The Ashdar Partners Blog

In no particular order, here are the learning opportunities I took advantage of in the last week: I listened to ReverseDSC with Nik Charlebois on RunAs Radio.  Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks by Jeff Ello. I read this once a year and I recommend it to anyone who interacts with IT people. I watched the "Implementing a Data Warehouse" by "Free Training on YouTube.  I am reviewing what I need to know for the 70-463 exam. I took the 70-461 and 70-462 exams ages ago, then got busy and never got around to taking the 70-463 exam.  The videos are a little dated, since they are from the SQL Server 2012 era. The same firm has videos for  70-462 . There are also old videos for 70-463 at the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) site. I've watched those before, and I should probably sit through them one more time. Why am I reviewing? I never feel "comfortable enough" with SSIS, even though my experience goes back 18 years to DTS, because  I us...

Before I get into the mundane things for this week, I'd like to point out that  all support for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 is ending on July 9, 2018 . Microsoft's page covering this is  here . Some things to consider: If you are subject to data regulations such as HIPAA, PCI and perhaps even SARBOX, running an unsupported version of your relational database manager may put you out of compliance.  Even if this is not the case for your organization, migrating to a supported version may provide significant performance benefits. I've never heard anyone say "My database is too fast".  With data compression now a feature of the Standard Edition, you may be able to realize savings in storage space, I/O bandwidth and related resources.  If you have SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 databases that you need to migrate to a supported version, I can help. Contact me. I have experience with nearly every obsolete version of SQL Server, going all th...

I find that posting these small learning experiences helps keep up by drive to watch them, so I will continue to post them here. I hope that you find them as interesting and/or useful as I did. Here are the online learning experiences for this past week, in no particular order: Monster Text Manipulation: Regular Expressions for the DBA with Sean McCown at SQL PASS Summit 2016. This might have been the clearest explanation of REGEX that I've ever encountered. Scalable Application Design with Service Broker With Allen White at SQL PASS Summit 2015 DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal at SQL PASS Summit 2015. Paul Randal is always worth listening to. Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2014: Flipping the DW Faster Bit with Jimmy May at SQL PASS Summit 2015 Emotional Intelligence for Engineers with April Wensel at ngAtlanta, on YouTube. Application Patterns for Azure SQL Database with Tony Petrossian at SQL PASS Summit 2015 Founda...

I find that posting these "what I've done" entries once a week helps me keep my momentum up, so I'm going to keep doing it. I watched the following talks:   Hadoop Primer for SQL Server DBA  by Konstantin Korobkov at SQLBITs XIV ( The sound quality for this one isn't great.) Python and R for SQL and Business Intelligence Professionals   with Jennifer Stirrup   at SQLBits XIV. Shiny: dashboards in R by Steff Locke (@SteffLocke) SQLBITS XIV   "How to Build a Virtual Test Lab for SQL Server" with Ed Leighton-Dick & David Klee at SQLPASS Summit 2015   "Analyzing your ETL Solution with PowerShell" with André Kamman at SQL PASS Summit 2015 "Change Data Capture Case Study and Checklist" with Uwe Ricken at SQL PASS Summit 2015 The most stand-out moments from last week's efforts include: I altered a SQL Server partitioning configuration that I had set up a number of ...