PASS Data Community Summit is a continuation of the original PASS Summit events. Last year, the first year since Redgate took over the PASS assets, they had successfully hosted a fully remote experience of the event, and this year – 2022, they are bringing a hybrid (in-person & remote) experience of the Data Platform. For me, flying over to PASS Summit was an annual pilgrimage that I have not skipped for over a decade until the COVID pandemic. This year Azure SQL Product Group is bringing a full day workshop on Azure SQL Managed Instance, which is called ‘A day with SQL Managed Instance ..read more

SQLBits is my favorite Data Platform event and with the disappearance of PASS as an organization, a great adjectives describing it as the biggest Microsoft Data Platform event in the world should be quite correct. Besides being the biggest and the best Microsoft Data Platform show, it is always a show that entertains and brings people together. In 2022 I will deliver 3 sessions on SQLBits, with precise times and dates to be reconfirmed yet, even though they appear currently on the schedule. Given that I do work on Azure SQL Managed Instance, I will be presenting exclusively about it with two 5 ..read more

SQLBits is my favorite Data Platform event and with the disappearance of PASS as an organization, a great adjectives describing it as the biggest Microsoft Data Platform event in the world should be quite correct. Besides being the biggest and the best Microsoft Data Platform show, it is always a show that entertains and brings people together. In 2022 I will deliver 3 sessions on SQLBits, with precise times and dates to be reconfirmed yet, even though they appear currently on the schedule. Given that I do work on Azure SQL Managed Instance, I will be presenting exclusively about it with two 5 ..read more

Marking the 2nd year of the pandemic, 2021 has brought a lot of changes to me, and the biggest of them in the professional space was joining the Azure SQL Managed Instance Product Group at Microsoft. While the stress with job change has caused a lot of anxiety and even caused more health issues, I was able to blog regularly and even returned to my presentation activities and as you will see in the statistics – very actively. Conferences I have attended more conferences then in the 2020, but not that much to be honest – DataPlatformSummit, DBCC International, 2 DataSaturdays, PASS Summit & ..read more

I have been active in blogging, but outside of this site and UI expect this tendency to continue for the nearest foreseeable future. My role at Microsoft allows me to spread the word and help the people well beyond this site has, and anything that I can contribute through documentation or official position will be more helpful then the personal thoughts that are expressed at a personal site. Around 6 months ago, I have started a series of posts on easy wins in Azure SQL Managed Instance, that we have called Azure SQL MI How-tos. This series contains 9 posts, where 8 of them are written by me p ..read more

For the last 1.5 years people around the world has been largely confined to their homes and the in-person conferences largely stopped taking place. This gave a huge boost to the online conferences – which exploded in the first year and even though started fading away, there are still so many online conferences and some late arrivals are still to be discovered. The thing is that besides very obvious observation that very few people are attending the sessions and that the participation through commenting and questions is almost none, is that the overall impression of a lot of people I have talke ..read more

Since I have joined Microsoft 5 months ago, I have not been even looking at my personal site, but now I am back and will be sharing some of the stuff I was and I am doing. I am working as a PM with Azure SQL Managed Instance (aka SQLMI) and I hope one day to show some of the stuff in public that I am working on :) In the mean time I am also helping with awareness of the SQLMI capabilities and for that purpose I am starting a series of public presentations on different topics, starting with “What’s New in SQL MI” and going into specifics, such as HA/DR, Performance & Monitoring. The current ..read more

After using Microsoft’s technology for almost 3 decades (1993 was probably the first year), after bashing and criticising them for all that time, after being a part of the MVP Program for over a decade (huge kudos for Cristina Gonzalez who considered me worthy for that incredible award) – I decided to join Microsoft. You might raise the question on the reasons of doing that – and the reason is simple. I love playing and researching and building top technology and I am a kind of tired of picking up the crumbs of other people’s work. At my last job I have built a monitoring tool that every clien ..read more

I wanted to write about a marvellous book by Daniel Kahneman with quite an exciting title of “Thinking Fast and Slow“. Even though we are not even whole year through (It’s middle of the May), I consider this book to be a very serious contender to become the book of the year. I am already planning to re-read it in the end of this year (during the Winter Holidays), and there are actually just a couple of the books in my reading history that I have instantly decided to come back and re-read them again – one example would be “Finite and Infinite Games” by James Carse. The book has a number of topi ..read more

This blog post is the continuation of the little series on the topic of Practical AI Trust & Ethics that I have started previously in Practical AI Trust & Ethics thoughts, part I In this post I want to focus on the processes and the origins – there has not been enough focus on them, especially since they are mostly down-to-earth and not-so-hypable by their nature of being already part of the regular IT processes. Even though it touches on the “Trust in the process” section of the previous part of this series, this is a more gritty, a kind of an “old-school IT vision” of the concrete st ..read more