It was October 2013, and I was in Charlotte, NC. I’d attended Red Gate’s SQL in the City event during the day, and was heading over to register for PASS Summit. I started chatting with one of the SQL in the City attendees. He was a DBA familiar with Red Gate’s tools and events, but he’d never heard of PASS or PASS Summit. You bet I started talking about how amazing the organization, the conference, and most importantly the community is.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Exciting news! On Thursday, March 17, 2016, I’ll be debuting my newest full-day training event, How to Get Started Using SQL Server in Azure. This is part of what is sure to be one of the greatest weekends ever – St Patrick’s Day, in Boston, combined with SQL Saturday 500! The details about the training: Microsoft Azure is a mature, stable ecosystem, but some people and companies are still hesitant to adopt it.
Here in the Frozen Tundra of Wisconsin, winter is setting in – this weekend, temperatures didn’t rise above freezing, and snow fell in some parts of the state. I have my cold-weather running gear out – fleece-lined tights, wind-proof jacket, hats, mittens, and trail shoes – and my snowshoes are hanging in the garage. For now, I’m looking forward to winter. I’m also still digesting all the great things I learned at PASS Summit and MVP Summit a month ago.
Up next in my 5 Questions series is an interview with a dog-rescuing, SAN-loving DBA from Minnesota – Amanda Crisp (linkedin | twitter | blog). Amanda and I have gone back and forth across the border to the Madison and Minneapolis SQL Saturdays many times, and always make sure to catch up. She’s one of the sharpest DBAs I know, and, much like Meagan, another dog-lover! When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
One of the benefits of Microsoft SQL Azure over an on-premises or VM installation is built-in resiliency. In a typical on-premises/VM installation your database lives on a single server, with all the single points of failure that brings to mind. SQL Azure, on the other hand, always has 3 or more replicas assigned for each database. This allows it to weather issues like network glitches and commodity hardware failures with no administration and little to no downtime.
Recently we’ve been working with the raw Azure Storage API to try and get to a more stable solution then the far more aggressively changing Azure Storage SDK. One of the goals is to be able to work equally well locally, against the emulator, and in production. We’re used to cases where the Emulator diverges from production or the documentation, but recently we found a case where the emulator and documentation match, but the production services appear to be wrong.
Every year, the Wisconsin SQL Server user groups combine forces to host a SQL Saturday in Madison. It’s always a great day to learn things, but it’s also fun to have presenters come from all over the U.S. This year, Meagan Longoria (blog | twitter | linkedin) – who I knew from Twitter – came to our SQL Saturday from Kansas City, MO. She and I share a love of SQL Server, good beer, and dogs.
Today, let me introduce you to Mike Fal (blog | twitter | linkedin). His blog header says a lot about him – it shows a pile of SQL books and a trombone – but it isn’t everything. First, it can’t show his sense of humor, or love of a good beer. Second, it doesn’t convey that he’s one of the smartest and most helpful PowerShell users I know. Mike even has his own GitHub repository of helpful POSH scripts!
One of the tasks that I find the hardest is to create a new presentation. I have the ideas, but I have to put in the work to make them good. I like to do so with as little distraction as possible, so I start them in Notepad. Not WordPad, not Notepadd ++, but plain old notepad.exe. This allows me to create a simple text outline that can be rearranged as needed, where I can see all of my thoughts and ideas in one spot.
Fall conference season is here! On Monday, I head to Las Vegas for IT/Dev Connections, where I’m presenting two sessions. At the end of October, I’ll be heading to Seattle, WA for PASS Summit, where I get to present a session. After that, I’ll be on the Microsoft campus for MVP Summit. There are lots of other conferences, large and small, as well – AWS re:Invent, DEVintersection, Milwaukee Code Camp.