In the last few weeks, I’ve been at several conferences, such as the MVP Summit and SQLBits, and have watched many demos. I’ve noticed a trend in the previous couple of years where presenters use more recorded demos than in the past. This trend is mainly something I’ve noticed with members of the Microsoft Fabric team, but I’ve seen others do it as well. When you do it correctly, only the keenest eyes in the room will notice that you aren’t doing live demos. When you do it poorly, everyone’s eyes quickly divert to their phones, losing the audience. Photo by Dmitry Demidov on Pexels.comWhy To R ..read more

With the demise of the #SQLHelp hashtag (well it still exists, but it’s much harder to support since Elmo ruined twitter), I’ve been spending the cycles I used to spend on #SQLHelp at the Azure subreddit. I see a lot of questions there around migrating on-premises databases to platform as a service offerings like Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance. Those solutions are very good, for some solutions, but like an other architectural decisions they all come with some trade offs, which I’d like to discuss in this post. The other reason why I’m writing this post is something, that I w ..read more

For those of us that work with relational databases, we are all (hopefully) familar with the concept of a primary key. For those of you who aren’t DB pros, a primary key is a record(s) that uniquely identifies a row in a table. For example, in the following table, the EmpID column uniquely identifies the EmpName. In this case, EmpID is what we call a surrogate key, meaning that it does not come from any actual data, but is just used to identity the record. Also, in this case, even though EmpName is currently unique (no names repeat), it does not have to be. Managed Identities If you haven’t w ..read more

One of the things I have always advocated for is for event speakers to be paid—whether directly or in the form of travel expenses. More conferences paying more speakers is good—it leads to more professionals. It allows a more diverse pool of speakers to attend events. Different conferences have different payment structures (more on that later). Still, most of the community conferences I’ve done have had fair payout structures. While there is a conference or two that ties pre-con payout directly to the number of attendees (and yes, those can be lovely paydays), many conferences have moved to pa ..read more

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending Cloud Field Day 17 in Boston. If you aren’t familiar with the Tech Field Day events, a bunch of independent technology experts get to meet with a wide array of technology companies. This allows the companies to tell us about their offerings, and we give them feedback and ask them questions. I’ve been to a number of Field Day events, and always enjoy them and leave with great knowledge and excellent contacts. One of the companies we met with in Boston was Couchbase. (Full disclosure, I have done some promotional work for Couchbase in the past.) Couch ..read more

A while back, a client, who host user-facing databases in Azure SQL Database, had a novel problem. One of their customers, had all of their infrastructure in AWS, and wanted to be able to access my client’s data in an RDS instance. There aren’t many options for doing this–replication doesn’t work with Azure SQL Database as a publisher because there’s no SQL Agent. Managed Instance would have been messy from a network perspective, as well as cost prohibitive compared to Azure SQL DB serverless. Even using an ETL tool like Azure Data Factory would have worked, but would have required a rather la ..read more

Last week, Google announced that they were selling domain registrations for the .zip and .mov top-level domains (TLDs). Google registered these TLDs as part of ICANN’s generic top level domain program. Spammers and threat actors everywhere have rejoiced at this notion–.zip and .mov files are very common malware vectors. While there haven’t been any real-world observations of attacks the SANS institute is recommended proactively blocking these domains from your network, until we better understand their behavior. There are a number of places to block these domains (and you will see various blogs ..read more

One of the fun parts of working for a small-ish Microsoft Partner is that you have to take a lot of exams. Some of which aren’t in your direct comfort areas–last year I took a couple of security exams (which was mainly my own doing) and even the Cosmos DB developer exam, which was a bit of a stretch, but I’m pretty familiar with NoSQL, and I just had to understand the specific Cosmos API calls and methods. Azure Networking was something I was more comfortable with, but the breadth of this exam, and some services that I hadn’t worked with meant I had to take a different tact. Photo by Pixabay o ..read more

I recently attended Tech Field Day 26, in Santa Clara, while we spent most of time with the Open Compute summit, and discussing CXL, we got to meet with hardware and software networking vendor, ZPE Systems. ZPE has a number of solutions in the edge and data center spaces that allow you to do secure network management and just as importantly automate large scale data center deployments. In my opinion there are two main concerns with building out network automation—security and device accessibility. ZPE aims to mitigate both of these risks–with security, by building a secure ring around your in ..read more

Last week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Tech Field Day 26 in San Jose. While we met with several companies, this was a bit of a special edition of Tech Field Day, and we attended the CXL Forum at the Open Compute Project conference. In case you don’t know the Open Compute Project is project from a consortium of large scale compute providers like AWS, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, amongst others. They aim to optimize hyperscale data centers in terms of power and cooling, deployments, and automation. So how does CXL fit into that equation? CXL stands for Compute Express Link, which ..read more