Azure

Hi Folks, on the 5th June (yes that’s Friday next week), I’m running a Data Camp day for the local Microsoft team. It’s being held at Cliftons in the city.

We’ve got four topics for  the day:

• Azure SQL DB
• Azure DocumentDB
• Azure Machine Learning
• Azure Stream Analytics

If you want to get your head around any/all of these, we’d love to see you there. Places are limited but you must register and can do so here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032627085&Culture=en-AU&community=0

2015-05-25

The team at Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) have pushed out some new content that’s relevant to database people.

First, if you’re wondering about using Azure for SQL Server, the Jumpstart for SQL Server in Azure VMs is worth a look. Longer term, I suspect we’ll mostly end up using SQL Server as a platform service (Azure SQL DB) but in the short-term, implementing it in a VM will be more common as it’s probably both easier when migrating existing applications and a little more familiar to most.

2015-05-24

I find many of the MVA courses great for quickly getting across concepts or areas that I haven’t worked with before.

This month, the local MVP program has asked me to highlight the following MVA courses. The first two in particular look useful for SQL folk. The third one provides good background:

Azure IaaS Technical Fundamentals

Deep Dive into Networking Storage and Disaster Recovery Scenarios

Embracing Open Source Technologies to Accelerate and Scale Solutions

2015-04-18

Hi Folks, we’ve been working hard on a new Azure Machine Learning course.

Come and spend a solid day finding out why Azure Machine Learning should be part of your arsenal.

Our first Melbourne offering of Azure Machine Learning Core Skills is 31st July. I’d love to see you there:

SQL Down Under Training

2015-04-15

Have you looked into Azure Machine Learning as yet?

If not, this might help. It’s a free eBook on getting started with it. Click the book to follow the link:

2015-04-14

I know that many of my readers appreciate finding out when free eBooks become available.

Microsoft Virtual Academy has been releasing quite a few lately.

In particular, SQL Server and database folk might want to take a look at the following:

• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014
• Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2
• Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight
• Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure
• Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure
• Introducing Windows Azure for IT Professionals
• Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model

2015-02-20

Recently I published a series of blog posts that provided scripts for rebuilding clustered columnstore indexes.

Niko Neugebauer sent me a suggested update to the latest version of those scripts and it makes sense. The change will help to filter out row groups that are not compressed and Niko noted that as Microsoft have started to include more objects (like Tombstone values)  into sys.column_store_row_groups in Azure SQLDatabase, he believes that will help to prevent future SQL versions having a problem with the scripts.

2015-01-31

When I attend events like TechEd, like many people I usually find the networking time more valuable than the session time. There is a pretty tight limit on the number of sessions you can attend, no matter how hard you try. So I often watch the sessions later when I can. At one of the earliest TechEd Australia events that I attended, they gave us CDs of the TechEd USA sessions. That was great because that TechEd had around 250 sessions, and there were over 150 that I would have loved to attend. Clearly that wasn’t possible.

2015-01-09

I spend a lot of time working with software houses, helping them to make their applications work well with SQL Server. One thing that I’ve heard loud and clear over the years is that most software houses won’t write a single line of code that will only run on the enterprise edition of SQL Server, because they are not prepared to limit their potential pool of customers to those running enterprise edition.

2014-12-12

We’ve been so excited having local data centres for Microsoft Azure.

The one disappointment has been that Office 365/Power BI has still been based out of Singapore data centres. That has an effect on people that worry about data sovereignty and it also means that we’ve had higher latency on the connections.

But no more! I was really pleased to read an article in the newspaper yesterday that mentioned that Microsoft is moving Office 365 to the Australian data centres. The article claims this is happening in April next year. I can only hope it’s true as this will be a really good outcome thanks Microsoft!

2014-12-10