The Bit Bucket

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

I’ve been a big fan of Shaun Micallef for many years. So I was very excited to listen to his new book Tripping Over Myself, A Memoir of a Life in Comedy both to learn more about his background, and to hear his thoughts on it.

I truly appreciate his sense of humour, and as someone who speaks publicly regularly, I appreciate watching his timing and delivery. That’s the number one reason why I wanted to listen to this on Audible rather than reading the book. Shaun reads the book himself, and I knew that hearing him deliver the content would add to the value it brings.

2023-07-29

On July 27th 1993, Microsoft released Windows NT, the forerunner to the versions of Windows we use today, particularly the server versions.

If you’re old enough, one thing you’d remember about this event is how signficant it was. At the time, if you wanted a server-based operating system on a PC, you didn’t have that many choices. We were predominantly using variants of Unix, most commonly Xenix.

Importantly, most other server systems were largely text-based. With Windows NT, Microsoft brought the power of a graphical interface to mass market server operating systems.

2023-07-27

I had an email from a friend today where he asked what was wrong with SQL Server, and wondered if ROUND() didn’t go to the same school that he did.

The example was:

SELECT '0.5' [SOURCE VALUE], '1' [SHOULD ROUND TO], ROUND('0.5',0) [SQL SAYS]
UNION
SELECT '1.55', '1.6', ROUND('1.55',1)
UNION
SELECT '94.55', '94.6', ROUND('94.55',1);

The output was:

What was puzzling him is why SQL Server’s ROUND was converting 94.55 to 94.5 and not 94.6. Now writing numbers as strings is problematic to start with, but that aside, he was puzzled by the output.

2023-07-11

I’m a fan of Seth Godin, and have always enjoyed listening to him. Recently I finished listening to Leap First on Audible. 

When I started listing to this book, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I always enjoy Seth’s anecdotes. At first, the book seemed more like a series of anecdotes than an in-depth treatment of the topic. It seemed to lack a continuous train of thought. I started feeling like I was listening to a collection of anecdotes from Seth, rather than a “real” book.

2023-07-06

Ever since I watched Professor Alice Roberts’ series on travelling Egypt by Train, I’ve been quite a fan of her work. (It also means I probably came to knowing about her later than I should have). Since then, I’ve been working through a number of her books. On Audible, I just finished listening to The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being.

Amongst many other things, Alice is an English biological anthropologist. She also worked as a doctor in the National Heath Service in Wales for a while, but she left clinical medicine to focus on anatomy.

2023-06-11