What I did for the week ending 2018/08/24

The highlights for this week have been a few videos from the free-to-view PASS Summit 2016 archive, available at PASS.org.

Managing SaaS Application Databases with Elastic Jobs: SQL Agent and More for Azure SQL Database, presented by Deborah Dove

• Essentially, "Elastic Jobs" is SQL Agent for Azure SQL. She also talks about "Elastic Query", which allows you to run queries on all of your databases, or a specific subset of them.

Azure Data Services: Spotlight on Azure SQL Database, presented by Debora Dove

• I think that this is a good introduction to Azure SQL and it covers Elastic Pools. I'm sure that I learned a few things. One thing that bothers ms is the low query/minute ceilings for the various offerings.

Design Patterns for SaaS Applications with Azure SQL Database, presented by Bill Gibson

• If you are going multi-tenant, sharding and employing Elastic Pools seems to be the only sane choice.
• "Most of our customers are compute-bound, not storage-bound."
• There are various clever things you can do with pools and tagging.

What I did for the week ending 2018/08/17

The summer has been busy and my Azure training schedule has suffered. Here are a few highlights from the last few weeks of study.

The following are presentations that occurred during SQLPASS Summit 2016. I can't  link to these presentations directly because they are behind a paywall (though it is free to subscribe):

Backup and Restore SQL Server Databases in Microsoft Azure, presented by Andy McDermid and Pinal Dave

This presentation is about Virtual Machines, not SQL Azure. My takeaways were:

• Segregating data, log, tempdb and backup locations is still recommended practice.
• The "backup to URL" feature can be useful because frees up a disk because it is not needed to hold backup files and writing to a URL doesn't count as bandwidth usage against your VM disks. "Backup to URL" can stripe the data just like writing "regular files" can. You need to ensure that the costs associated with the (required) Azure Storage Account make sense.
• You can stripe VM disks for performance, but remember that VM sizing has rate-limits on the disk performance. If striping provides capacity that exceeds those rate-limits, you won't get the performance benefit that you expect.

Virtual SQL Servers. Actual Performance, presented by David Klee

Klee is always worth listening to, though his client's systems are much bigger than anything I've seen. My takeaways were:

• Your virtual sockets should look like your physical sockets. Put everything inside of a NUMA node, if you can.
• Always consider: "What if my VM gets moved to a host with a different processor configuration?"
• Paraphrased: "Changed from 1x16 (socket x core) to 2x8 and the performance went up 25%"
• Paraphrased: "A client had every VM set to 64 vCPU. Changing from 64 vCPUs to 4 vCPUs got a throughput 3.5 times higher than anything the client had seen up to that point".
• Turn off "hot-add CPU" because it disables proper NUMA configuration.
• Hypervisors generally ignore hyper-thread "cores" until the server is really loaded up. That level of load should not happen often. Therefore, there is little use in turning HT off in the BIOS.
• If your storage does compression, rely on that and turn off SQL Server's data compression.
• Virtual Disk Controllers (VDCs) are still a problem. Creating additional (non-default) VDCs and spreading your IO load around is recommended.
• As always, test any change to make sure that you get what you expect.

SQL Server in Azure VM: Best Practices, Latest Features, and Roadmap, presented by Luis Vargas

and 

SQL Server High Availability & Disaster Recovery in Windows Azure, presented by Lous Vargas, Sanjay Misra, et al

Both of these were very good, with some overlap. I liked the first one so much (which Vargas presents "solo"), I watched the second one when I noticed that he was one of the presenters. My takeaways were:

• You are better off using storage pools, not MDF/NDF files, for striping and performance.
• Licensing seems to only get more complex as time goes by.

What I did for the week ending 2018/07/21

I found a version of my favorite SSDT presentation (from PASS Summit 2016) on YouTube. On YouTube, it is named "Continuous Integration with SQL Server Data Tools", presented by Jon Boulineau for the Nashville SQL Server Users Group.

This seems to be an earlier (?) version of a presentation called "Agile Development Fundamentals: Continuous Integration with SSDT", given at a SQL Saturday. In an earlier blog post, I named the PASS version of the presentation as "my new favorite SSDT video". Both presentations were done by the same person and seem to be the same content. The sound on the YouTube version isn't as good as the PASS Summit version, but you do not have to go through the PASS sign-up process to see it. (Though I do recommend PASS for anyone who wants to know how SQL Server works or how Microsoft expects you to use it.)

