The Ashdar Partners Blog

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 ...

Last Saturday, I attended SQL Saturday #121, at Microsoft's Malvern location, which is just outside of Philadelphia, PA, USA. I enjoyed all of the presentations that I attended and I thought that the event was well-attended. Microsoft has a very nice facility and this is the first time that I've really seen all of it. I snapped a few quick photos, which can be found on my twitter stream, @dstrait .   I've been attending SQL Saturday (and Code Camp) events for many years. The most strinking thing (to me) that I noticed about this year's event was that there were only two or three laptops, but there were five different people carrying iPads and at least one carrying some sort of Android tablet. One person had an external keyboard bluetoothed to his iPad. There were too many smart phones to count.  In the past, there would have been a couple of dozen laptops and I would have brought my own laptop. Once, I actually lugged my eight-pound Thinkpad 770ED around all day. Thi...