Category: Uncategorized

Why I Am Running for PASS Board

Simply put, becoming involved in PASS events and the broader organization itself has changed my personal and professional life for the better in a massive way. I want this organization, and the community it represents, to be around for many years so it can provide to others the same opportunities that it provided to me. This year and this pandemic have presented massive, but not insurmountable, challenges to this organization and its future. I want to be a part of channeling everyone’s clear passion for the this community into clear-eyed and clearly communicated decisions that will put PASS on a firm footing for years to come. Connecting, sharing, and learning has never been more important. Let us do what we can to ensure that PASS is here to serve the community for years to come.

If you’ve arrived here from my campaign website on PASS.org, you’ll likely recognize that as my campaign platform statement. I’d like to expound on that, my background in this organization, and a bit more.

Before becoming aware of PASS Summit sometime in 2012, and attending my first Summit in 2013, I thought my life was a DBA would be an endless search of Google and Bing searches in pursuit of a solution for whatever our latest fire alarm issue was about. I didn’t know that there was a community out there to help, and I was intensely shy by nature, so that lack of awareness on my part was infinitely more comfortable for me. That said, we had encountered some difficult issues in our Always On Availability Group implementations and I read a blog mentioning the Microsoft Clinic at PASS Summit 2013. I told my boss that I needed to be there to discuss our list of issues with the engineers and, thankfully, he approved me for the trip. Not only were our issues resolved in the clinic, but my eyes were opened to an entire community of data professionals from different parts of the data platform world and different parts of the real world as well. My first Summit experience honestly blew my mind even though I stuck with the experienced introvert plan of never talking to anybody other than the folks at the clinic and never sharing a table with anybody at every meal. My curiosity had definitely been piqued.

From there, contacts I made at the next PASS Summit (where I actually talked to some people) led me to make some additional contacts at a SQL Saturday that led to me getting a job in consulting. My consulting job mandated that I present a webinar or a live session once a quarter to maintain visibility of the company and myself. Despite my occasional stutter and intense fear of public speaking, I started building sessions to present at virtual and in-person events. As those sessions improved in cohesion and quality, doors were opened to speak at events of many different sizes in different regions of the country and, eventually, all over the world. I was also awarded as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP in 2018 – something not even in the realm of possibility for me when I first became involved in PASS.

I owe nearly all of my professional success, my friendships around the world, and my ability to help mentor and elevate others in this community to PASS and its members. I want it to survive and thrive and I want to be part of the solution so we can, collectively, elevate so many others. Thank you for reading and, if offered, I appreciate your support and vote in the PASS Board elections.

Data Platform Discovery Day – How To Help

Data Platform Discovery Day – How To Help

Stuart Moore (@napalmgram on Twitter) and I are proud to announce the first edition of Data Platform Discovery Day, happening for US-based timezones on April 29 and European timezones on April 30. What is it, you are likely asking?

Data Platform Discovery Day is a one-day virtual conference intended for folks looking to make a career change or data platform beginners wishing to expand their skill sets into areas beyond the one in which they work currently. It is a grassroots, community-driven day where well-regarded speakers will be presenting introductory, 100-level sessions on topics across the Microsoft Data Platform. Whether your interest lies in database performance, data visualization, or data development we intend to have material across the spectrum that helps you expand your burgeoning skill sets or introduces you to your new career in data for the first time.

We’re currently looking for speakers for the US and EU events so please visit the main link at https://dataplatformdiscoveryday.com/. We’re also looking for a few session moderators as well – feel free to reach out to Stuart or myself (@sqlatspeed) directly if you’d like to help with that.

Above all, stay home, stay safe, and we’ll speak to you virtually at the end of the month.

