The Bit Bucket

I’ve worked in this industry a long time now.

From 1981 to 1986, I worked as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. Yep, I’m “have actually met both Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard” old. They’d retired when I met them and John Young was in charge, but they came to Palo Alto to a shareholders’ meeting and I was there at the time.

Most of my work was on HP3000 commercial mini-computers. The level of engineering on those systems was unlike anything I’d ever seen either before or since. They were really quite superb.

2023-03-05

I often need to capture the changes from one database into another. The most common reason is that I’m wanting to bring changes from a transactional system across into a data warehouse that’s part of a BI setup.

So which technology is best to use for this?

That’s not a trivial question to answer but here are some thoughts:

Replication?

Unfortunately, this one’s not available for Azure SQL DB as yet. Azure SQL DB can be a subscriber in Transactional Replication. We often use it this way. If we have an on-premises SQL Server, one of our favourite ways to get data into the cloud is by using Transactional Replication. (If you need to get your head around Replication with SQL Server, just head to our course here).

2023-02-26

I published a new Cosmos Down Under podcast today.

In the podcast, I’ve discussed the new integration between Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Data Explorer with the program manager for the feature: Vincent-Philippe Lauzon.

It’s a great new capability and worth half an hour of your time to find out about it.

I hope you enjoy it. You’ll find it, along with all Cosmos Down Under podcasts at:

Cosmos Down Under Podcast

2023-02-17

Just a heads-up that v23 of SDU Tools went out to SDU Insiders yesterday.

You can find details about SDU Tools here: https://sdutools.sqldownunder.com

In v23, we’ve added or enhanced the following:

• ExcelSerialToDateTime - there’s so much corporate data stored in Excel, and if you need to import it to SQL Server, you quickly find that dates and times are a challenge. I have a friend who says that the only data types in Excel are numbers and strings, and that everything else is an illusion. I think that’s pretty accurate. This function takes one of the funky Excel decimal numbers (called a Serial) that represents a date and time, and converts it to a SQL Server datetime value.
• DateTimeToExcelSerial - no prizes for guessing what this one does. It’s the opposite of the above.
• We’ve done a lot of updates to internal data within the tools, like all up to date SQL Server build numbers, etc.
• DateDimensionColumns now has StartOfWeek and EndOfWeek
• DateDimensionPeriodColumns now has IsSameWeek, DayOffset, MonthOffset, and WeekOffset

You can see a short video on the new Excel conversion functions here:

2023-01-19

A while back, I reviewed a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I mentioned at the time that I nearly didn’t get past the first chapter as I thought it was going to be another pretty cheesy self-help book. But I ended up loving the book. James really made me think about habits in a way that I hadn’t done so before.

And so I was interested when Luke and Phil from Mandarin Blueprint released a new online course called the Habit-Building Bootcamp.

2023-01-18

I recorded the first of a series of podcasts for the SQL Server 2022 timeframe recently. Once again, it was great to chat with another old friend Davide Mauri. Davide is a Principal Product Manager for Azure SQL Database.

Note that the topic I chose for today was the new  sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint system stored procedure, and it’s currently only available for Azure SQL Database but I expect it will get ported to other flavours of SQL Server over time. Davide has been deeply involved with the development of this procedure.

2022-12-16

I’m always excited when I can get involved in conferences with our Polish friends.

Coming up very soon is the Data Science Summit 2022: https://dssconf.pl/en/

For this summit, I’ll be presenting a quick (around 40 minutes) session highlighting what’s changed in T-SQL for SQL Server 2022. I’m always so glad to see T-SQL enhancements in SQL Server and SQL Server 2022 has more than what we’ve seen in other recent versions. There are a number of very important enhancements that will take a little while to get our heads around, on the best way to use them.

2022-11-06

I’ve just finished publishing another show for the Cosmos Down Under Podcast. This time the guest is Charles Feddersen.

Charles (and ex-Melbourne local) is working for Microsoft in the Azure Cosmos DB team. His current focus is the PostgreSQL API that Azure Cosmos DB supports.

In this show, Charles discusses the state of the PostgreSQL market, how it’s implemented in the Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL API, how that compares to Microsoft’s Flexible Server offering for PostgreSQL, distributed tables, scaling databases, and so much more.

2022-11-04

I have a varied client base. Many of my customers are traditional larger financial organizations. But I also work with start-ups and software houses. (Microsoft calls these ISVs - Independent Software Vendors).

Most software houses don’t want to sell software any more. Instead, they want to repackage their solutions as services i.e. they want to offer Software as a Service. (SaaS)

Converting an application to a service is not easy. Even Microsoft had false starts with moving their on-premises applications to cloud-based offerings.

2022-10-03

I’ve just finished publishing another show for the Cosmos Down Under Podcast. This time the guest is Will Velida.

Will is an Engineer for Microsoft working in the Fast Track for Azure team. His focus is on application development and modernization. He is passionate about developers from all walks of life build great things using Azure. Prior to joining Microsoft, he has worked as a software engineer in the financial and agricultural sectors. He was also a Microsoft MVP in the Data Platform category, focusing on Azure Cosmos DB.

2022-08-31