What I did for the week ending 2018/04/28

I attended SQL Saturday in Blue Bell, PA. Specifically, I attended these sessions:

• Effective DW Storage Patterns with Miner
• Azure SQL DW Migrate On-Premise to Cloud, with Zhang
• Extending DevOps to SQL Server with Fritchey
• Data Governance and Master Data Management, with Napoli
• Successfully Running SQL in AWS, with Carrig

I took advantage of these additional learning opportunities:

• I watched Creative Uses of the APPLY Operator, session 1, with Itzik Ben-Gan at SQLug.se on YouTube
• I watched Creative Uses of the APPLY Operator, session 2, with Itzik Ben-Gan at SQLug.se on YouTube

What I did for the week ending 2018/04/21

The big thing for this week is SQL Saturday #714, which will be held at Montgomery County Community College on 4/21. I'm writing this post a little early, as I won't have time to write over the weekend.

The time I had planned to spend on finishing up 70-767 has been taken up by finishing up the annual and quarterly book keeping and a strange issue with my backup laptop (an old Core Duo ThinkPad T500) refusing to update to a recent version of Windows 10. If I get the laptop working, I will post a more detailed entry. Unfortunately, I'm starting to think that it's time to retire the old workhorse or put Ubuntu on it.

What I did for the week ending 2018/04/14

I don't know what happened with the date in the title of the last blog entry. I don't think that it will cause any harm to anyone, so I'm going to leave it as-is.

Here are the main things I worked on last week (in addition to my 'normal' work for clients, which I don't detail here):

• I watched several videos from the "SQL Server tutorial for Beginners" playlist on YouTube, which is produced by kudvenkat. As you know, I am not a beginner with SQL Server. Even so, I don't have much practical experience with the LEAD(), LAG() and windowing functions. I've been working on a project where these functions are beneficial, so I am learning more about them. I found the ten or so videos that I watched up around the "Part 110" area to be well-explained.
• I am up to page 145 in my "Implementing a SQL Data Warehouse" review. 
• My progress was impeded by having to catch up with the quarterly and annual bookkeeping.

What I did for the week ending 2018/04/10

Here is the progress for the week:

• I watched the "Columnstore Indexes", episode 12 of Kalen Delaney's Weekly Webinar series on YouTube. Kalen references Niko Neugebauer's blog several times in her talk. She also points to the SQL Server Central "Stairway to SQL Server Columnstore Indexes" series of blog postings.

I've spent quite a bit of time on a couple of dbatools issues, which has negatively impacted the amount of time I have had to read my 70-767 book. I am only 34 pages into the 70-767 book.

What I did for the week ending 2018/03/30

Last week was a very light week for learning.

I watched:

1. DSC in a vSphere Environment by Luc Dekens on YouTube. Mainly, I am interested in DSC as I have moved on from VMWare in my home lab.
2. Test your Powershell code with AppVeyor for ITPros with André Kamman & Rob Sewell on YouTube.