Racing Toward SQL Saturday Charlotte

Racing Toward SQL Saturday Charlotte

You knew I couldn’t start a blog post about speaking in Charlotte without a racing picture, right? I wanted to take a minute over this holiday weekend to remind my readers, especially those in the southeastern US, that SQL Saturday Charlotte is closing in on us. The 2019 edition of #SQLSatCLT is on Saturday, December 7. This year’s edition also sees us at a new venue – the Cone Center on the campus of UNC Charlotte. The most exciting part of this year’s venue is that speakers and participants no longer run the risk of being attacked by violent geese (😁), as this helpful warning sign alerted us to a couple years ago!

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I’m excited to be presenting my Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Logic Apps session (with a bit of Power BI) entitled “Feelings Quantified: Scoring, Storing, and Exploring Social Media Sentiment”. I really enjoy presenting this session and it’s my hope that it opens people’s eyes to the many cool and valuable things data professionals can do that may not be pure data work. Things like Cognitive Services can bring more value to a company’s data by helping it generate actionable insights and we’ll talk about that in this session. We’ll also talk a little bit of soccer as well, as it was a soccer podcast that actually got me into the world of Cognitive Services and Logic Apps.

Enough about me – I hope to see you at SQL Saturday Charlotte. The registration link is here and I’ll see you there on Saturday, December 7th!

#DPS10: My Travels to India Inspired Me

#DPS10: My Travels to India Inspired Me

I set a personal goal for 2019 to push my boundaries travel-wise. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to speak at SQL Saturdays and data-related conferences in and around Europe over the past couple of years and, for 2019, I wanted to expand my travels to somewhere beyond North America and Europe. To that end, I was honored to be selected by the Data Platform Geeks team to present two regular sessions and a chalk talk at this year’s Data Platform Summit (known by its #DPS10 hashtag). I also appreciate the diversity of the topics, as I presented on high availability in Azure, Cognitive Services, and Azure Logic Apps.

As you may have noted, my motivation for speaking at this conference was fairly selfish. I’ve always wanted to travel to India and it’s always good to present to and meet with people within the Microsoft data platform community. That said, as soon as I arrived at #DPS10, I felt immediately grateful for the opportunity to be there and participate in the event. The enthusiasm of everyone involved, from pickup at the airport to the keynote to the sessions, was overwhelming. I’ve certainly had professional and personal challenges over the last year and change, and those can take a toll on you, but I was instantly invigorated by how motivated everyone involved in the conference was to expand their knowledge of all the areas of the Microsoft data platform.

Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the words for how positive an experience this was (thus the blog happens nearly 3 weeks after I returned). Simply put, the team behind Data Platform Summit does a first-class job making speakers feel welcome and engaging attendees. If you get the chance to participate in future Data Platform Summits in, don’t hesitate to accept that opportunity. I certainly hope to be back someday and hopefully I’ll see you there!

Back to Back at #SQLSatJax

Back to Back at #SQLSatJax

Fresh off a wonderful weekend of #sqlfamily and data community time at Data in Devon in Exeter, England last weekend, I find myself in northeast Florida this weekend as opposed to southwest England. I’ll be presenting two sessions at SQL Saturday Jacksonville and spending a bit of time at the SQL Clinic as well. I was fortunate enough to be selected to speak here last year as well and it’s always fun to fun to come an event for the second year running – plus it allowed me to give this post a title that kinda sorta rhymes!

It means a lot to speak here in Jacksonville for a couple of reasons. Considering that I have never lived in the Jacksonville area, it’s a place that’s been oddly significant at a couple of points in my life. My wife and I went to Ponte Vedra Beach on our honeymoon and spent a wonderful few days in this area. Then, my first job as a data consultant was at Pragmatic Works, which is headquartered in metro Jacksonville. In fact, the first Pragmatic Works holiday party that my wife and I attended gave us a chance to head back for a quick lunch visit to the resort where we honeymooned and take the picture below that shows two things: 1) I have a beautiful and photogenic wife and 2) I am really not very good at taking selfies.

