The Bit Bucket

I took AI-102 yesterday. It was the first exam that I’ve taken where Learn content was available. There’s an icon at the bottom centre of the screen, beside the one that lets you take a break. (I haven’t used that break option yet but that was also a great recent additon).

Did it help?

There were a couple of places where I found it helped. It’s not going to teach you the content, even though the training parts of Learn are available. That would mostly take far too long. What it worked well for, was to confirm the purpose of a specific option, etc.

2023-09-30

I was recently sent a copy of a new book by Ahilan Ponnusamy and Andreas Spanner, called Technology Operating Models for Cloud and Edge: Create your purpose-built distributed operating model for public, hybrid, multicloud, and edge.

It was interesting to read this book.

I spend more of my time on the Azure side of the fence than the AWS / RedHat side of things, so I have some pretty different opinions to the authors on many of the topics. I’ve have worked with multiple clouds, so what they were describing was familiar anyway.

2023-09-28

Microsoft Learn has a community content pilot running right now. They are looking to see how content from community members might provide different value to the content provided by their team members.

So, I decided that I should submit an article to see how it goes, and to find out how it works.

At present, it’s all hosted in a GitHub repository, and no surprise, is all written in Markdown.

2023-09-26

This is part 4 of a series on working with change data capture (CDC) in Azure SQL Database. This part discusses how to enable it and how to use it.

When I was reading the documentation for CDC in Azure SQL Database, I kept coming across a mention that it required at least an S3 service level objective (SLO), if you were using a DTU-based database.

I really hoped that wasn’t the case.

2023-09-23

It’s scary how much of the world’s data lives in CSVs. Yet, as a standard, it’s problematic. So many implementations just don’t work as expected. Today, I had a client asking about why Azure Data Factory wouldn’t read a CSV that, while odd, was in a valid format.

The simplest equivalent of the file that wouldn’t load, would be one like this:

First Column,Second Column,Third Column,Fourth Column
12,Terry Johnson,Paul Johnson,031-23423
13,Mary Johnson,"Paul,Johnson",031-23423
14,Mia Johnson,"Paul ""the beast"", Johnson",031-23423
16,Cherry Johnson,Paul Johnson,031-23423

There are meant to be four columns. The source system wrapped strings in quotes only when the string contained a comma, as that was the delimiter for the file.

2023-09-12

I had the great pleasure to get to spend time today, talking with Mark Pryce-Maker. We were discussing the SQL warehousing experience in Microsoft Fabric.

Mark is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, where he’s working closely with the Microsoft Fabric team. He has a strong background in many areas of data, most recently prior to Fabric, with helping customers migrate to Azure Synapse Analytics. He has worked extensively with the dedicated SQL pools in that service.

2023-09-07

I was pleased to see Reza Rad’s latest book Pro Power BI Architecture: Development, Deployment, Sharing, and Security for Microsoft Power BI Solutions: Rad, Reza: 9781484295373: Amazon.com: Books now out the door. Reza is an old friend, fellow Data Platform MVP, and fellow member of the Microsoft Regional Director program.

I was pleased to have been a technical reviewer for this book, and I hope that, along with the other reviewers, we have improved what was already a good book.

2023-08-28

I’ve been fascinated by what happened at Chernobyl for a long time. Many of my readers wouldn’t know that when I first started university, I was studying nuclear physics and mathematics. Wasn’t long afterwards that I headed into computing but, at the time, there were very few degree courses on what’s now called computing.

I decided to move on from that study for many reasons, but a primary one was that I could see Australia heading into a pretty solid ban on using nuclear power. The only reactor running in the country was a high flux reactor at Lucas Heights and was used primarily for producing medical isotopes. (It was replaced by a 20MW open-pool lightwater reactor in 2007).

2023-08-12

I can’t tell you how many times lately, that I’ve seen people writing about service principles when they really mean service principals. These are entirely different concepts!

I did a certification exam the other day, and it was asking about service principles. I was left wondering how many people had reviewed that before it was released.

But what’s worse, is when people bake the wrong one into code libraries that others need to use. I was reading some content from Microsoft Learn: Quickstart: Manage data with Azure Cosmos DB Spark 3 OLTP Connector for API for NoSQL and I saw this code example:

2023-08-11

I had the great pleasure to get to spend time today, talking with Josh Caplan about OneLake.

Josh Caplan serves as a Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft, where he’s now leading product management for Microsoft OneLake. He has a strong background in managing products like Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Servers, and Azure Analysis Services. Before his current role, Josh contributed to enhancing developer tools for Power BI and worked with Bing to harness its vast data resources.

2023-08-10