Jon goes over several things, including an introduction to SSDT, the test project feature and deploying builds. It's just over an hour long.

According to Microsoft's Certification Planning web site, I am officially a "Microsoft Certified Professional", having passed the following exams:

• Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014
• Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 Databases
• Implementing a Data Warehouse

I'm going to need to evaluate what exam(s) to take next. The versions of SQL Server that I'm tested on are getting old and dusty but I need more Azure in my (professional) life.

I have started the edX.org "Azure 215x: Cloud Administration" course. Partly, I am interested in how edX runs it's online courses. I've taken a few other thing online over the years. I tend to do better with self-directed learning. The course is not very long, just a few hours, but I'm going to drag my feet until August starts in order to maximize the free time I have to use Azure tools. (There is a free account level for 12 months, but the minimum granularity seems to be "one month", so I'll dilly-dally for a week.)

Microsoft is now saying that you can get security patches for SQL Server 2008 for free after extended support ends on 7/9/2019. The catch is that you have to move your SQL Server 2008 instance to Azure. IOW, they are dangling extended lifetime for existing SQL Server 2008 applications in front of organizations in order to get more people onto their cloud systems.

What I did for the week ending 2018/07/07

I do not have much to report this week.

I've started the Microsoft Professional Cloud Administration course over at edX.org. I've only done the very first units and have yet to form an opinion.

I'll be looking at learning a few things about Confluence in the upcoming weeks,as well.

What I did for the week ending 2018/06/30

Over the last two weeks, I've been watching PASS Summit 2016 videos. No particular presentation really stands out and I've been watching presentations that cover topics outside of my core competencies, so I haven't been keeping an inventory.

I've signed up for an edX course on Azure. I expect this to take up all of my training time budget for the next few months. I've taken short online courses before, including Rhetoric, Learning and Spanish, but this will be my first time taking an edX course. Those low-intensity courses and required only a few hours a week, while (IIRC) the edX course materials state that I should budget 12 hours a week for the next three months. I'm excited to see how a more demanding course will work out.

What I did for the week ending 2018/06/16

I have finished watching the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 presentations on YouTube that caught my interest. If you have any interest in applied PowerShell, I suggest that you have a look at their playlist. there are nearly 60 presentations and I'm sure that something in there will interest you. If not, PowerShell.org has many other presentations.

After finishing up the PowerShell presentations, I went looking for some good tutorials on Jira. I found a lot of marketing, but I didn't find much on useful, implementable details. Some of that seems to be due to Jira being flexible enough to do whatever you want. That's great, but my problem is that I'm not at the point where I know what I want. I will just endeavor to persevere on this front. 

For the past week or two, I've been spending more time with Trello than I had been. I had a ten minute look at Kanbanflow, which seems like a worthy competitor to Trello. All of this activity is the fault of my reading The Phoenix Project, which re-ignited my interest in thinking about work strategically.

The fact of the matter is that you can turn many information tools into a rough Kanban-style task manager. I use OneNote to do task management. I have been using methods based on GTD since I read David Allen's book many years ago, but I've been moving towards Kanban. (A benefit of using OneNote is that my notes on my tasks become part of what I search when I say to myself "Didn't I do this before?". If something is buried in Trello, I might not find it so easily. I might not even think to search Trello.) You could use text files in some folders for a crude task list. The web sites start to shine when you need to work as part of a team or need better reporting.

I also did a little DFS research, because I am curious as to how that works even though it isn't really my bread-and-butter. One of the things I learned was that DFS was introduced in Windows Server 2003. I thought that DFS was a more recent innovation and (maybe Windows Server 2008). It is good to know things. 

I've started looking through the SQLPASS Summit 2016 presentations. I identified about 60 presentations that looked interesting. I've started going through them. The stand-out presentation so far is Agile Development Fundamentals: Continuous Integration with SSDT, which was presented by Jon Boulineau. This is my new favorite "How to do SSDT" presentation. It covers SSDT basics, testing and deployment. I have been using SSDT since the days of "Data Dude" back around 2008 (or earlier) and I need to improve my use of SSDT to match Jon's.

(I can't publish direct links to the SQLPASS site because of the way their site is built. You will just have to log into the SQLPASS site and search for Jon's work.)

