16Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit 2013 Day 1 Keynote

PASS
I am liveblogging the keynote from the bloggers table at the PASS Summit again this year. Just keep scrolling. Watching the introduction video as people trickle in. All the other bloggers are setting up. I get in early. I didn't rearrange the seats this year. I see others doing it now. 8:11: Watching the videos of all the attendees registering and meeting people at the start of the event and last night's welcome reception is awesome and fun. 8:21: The lights go down and the videos of what everyone is looking forward to at the Summit. In keeping with our location, right next to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, we've got a bit of a race theme going on. We're seeing current PASS President, Bill Graziano having a dream about…
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15Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Monitoring Structure Changes

Azure
Most everyone I know works with environments that are carefully controlled and structured. All changes go through rigorous testing and full documentation. Absolutely nothing happens in a production environment that hasn't been thought through, discussed, planned for and written down. But, there are a few, a very few, who work in a slightly different kind of environment that they refer to as "the real world." In this "real world" changes to a production environment can happen without approval, planning or testing. Scary, right? There's good news for these poor benighted souls. Red Gate is testing out a new piece of software called SQL Lighthouse. It's meant to monitor your systems for changes so that you know what has happened and when in case you don't have a good source control…
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09Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Do Be a Gatekeeper

Professional Development
I read this fascinating blog post called "Don't Be a Gatekeeper" by Julie Zhuo. Please read that first. It really resonated for me in a lot of ways. Everything she said is 100% applicable to our jobs as data professionals. Work to make things more robust. Create processes and structures and an environment where you don't have to be the hero all day every day. Yes, absolutely. But... ah, there's this nagging little voice at the back of my head. Let's ignore it for a moment. Are you a gatekeeper for your developers? Why? Get out of their way. Listen to what Ms. Zhuo has to say. Your development team doesn't need you squatting on their servers preventing them from moving as fast as they can. In fact, they need…
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08Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Azure Account and Spending Limits

Azure
If you've been working with Azure for a while you probably signed up before they had the ability to create an account with spending limits. Even worse, you couldn't switch an unlimited account to a limited account. I have great news. Sometime between June (last time I was messing with my accounts) and now, Microsoft made it possible to put a spending limit on those accounts. It's incredibly easy. Just get to the account management screen like this one: Click on the link and you'll get a pop-up window that lets you modify your choices. Once you've implemented a spending limit you will get shut down when you reach the limit. So, if you want, you can turn it off. It depends on the account type what you'll see. This…
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04Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Speaker of the Month, October 2013

Professional Development
This month I saw several good speakers talking on a variety of topics. Making this choice was hard. I'm really glad people don't know who I've decided not to pick because I would be singularly unpopular. The rules for speaker of the month are simple. This is an utterly arbitrary and random decision made by me based on criteria that crosses the gamut from careful evaluation of speaker skills, to reading chicken guts, to the random coin toss. In short, I pick, my way, no whining. But, I really, really want you to have a blog (or something like it) that I can point people to. That said, I'm making an exception this month (see arbitrary and random above). I'm doing this because I really enjoyed the session, Stop That,…
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30Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 9 Comments

An Experiment Concludes

Misc, Professional Development
[caption id="attachment_2548" align="alignleft" width="300"] That was hard work[/caption] You may or may not have noticed, but every single week day for the month of September, I've put up a blog post. Some were short little blurbs linking to some other person's blog or an article that I decided to comment on. Some were the normal, longer, type of posts that I put up, explaining some bit of technical behavior that has interested me or that I've had questions about. This is the last week day of the month and I'm excited to be able to go back to blogging 1-2 times a week again. There was no small amount of stress ensuring that I had posts scheduled out for each day, coming up with ideas, getting them written up. Whew!…
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27Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Azure Offerings Continue to Expand

Azure
We just received word of a bunch of new functionality over at Scott Guthrie's blog. Not a lot of stuff for data pro's... unless you work with Oracle. Yeah, you can now create Oracle VMs. See the image below:   I swear, I can't tell you why this gives me the giggles, but it does. See, Oracle really does have a cloud offering, and it's Microsoft. Ha! Well, anyway, check out the link on Scott's blog to see the other changes to billing, security, etc. Absolutely worth the read. <snicker>Oracle on Azure. Oh, and if you need to get going on Oracle and you have an MSDN account, you can link your MSDN account to an Azure account for zero cost. Check it out here and enter to win an…
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26Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS Votes

PASS
I've already made my own intentions clear. I'm casting one of my votes for Allen Kinsel. But, I get three votes. Some of you may be asking yourselves, why didn't recommend two other candidates? Honesty time. First, no one else asked me to. I'm actually glad of this. If I received requests for help from more than three of the candidates, I would be very hard pressed to choose. Yes, I ultimately have to, but I don't have to publicly reject anyone. At this point, it looks like I'm ready to vote for every other candidate. That's a good thing from my standpoint, maybe not so much from theirs. However, if anyone wanted a little help, they should have asked. That's a good policy with life in general. Second, I…
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25Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

AdventureWorks2012 Bug on Azure

Azure
While I have production databases in Azure, I can't exactly experiment with them at will. Further, while they mostly have pretty innocuous data, it's not all public. So, I need a mechanism for creating a database that I can play with in Azure. I use AdventureWorks. I get it. It's not that big (actually a good thing for Azure) and it's not a great database design which doesn't reflect reality (I would argue makes this reflects reality as I've seen it). However, it's a handy resource because you can go to Codeplex and download it. That makes it a great way to teach others because everyone has access to it. But... The other day I download the database and install it on my Azure system. I wanted cleaned up copies…
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24Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Premium Database on Azure

Azure
One of the things that can make Windows Azure SQL Databases (WASD) attractive is the fact that they run inside of a managed environment. But, that does mean that you're sharing resources with other databases. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if people are extremely worried about performance, yet, still want to take advantage of all the cool stuff in WASD, there is a way to do this; Premium Databases. I requested access to the early access program and was able to get it. You can request it by clicking on this link and scrolling down to Premium Database. Once you get access you should see this in your list of servers: To create a Premium Database you just create a  database any way you would normally (T-SQL through…
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