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Anyhow, I am guessing you did not click on this post to see pictures of me, you clicked through to get information on my sessions at SQL Saturday Jacksonville. My first session is at 10:15 in the Gamoor room (4-1705) and it’s entitled Azure-d Availability: Scaling SQL Server to the Cloud. This is a relatively new session of mine but I’ve received some good feedback so I’m looking forward to presenting it here in Florida tomorrow.

My second session is at 12:45 in the Fondor room (51-1209) and, in another bit of Jacksonville-related nostalgia for me, this session began life as the very first webinar and very first SQL Saturday talk that I ever delivered. The session is called Top 5 Tips to Keep Always On AGs Humming and Users HappyĀ and it will help anybody who is learning how to administer Always On Availability Groups or anybody who needs a refresher on some of the ways AGs can bite you if you don’t feed and care for them properly. This session has changed a lot over the years, as I like to think I’ve gotten a little better at this speaking thing, but I’m always a little bit extra excited to deliver this session.

I’ll wrap up my day at the SQL Clinic from 1:45 – 2:15 so feel free to drop by there if you have questions about anything from my sessions or just any SQL Server or Microsoft Data Platform-related questions. I’m really thankful to be a part of this wonderful weekend of friends and #sqlfamily – register here if you’d like to be a part of it!

A Ye Olde Way to Break Stretch Database

A Ye Olde Way to Break Stretch Database

I’m really excited to be publishing a real live technical blog post! I have fun blogging about speaking, travel for speaking, and racing, but I’m looking forward to my new professional opportunities lending themselves to more technical blogs on a variety of data platform topics. I’m really looking forward to blogging on some more cutting-edge data platform topics as well, but for today I have a bit of a blog about a SQL Server feature that doesn’t get a lot of love. We can debate all the reasons for why stretch database hasn’t seen a lot of use, but it’s still there and still an interesting feature to play with.

Recently I had the pleasure of putting together a proof-of-concept for a customer who was looking into using Stretch Database to offload a large amount of archive data into Azure rather than their own datacenter(s). This particular application had some tables that were created nearly 15 years ago (a fact that will become relevant shortly). Enabling Stretch Database is covered well in the Microsoft document hereĀ so I’ll skip straight to the error I was getting.

I noticed when I enabled Stretch Database (via the wizard) some tables were starting to migrate completely normally and some were not. I began querying sys.dm_db_rda_migration_status (a DMV used for monitoring Stretch Database operations) and saw that all of the tables that were not moving were registering error 7320 in the error_number column of that DMV. A quick search on the error revealed the following text of the generic error: Cannot execute the query “%ls” against OLE DB provider “%ls” for linked server “%ls”. %ls. Not very helpful, is it? It was at this point we contacted Microsoft support because we thought we’d found a bug – some tables were migrating correctly and some weren’t, even though they’d all been configured for stretch the same way via the wizard. Our support ticket went between Azure SQL Database support and SQL Server support before we were connected with a solid engineer who assisted in troubleshooting but was unable to find anything incorrect in the tables or the way Stretch Database was configured.

We were at a loss but he recommended another review of the SQL Server error log to see if there was anything untoward there at all that we had missed in our previous reviews. What I noticed in that final review was that we were occasionally seeing errors relating to ANSI_NULLS settings in the error log. Cross-referencing that with the times the Stretch Database migration process was attempting to kick off on the erroring tables revealed that something to do with ANSI_NULLS was breaking Stretch Database migration. But what?

I relayed this information to the support engineer and he contacted the development team to ask what ANSI_NULLS had to do with Stretch Database migration throwing an error related to linked servers – an odd chain of errors. They replied and said that if a table was created with the ANSI_NULLS setting set to OFF then the Stretch Database migration process will throw that linked server error. These tables, due to their age I mentioned earlier, were created with that setting set to OFF. Problem solved! (Although changing the ANSI_NULLS setting for hundreds of related tables is its own set of challenges that should be its very own blog post). In better news, the support engineer submitted a request to the docs team to clearly document this previously undocumented issue.