I have said this before, but I'll say it again: If you have any interest in SQL Server, you should join SQLPASS. They don't bother you very much and you will get access to hours and hours of free SQL presentations. Yes, much of the content is "old", but SQL Server doesn't move that fast and "older" doesn't mean "obsolete". I would avoid anything earlier than SQL Server 2014, unless you stuck on an older platform.The quality and focus of the SQLPASS presentations tends to be better than what you find randomly searching around on YouTube. Additionally, you don't have to weed out as many introductory presentations for newbies. Even if you are "just an analyst", there are enough presentations on reporting technologies for you to find something that you can use.

I am still finishing up Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. I found the chapter discussing the 1976 Swine Flu incident interesting as I kind-of-just-barely remember that time.

What I did for the week ending 2018/06/09

I've watched so many of the Powershell + Devops Summit 2018 videos in the last week that I've lost track of the best ones. I won't bore you with a list. I'll just point you to the official Ashdar Partners twitter feed. The feed shows all of the videos that I've liked.

I have three more videos from the Summit that I want to watch. After that, I'll be switching focus to Jira for a while because one of my clients has adopted Jira and I feel a little lost.

After Jira, I'll be going back to the SQL PASS 2016 videos that I put aside a few months back. With my recent certification and the way that the IT universe seems to be going, I am starting to believe that Azure is the future.

I'm also on a kick to read more. I have a good local library and I should take more advantage of it. I have three branches within easy driving distance, including the main branch, and I have easy access to any book at any branch through their inter-branch loan system. After finishing "The Phoenix Project" last week, I am reading Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise". It is a lighter read than the book by Nassim Taleb that I read last year.

What I did for the week ending 2018/06/02

I took advantage of the following learning opportunities:

• PowerShell Team: Using PowerShell From a Browser to Manage Cloud Resources by Danny Maertens on YouTube
• CSV, JSON and XML (Oh My!) by Jeff Hicks on YouTube
• WebJEA: PowerShell driven Web Forms for Secure Self-Service by Mark Domansky on YouTube

Perhaps more interestingly...

Last week, the library didn't have the books I was actually looking for, so I picked up The Phoenix Project by Kim, et al. I should have read this book a couple of years ago. I've seen this book recommended as required reading for greater DevOps understanding a few times.

I've been following the DevOps movement for a while, at a distance. I haven't paid much attention to DevOps's underpinnings or the scope of it's ideas. People don't hire me to re-engineer their business processes. As I did with TDD over ten years ago, I have adopted what I can of DevOps, according to my understanding of it.

"DevOps" is usually sold to technologists as tools (open-source, closed-source or roll-your-own), or perhaps some tactical approaches to things. Tools are easy to sell. (If we are talking about open source tools, "sell" is metaphorical but someone still needs to convince you that you need that tool.). You put up a Kan-ban board, you use git, you install a CI/CD system and you are done. Frankly, I've seen tools come and go (ah...Borland...) and I'm jaded. Most tools do not last more than a few years. I've seen waterfall projects outlast the tools they were based on. Many tools are just old wine in new bottles. (A new text editor? Sure, I'll give it a go. Is it better than the old one? Yes. Is it revolutionary? No.)

Concepts are not easy to sell. The book pushes the DevOps concept well beyond my previous understanding. I feel that my understanding of what the DevOps folks are trying to do has been radically upgraded. It encompasses tools, tactics and corporate strategy. IT isn't just something that "the IT department does". IT involves much of, if not all of, a company. whether the company understands it or not. IT should be seen as a competitive asset and data is as much the life blood of the company as cash flow is, or chargebacks between departments are. I've read that "going DevOps" requires a change in mindset, but I'd never understood the true breadth of what would be required, including from people who traditionally have as little as possible to do with IT.

All of the book's stories about WIP, queued work and rework all ring true. My first job out of school was in a factory. I worked on testing programs and hardware. I didn't really see the factory's products as my worry, but my boss did. He worried about WIP all of the time. I would see him out on the manufacturing floors, counting the pallets of unfinished goods that were stacked all over the building and frowning. Just figuring out how much product was in the pipeline was a problem, they would conduct "inventory counts" a few times a year, when nearly all other plant work was frozen for a day or more. I saw firsthand the chaos that happened when "finished" goods started failing tests and had to be reworked. Those tests were run by the programs that I wrote.

