microsoft Archives - Grant Fritchey

09Dec 2019 by Grant Fritchey 24 Comments

Distributing Jupyter Notebooks

If you're working with the Microsoft Data Platform, you should be, at the least, exploring Azure Data Studio as a new tool in your toolbox. One of the big reasons for this is the inclusion of Jupyter Notebooks. For those who don't know, Jupyter Notebooks are an open source documentation tool that lets you combine text and pictures with live code. From this we can talk about runbooks that you can share with people, lessons in combination with videos, presentations, interactive software documentation and lots more. I'm myopically focused at the moment on Azure Data Studio, but there are a lot of other places and ways to create or consume notebooks. However, I'm going to keep my focus. The issue I'm running into, is distributing the notebooks. Where to go…

03Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

My Next Phone May Be a Nokia

Misc

I really like my Windows Phone. Yes, there are not as many apps as on a Droid or iPhone. But the apps there are and the OS itself... wow! And the hardware is always charging forward. And evidently, this new acquisition from Microsoft suggests that it might charge forward in a more coordinated fashion. We'll see.

10Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Praise and a Suggestion for AlwaysOn

Uncategorized

One of my favorite additions to SQL Server 2012 is the Availability Groups, referred to as AlwaysOn. These things are awesome. It's basically shared nothing clustering at a database-by-database level. You can set up a series of secondary machines that will enable you to failover a database in the event of an outage. This is a huge advantage in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. We're talking serious business continuity. Further, you can set up one of those secondary machines to allow for reads, meaning, you get a reporting database that allows you to offload read queries from a transactional machine. Another giant win. But wait, it gets better. Now, with the capabilities that are coming with Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Networks you can go even further. It's…

03Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Microsoft Teched 2013 Keynote

Misc

Welcome to Teched 2013 We're starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, "you'll never crack it" Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives out on stage. And that is Brad Anderson arriving. Guy7 looks like he does crossfit. "We spend our time making other people great" He's laying out the path of the future and, shock of shocks, he said SQL. Out loud. On stage. Twice. That's pretty cool. SQL Server often feels like a red-headed step child. Iain McDonald, comes out to introduce information about Windows Core. The OS covers everything from the phone to tablets to xbox to your servers. The…

21May 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Microsoft Lync Through the Web

Misc

Get an invite to a Microsoft meeting? Are they using the new Lync interface? And, you don't have a paid Office365 account do you? So, you click the link, figure it'll open a web browser and off you go, right? Wrong. Instead it opens up a Lync app that you installed with Office, or the one that comes with Windows 8. And then you're stuck. You can't log in if your office doesn't have a Lync server (office?). Thankfully, there's a simple solution. Many thanks to Michael Wood. You just add a string to the end of the URL and you're off to the web app. I couldn't find this anywhere, so I figured I'd share with those who might need the help. Just add '?sl=1' to the end of…

23Dec 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

A Lack of Excitement

PASS, PowerShell, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools

I usually use all the problems, crashes, and issues that I run into at work as grist for my mill, aka, material to blog about. But lately, we haven't been crashing & burning much <knock wood, turn three times, throw salt over my left shoulder, spit>. But it was suggested that may be I should mention why that is. The fact of the matter is that I've been spending a lot more time working on methods for monitoring our systems so that we avoid more of the stupid stuff, full disks, failed backups, long running agent jobs, etc.. I've blogged before about our use of Microsoft's Operations Manager for monitoring our servers and how we've built custom rules and monitors to keep an eye on things. I've also mentioned how…

17Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Record of a PSS Call

Uncategorized

Not everyone has the opportunity to call Microsoft Premier Support. For those who have not yet had this experience, I'll document my most recent, non-critical, call. Critical calls are a different critter entirely. We were experiencing a very odd error on one server in our system. When a particular procedure was run with a particularly large set of data, it would produce an error, but only when called from the application. The exact same error with exactly the same dataÂ called from SSMS did not produce an error. We went through a very extensive set of tests and were unable to fix the problem on the server. After moving the production systemÂ that was experiencing the issue to a different server, we decided to contact PSS. 8:48 Am, Tuesday: I made the…

08Jun 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Microsoft SQL Server Premier Field Engineers

SQL Server, T-SQL

Joe Sack has started a new team blog for the Microsoft SQL Server Premier Field Engineers. If you don't know who they are, you should. The first post is just introductory, but this blog is likely to become a great resource. These are the guys that MS zip lines into tough situations with the expectations that they'll improve them. I'd strongly suspect these are fellows worth listening to.

04May 2009 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Help Make Connect Work Better

Misc

I've posted several times about how useful I find Microsoft Connect. I've seen issues introduced there get resolved through hot fixes and service packs. I sincerely believe it's a very important tool in your arsenal to get the kind of service you need from Microsoft. Here's a post on Connect that's trying to make Connect itself easier to use. I'd strongly recommend you swing by and vote positively for this. And for those who are unclear, click on the stars to submit your vote.

25Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Microsoft Links to Help Your Career

Misc

I received this list of links from my Microsoft rep. It was really an impressive list. So I asked if I could post it to the blog. Figures, it was already out there. Buck Woody had compiled it. It's worth a look through. There really is a lot of information that focuses on you and your career available from Microsoft. Who knew that a big company like that could be so helpful. Also, how great was it that Buck Woody pulled it all together for convenience.

Tag: microsoft