I realize, given the minimal adoption of Stretch Database, this blog post may be targeted towards a limited audience. That said, if it helps just one person avoid the issues that I ran into and save hours or days of work to figure this out, it is a huge help to somebody! If that somebody is you, cheers!

As always, thanks for reading and come back soon – there will be much more content here as 2019 rolls on.

Speaking of Blogging…Here Is Where I’m Speaking Soon

Speaking of Blogging…Here Is Where I’m Speaking Soon

For the folks that follow my blog and have noticed it’s been a bit quiet around here – apologies. Personally and professionally, the last 3 months or so have been quite a whirlwind but I’m still here and the blog is too. Tomorrow there will be a real live technical post here on the site, but for today I wanted to get a post up noting my next three speaking engagements.

Saturday, March 30 I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Cincinnati. I will be presenting my fairly new session “Azure-d Availability: Scaling SQL Server to the Cloud” and I’m excited to be speaking at one of my local-ish SQL Saturdays. The link to my session is here and the registration button for the event is in upper right corner of that page.

Following that, I’ll be presenting to Midlands PASS in Columbia, SC at 5:30 PM on Tuesday night. I went to college at Clemson so, in some ways, Columbia is a bit like home. If you’re familiar with the Clemson/South Carolina rivalry, however, in some ways it’s not. šŸ™‚ Either way I’m looking forward to speaking to the group about Azure Logic Apps, Azure SQL DB, and sentiment analysis using Azure Cognitive Services as long as they don’t boo me out of there! The session link is here for those interested and in the area.

Finally, I’ll be crossing the Atlantic once again to speak at Data in Devon in the southwest of England. This is the event formerly known as SQL Saturday Exeter and I’m thrilled to be presenting my “Where Should My Data Live (and Why)?” session to an international audience. If you are at all close to the area or fancy a weekend in southwest England with some excellent training (and my session), the registration link is here.

Thanks for reading and I hope I see you at one of these events. Thanks to IDERA Software for making some of this travel possible. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow (March 29th) for my first technical blog in a while.

Why Is Daddy Talking to the Wall?

Why Is Daddy Talking to the Wall?

This morning (October 18th, 2018) I had the opportunity to present my “New Features and New Speed in SQL 2016 (+) Always On Availability Groups” session remotely to the community of people registered at DataPlatformGeeks.com. DPG is the group behind the Data Platform Summit, which will be at the Radisson Blu in Bangalore from August 22-24, 2019 (pre-conference sessions offered August 19-21). While I certainly hope to submit to DPS in 2019, today was a lot of fun and good chance to speak to their community.

My session began at 5:30 AM Eastern (I’m based in Lexington, Kentucky, USA). That is 3 PM IST. My kids wake up around 6:30 AM to get ready for school. I presented the webinar from my home office and my kids were a bit confused as to why I had my headset on so early in the morning and appeared to be talking directly to my wall. I’ll never cease to be amazed at technology that allows us to share technical content to people halfway around the world – it’s awesome and I’m so fortunate to get opportunities to do this now and then.

I’m actually presenting another session to them on November 15th – I’ll be doing my “Where Should My Data Live (and Why)?” presentation that I gave at PASS Summit 2017. If you’d like to register for that, the link is here. If my session doesn’t interest you, though, go check out their events pageĀ to see all the good, free content that they make available throughout the year. For example, Bob Ward and Jonathan Kehayias are the last two sessions before I present on November 15th. Even if you think I’m a bit of a dodgy speaker, you can’t get any better than Bob and Jonathan! Til next time…

Weekday Speaking and Weekend Racing, MVP-style

Weekday Speaking and Weekend Racing, MVP-style

Greetings and thanks for dropping by! I have a couple speaking gigs to mention and a real racing gig to discuss and then I’ll leave you to your actual work instead of reading silly blogs.

