The Bit Bucket

What many people who follow me don’t know, is that I spent a lot of years playing baseball. Early on I played third base, later I pitched, and my last position was usually catcher or first base.

I love the game. What is less known is that I also spent many years umpiring baseball, through to state level. I umpired in the Pan-Pacific games in Queensland.

Umpiring requires a very detailed knowledge of the rules of the game. Umpires must pass annual rules examinations. If you want to umpire at higher levels of competition, you must pass the exams at a higher level.

2024-08-02

Welcome to show 3 for PG Down Under!

Once again, I really enjoyed recording today’s show. It features Ryan Booz. Ryan is an evangelist with our friends at Red-Gate, focussing on PostgreSQL.

In this show, Ryan shares his experiences with community in relation to PostgreSQL. Next, we ventured into the challenges and benefits of being an application vendor working against PostgreSQL, and in particular, the extensibility model and how it compares to other products.

2024-07-25

Another Fabric Down Under podcast is out the door. This time it was with a another fellow “Down Under” guest Heidi Hasting from Adelaide.

Heidi Hasting is a Business Intelligence professional and former software developer with over ten years experience in Microsoft products.  She’s an MVP, MCT and holder of many certifications along with being an ALM/DLM enthusiast and Azure DevOps fan and co-founder and organiser of the Adelaide Power BI User Group.

2024-07-24

There was a question on the Q&A forums today, asking how to read data using SSIS, when it’s in this format:

|Col1| |Col2|Col3|Col|
|101| |A|21|DC|

One of the concerns was that there was a leading pipe. This is not a problem. When you have data like that, and you set | as the delimiter, because there are 6 delimiters, then there are 7 columns output. These are the values:

Column 1: blank string Column 2: 101 Column 3: blank string Column 4: A Column 5: 21 Column 6: DC Column 7: blank string

2024-07-19

A few weeks ago, I received another book from our friends at PackT. It was the second edition of Azure Data Factory Cookbook by Dmitry Foshin, Dmitry Anoshin, Tonya Chernyshova, and Xenia Ireton.

I liked the earlier version of this book, and I was pleased to see substantial work had gone into this second edition.

It’s interesting that the book doesn’t stick directly to Azure Data Factory (ADF) but also branches into topics on Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, and Databricks.

2024-06-14

Another book that I read recently was SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices Book Cover by Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H Mala, Leslie Andrews, and Chi Zhang. It also came from our friends at PackT publishing.

Purpose

The intro to the book says “This book is for the SQL developer who is ready to take their query development skills to the next level. This includes report writers, data scientists, or similar data gatherers and allows users to expand their skills for complex querying and build more efficient and performant queries.”

2024-06-11

I was excited to see Gus Frazer’s new book on Data Cleaning with Power BI. Our friends at PackT sent a copy for me to take a look at.

Gus has a background with both Power BI and Tableau, and it’s always interesting to see a mix of perspectives in any book. In this book, he shows a variety of data cleaning/cleansing tasks, then how to do many of them with M in Power Query. And you can tell Gus has a teaching background. because chapters have review questions. The book could well support a course.

2024-06-10

I hadn’t seen Mohamed Kabiruddin for a while. He used to be Australian based, and worked for Microsoft for some time. Now he’s a product manager at Google. He’s always fascinating to chat to and so I was so pleased to have him on a SQL Down Under podcast today.

Mohamed leads Cloud SQL for SQL Server working with the engineering team to deliver features and capabilities for enterprises to run their SQL Server workloads on Google Cloud SQL. His expertise lies in architecting globally distributed data and information retrieval systems, databases, cloud database migrations, and vector embeddings.

2024-05-18

I’ve seen a few books lately from the PackT people. The latest was the second edition of Extending Power BI with Python and R by Luca Zavarella: Perform advanced analysis using the power of analytical languages.

Author

The author is Luca Zavarella. I’ve been working with Power BI since before it was released, and ever since I’ve seen discussions around using R (initially) and Python (later), Luca has been one of those people that everyone listens to.

2024-05-06

Welcome to show 2 for PG Down Under!

I really enjoyed recording today’s show with John Miner. John is a data architect at Insight in the USA. Over many years, John was a data platform MVP, is a strong community contributor, and blogs at craftydba.com.

After I created the Wide World Importers sample databases for Microsoft back in 2016, I did also do a migration of the code to PostgreSQL. That didn’t get released for quite a while but I’ve now seen it out there in the wild. I wanted to do a show on the migration but was concerned that I had done it so long ago, that I might have forgotten what surprised me at the time.

2024-05-04