I've made note of many of the books mentioned after the end of the novel. I'll be following up on them at my local library.

What I did for the week ending 2018/05/26

I am slowly going through all of the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 talks that I find interesting.

I took advantage of the following learning opportunities:

• Whip Your Scripts into Shape: Optimizing PowerShell for Speed by Joshua King on YouTube
• Application Provisioning with DSC and Octopus Deploy by Josh Duffney on YouTube
• PlatyPS: PowerShell Help meets Markdown by Sergei Vorobev on YouTube
• Defending against PowerShell Attacks-In theory and in practice by Lee Holmes on YouTube

Certified, as opposed to merely Certifiable

I passed the 70-767 Implementing a Data Warehouse exam this week.

I first read Kimball's Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and The Data Warehouse Toolkit over fifteen years ago, so it's about time. I still have those books, although many other books have hit the recycling bin. A lot of the underlying technology has changed in the data warehousing area, but a grounding the basics of facts and dimensions is still important.

I passed the exams for Querying Microsoft Server 2012/2014 and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 Databases, a while back. My Microsoft Learning dashboard points tout that this third success qualifies me as a "Microsoft Certified Professional". The last time I was Microsoft-certified in anything was in 1998, when I had a certification in Windows 98 desktop support, or some such thing. I don't think I ever did anything with that.

Co-incidentally, I used the last of my last business cards while attending a talk on Machine Learning at Jacquette Consulting on Wednesday. It must be time for new cards.

What I did for the week ending 2018/05/19

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week:

• The Build Release Pipeline Model for Mere Mortals by Ryan Coates on YouTube
• PowerShell Team: Inventory Your Server Environment and Detect Change at Scale by Jenny Hunter on YouTube

What I did for the week ending 2018/05/12

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week.

Due to my interest in and use of DbaChecks, I need to get a better handle on PowerBI:

• Introduction to Power BI Desktop with Dustin Ryan on YouTube

PowerBI seems to be the only reasonable way to visualize the results of the tens of thousands of tests I'm running.

I could not resist watching a several things from the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018. The following are all from the Global Summit:

• Beyond Syntax: Pester Testing with Dave Wyatt on YouTube
• Keynote: State of the Community with Don Jones on YouTube
• PowerShell 2018: State of the Art with Jeffrey Snover on YouTube
• A Historical Architectural Tour of PowerShell with Bruce Payette on YouTube
• Become a PowerShell Debugging Ninja with Kirk Munro on YouTube

I don't usually listen to things like keynotes, but I find that Don Jones and Jeff Snover always have something valuable to share.

I am surprised with the renaming of PowerShell Core to PowerShell. I am sure that won't be confusing to casual scripters. /s

If you'd like to keep tabs on what I am watching more closely, you can head over to the official Ashdar Partners twitter feed. I am not big on chitchat. It's mainly YouTube sharing what I watch and (what I hope are mostly) quality retweets.

What I did for the week ending 2018/05/05

I took advantage of these learning opportunities:

• Building Your T-SQL Tool Kit: Window Function Fundamentals with Christina E. Leo on YouTube
• SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches with Adam Machanic on YouTube
•  Beyond Pester 101: Applying testing principles to PowerShell by Glenn Sarti on YouTube.

The PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit has released their 2018 videos (62 in all!) and all I want to do is watch PowerShell videos all day. Life intervenes, however...

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.

What I did for the week ending 2018/03/23

Another snowpocalypse has come and melted.

I've been busy, but I haven't made much progress on my training this week. Just about the only thing I have done is this:

• I listened to a RunAs Radio podcast on "Be the Master" with Don Jones.

What I did for the week ending 2018/03/16

This week was very busy (work can be so inconvenient :-)) and I didn't get very far in my studies. 

• I went through the MVA course on SQL Server on Linux. This is several videos and takes a couple of hours. This required dusting off my aging Linux knowledge. In short, most SQL things are the same. I'm not sure that I would be in a hurry to build a complex cluster just yet, but small, uncomplicated single-instance applications should be fine. 
• I watched Introduction to Jira & Agile Project Management with Dan Cuparkoff on YouTube. I'm not unfamiliar with Agile tactics and strategies, but I have not had a chance to work with Jira. 
• My exam reference book for 70-767 arrived but I haven't had a chance to crack it open.