I was supposed to head to North Carolina next week to present my “New Features and New Speed in SQL Server 2016 (and 2017) Always On Availability Groups” session to TriPASS in Raleigh. I was also going to use the trip to see some Triangle-area friends and some family in the Asheville area as well, but Hurricane Florence has other ideas and so I’ll be delivering the session remotely provided that the meeting still goes on. At this point, while I’m happy to present the session, I’m focused on the health and well being of all my friends and family in the Carolinas. While Florence’s winds have weakened, the forecasted rain looks quite significant and I’m definitely hoping for the best possible outcome there.

Mother Nature willing, I’ll be presenting my “Where Should My Data Live (and Why)?” session to the Atlanta Microsoft Database Forum on October 8th. I’m excited to speak to that group and looking forward to heading to another area where I have family and friends in the vicinity. If you’re Atlanta-based I encourage you to register here. As an aside, my mom lives north of Atlanta and has expressed an interest in seeing an Atlanta United soccer/football match so I’ll probably take her to the match on 10/6 at 3:30. If you’re an Atlanta United supporter I’d be happy to grab a pint with you pre-match. Feel free to comment below or tweet at me (@sqlatspeed) if you’d like.

Finally, I’m excited to talk about the opportunity I have to run a GTA-class Mustang (picture above) at theĀ 2018 OVR Autumn Classic XXXVII at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course October 13-14. If you’re around Central Ohio, let me know if you’d like to come out. I’d be happy to talk you around the circuit and walk you through the car as well. It’s been a while, but I’m happy to be able to live up to my @sqlatspeed Twitter handle. This is an introductory effort to a potential full-season opportunity next year. My sincere thanks to Win Smith Racing for the opportunity and to FGE Professional Sports AnalyticsĀ for the support to make this happen.

That’s all the traveling news for now, but I’m proud to say I’ll be doing this traveling as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. I’m honored to be awarded that designation and I’ll do my level best to maintain it and earn it in the coming year. Stay tuned to my blog for updates on the racing efforts (with in-car video) and an update on my recently announced PASS Summit session as well. Bye for now!

End of Summer Speaking Sessions (also, maybe racecar!)

End of Summer Speaking Sessions (also, maybe racecar!)

I wanted to post a short update to my readers to let you know about my upcoming speaking schedule to wrap up the summer and a couple other interesting things happening in late summer/early fall.

First of all, I’ll be speaking at SQL Saturday Indy on Saturday, August 11. I’ve really enjoyed giving this session (“Where Should My Data Live (and Why)”?) at several different events in both the USA and the EU this year. This session began life as my PASS Summit 2017 session but has evolved thanks to excellent attendee feedback (and continuing consulting engagements) into an interesting look at various clients’ and customers’ moves to and from cloud providers. I really enjoy giving this session and look forward to an interactive crowd at #SQLSatIndy. If you haven’t registered, there are just a few seats left and you can register here.

Following that, I’m really excited that I was selected to present at Azure DataFest Atlanta on Thursday, August 16th. I’ll be giving my “Democratizing Data Analysis: How and Why of Social Media Sentiment Scoring” presentation. I really love this one, and regular readers of the blog will recognize this as my “Men in Blazers Premier League Mood Table talk”. It’s evolved from a POC for a soccer podcast into a really interesting technical talk and platform for discussion and I’m thrilled to be speaking at this event in Alpharetta on 8/16. While I’m still a bit limited with what I can speak about regarding my work with FGE Professional Sports Analytics, this talk will delve into some of those details. If you haven’t yet grabbed a ticket to see me and many other speakers better than I, tickets are available here.

Lastly, plans are really coming into focus regarding my 2018 racing plans. Yes, I realize it’s a bit late, but we still have a third of the year left! I have a few options on the table and sincerely hope to be able to announce something soon. I may even put up a Twitter poll to help me decide which opportunity to select. As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at a speaking event or a racing event soon!