The Bit Bucket

It’s been a big week for Down Under podcasts. I really enjoyed recording another new Cosmos Down Under podcast this morning. It’s now edited and released.

Show 11 features Azure Cosmos DB product manager Khelan Modi discussing the vector database and search features of Azure Cosmos DB, and particularly how that applies to large language models (LLMs).

Khelan is a product manager on the Azure Cosmos DB team. He leads the AI and Portal (UI) initiatives for the Vector Database service, Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.

2024-03-09

I had the great pleasure to get to also record another new Cosmos Down Under podcast this morning. It’s now edited and released.

Show 10 features Azure Cosmos DB product manager Tara Bhatia discussing the elasticity features of Azure Cosmos DB. Tara and her team have been helpful lately, helping me understand the burst capacity features of the product better, and I thought it’d be great to have her on the show.

2024-03-08

Welcome to PG Down Under!

I’ve worked with data most of my life and I love all aspects of it, and PostgreSQL has been part of it. Whenever possible, I’ve attended local PostgreSQL user groups to make sure I stay across what’s happening with it, even though my primary work was with SQL Server. PostgreSQL has been part of many client engagements over the years.

For some time, I’ve been starting to build up a series of podcasts for PostgreSQL developers and DBAs.

2024-03-08

I’ve been writing a series on Power BI Implementation Models for Enterprises for Tekki Gurus.

Part 3 that covers what I consider Cloud Friendly Clients is now published:

Note: Sorry but Tekki Gurus have closed down.

Enjoy !

2024-03-08

And another new SQL Down Under show is published!

Once again, I had the great pleasure yesterday to record a podcast with one of my UK based friends Bob Duffy.

Bob is a Principal Data Architect at Prodata’s SQL Centre of Excellence in Dublin, Ireland. He helps enterprise customers build large scale enterprise data warehouses in Azure, typically integrating ERP and financial systems.

Bob is a long-term Data Platform MVP, a Microsoft Certified Architect, Master, and Analysis Services Maestro. He holds a number of Azure role-based certifications. Bob also specialises in performance tuning, architecture, load testing, DevOps, Software engineering, MQ architecture, semantic modelling and meta data driven design on the MS platform.

2024-03-07

Once again, I had the great pleasure to record a Fabric Down Under podcast. This time it was with a fellow “Down Under” guest Philip Seamark, from across the “ditch” (as we both call it) in New Zealand.

Phil is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team and works as a DAX and Data modelling specialist.

He gets involved when enterprise customers need deeper technical support.

In this show, I discuss Phil’s thoughts on Direct Lake which is one of the very new options that came with Microsoft Fabric. It adds another mode to Power BI, in addition to Import and Direct Query modes that have been there previously.

2024-03-06

One of my more surprisingly popular blog posts in the past talked about Machine Learning: Testing your installation of R and Python in SQL Server 2017. The problem is that SQL Server 2022 changed things.

Now the SQL Server team has published an article on how to make it work.  What I’ve been finding though, is that people are struggling to follow that article. And more concerning, people using named instances of SQL Server (like SQLEXPRESS) couldn’t get it to work at all, no matter how much they tried.

2024-03-04

I was doing work for a client that uses Azure Data Factory (ADF), and noticed an unexpected Error code 2011 from a Get Metadata activity.

The pipeline was using a Get Metadata activity to read a list of files in a folder in Azure Storage, so that it could use a ForEach activity to process each of the files. Eventually it became clear that the error occurred when the folder was empty.

2024-02-07

This is the final part of a series on using Change Data Capture with Azure SQL Database, and looks at accessing the data from change data capture from another database.

Scenario

I often use Azure SQL Database as a data warehouse. It’s a perfectly fine database for that. But the challenge with Azure SQL Database is always about how to access data in other databases.

Many people don’t seem to realize that you can use External Tables (and External Data Sources) to read data in one Azure SQL Database, in another Azure SQL Database.

2024-01-22

I’ve been writing a series on Power BI Implementation Models for Enterprises for Tekki Gurus.

Part 2 that covers what I consider Cloud Native Clients is now published:

Note: Sorry but Tekki Gurus have closed down.

Enjoy !

2024-01-18