SQL Data Partners Podcast

As a data pro, you are negotiating and problem-solving all the time, often without knowing it. Your success as a professional as your company evolves its Data Platform depends on how well you can communicate and influence. It’s a scary thought, but your ability to negotiate with the business directly often determines if your projects get funded. Those skills are arguably as important as your T-SQL. In this episode, we chat with Blythe Morrow about strategies you can incorporate to better communicate with those around you.

The show notes for this episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/10/06/episode-234-communication-tips-for-the-it-pro/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

The show notes and video can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/09/15/episode-233-scriptdom. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Public speaking is not fun for most; however, it can be very rewarding. Chris Seferlis chats with us about a few tips he has on being a speaker. Most of the tactical advice we defer to a toastmasters or public speaking group, so we give some thoughts on preparation, soliciting feedback, audience engagement, and handling criticism. I should point out that public speaking is WAY different from recording videos. We hope you find the information useful. Did we miss anything? Let us know!

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/09/01/episode-232-giving-technical-presentations. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Everyone has bad days; however, how those bad days develop are unique to each of us. In a special episode, we chat with Tracy Boggiano about her experiences with Mental Health, how she has dealt with it, how each of us can work on our own mental health, and phrases we should avoid saying to those with mental health issues. Our own Eugene Meidinger shares a story on negative thinking and how damaging it can be. We hope this conversation will help foster ideas on how you can feel more comfortable talking about Mental Health and making it easier for those who struggle.

One of the core principles at SQL Data Partners is to "Act in a way that expresses care, hope, love, and joy".  As we talked during the episode, I was struck by how this principle is correlated to mental health. I had not made the connection before. While we may not be able to solve other problems, we can show support by expressing care, hope, love, and joy. If we can foster these environments, it will make it easier to get through our own bad day when they happen.

The show notes and video can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/08/11/episode-231-mental-health-and-wellness-in-it. Take care of yourself on the SQL Trail!

No one wants to lose data when disaster strikes; however, we need to plan for some data loss and putting all the pieces in place can be tricky. There are two metrics commonly used to measure data loss and availability when it comes to planning for disasters—Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective. In this episode, we touch on how you might come up with these metrics, how to consider the implementation cost, and how you might go about walking through a disaster situation to test your plan. 

The show notes and video can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/08/04/episode-230-rto-rpo. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

The scary part of upgrading SQL Server is finding out you have a problem AFTER the fact. In this episode, Mariano Kovo joins us to discuss the Data Migration Assistant tool from Microsoft. While the name can be a bit misleading, (What? Microsoft have confusing names—that's a first), the major benefit to the tool is the assessment feature to alert you of potential issues when you upgrade. Issues are broken into three major categories:

• Breaking Changes
• Behavior Changes
• Deprecated Changes

While each change should be reviewed, many times we allow deprecated features to remain unresolved as they are still supported in SQL Server; however, we certainly want to put those on the backlog because one day Microsoft will finally pull the plug and we want to be ahead of the curve. 

You can find the show notes and video for today's episode at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/07/21/episode-229-data-migration-assistant. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

As data practitioners, we want to get ahead of any problems that might come up and share those insights with others on our team. In this episode, Edward Pollack gives us a few scenarios we might consider as we attempt to prevent application issues. These techniques also go into the security space and could help prevent data loss. As we collect this information and make it available to others, we can also demonstrate the ROI we provide to the organization.

You can find the show notes and video for this episode at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/07/14/episode-228-predicting-application-problems-with-database-metrics. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Organizations look to constantly improve and offer better services and the application tooling has been built to accommodate the process. Database tooling has been a bit slower to develop; however, in this episode Eitan Blumin, a co-host at sqlserverradio.com, brings us up to speed on the latest features of SQL Server Data Tools with some thoughts on how to get started with continual deployment or ‘devops’.  We know this can feel like a steep learning curve for folks without a programming background and we share a few resources for you to get started.

The show notes and video can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/06/23/episode-227-ssdt-methodologies-for-db-devops/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Let’s say you have completed a lift and shift VM hosting to the cloud.  Great—you now use Iaas services.  While you don’t have to worry about the hardware, managing the software can be problematic.  The SQL Server IaaS Agent Extension can offer some PaaS-like services and make it easier to manage the database environment.  In this episode we chat with Ameena Lalani from Microsoft about this feature, why you might want to enable it, the prerequisites, and the downsides.  She also shares her daily guilty pleasure and Kevin lets it be known he doesn’t put toppings on his ice cream anymore.

The show notes and video for this episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/06/09/episode-226-sql-server-iaas-agent-extension/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Have you ever created a report in a visualization tool, spent all this time and energy creating something that looked really cool, went through more edits than you could remember only to deliver the report and have the recipient go “What am I looking at?” I don’t think I am the only one and, in this episode, we explore some of the rookie mistakes IT pros make when creating visualizations.

The show notes and video for this episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/05/26/episode-225-dashboard-design-principles. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Carlos, Kevin, and Eugene reconnect after some time away with a new streaming time.  Long form conversation on a single topic is also the place we want to get back to in our podcast. 

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/04/28/episode-224-the-standup-meeting/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

With both Kevin and Eugene busy this week, Carlos went solo to share a few changes to the podcast, including the Twitch livestream moving to Tuesday, how you can support the podcast, and podcast episodes going back to being published every other Wednesday. If you have a subject that you’d like to chat about on the podcast with us, we’d love to schedule a time with you…go to sqldatapartners.com/podcast to sign up. We invite you to submit to our Call for Speakers for SQL Trail June 2021, starting April 15th, and whether you speak or not, to attend SQL Trail on June 15th. Carlos also discusses how you can join the SQL Data Partners team as an independent contractor.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/04/14/episode-223-podcast-update. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Azure Arc-enabled data services provide powerful capabilities to deploy and manage local, on-premises, and hybrid cloud data resources using the same centralized management and tooling you get from the Azure cloud. Since Eugene suggested our previous attempt at Azure Arc was insufficient, we invited Ben Weissman and Anthony Nocentino, authors of the book Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services Revealed, to the podcast to discuss how this technology came about and why the future looks very exciting.

The show notes and video can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/03/24/episode-222-azure-arc-enabled-data-services. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Virtual conferences are  just not the same as the conferences we are used to, but we’re still determined to provide a good learning and networking environment for our friends. We very much miss having conferences in person and look forward to that happening again. In the meantime, we have discovered Airmeet and we had a great event: our first of the year. We are doing another data platform conference in June similar to this one and a bigger event in October. Carlos and Kevin sit down and dissect the good, the bad and the indifferent that was SQL Trail March 2021.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/03/22/episode-221-sql-trail-march-2021-retrospective. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

As we prepare for SQL Trail on March 18th, we peek back at Microsoft Ignite and review the announcements made there—filtering out the pieces our compañeros will enjoy hearing about. Did we miss something you think we should talk about? Let us know!

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/03/10/episode-220-microsoft-ignite-recap. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

How do you document your SQL Server environments? I can remember walking through Brent Ozar’s takeover script back in the day and how cumbersome it was to put all that information together. We have a few more options available to us now. In this episode, we discuss a listener question along with some options for doing server inventories. SQL Trail is coming on March 18th. Will we see you there?

The show notes (and video) for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/02/24/episode-219-sql-server-inventory. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

In this episode of the SQL Data Partners Podcast, Eugene and I go back to our DBA beginnings and talk about database file growth, how to manage files and how to tell when a file has grown.

The show notes for today's episode (including the video with the demonstration) can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/02/17/episode-218-file-growths. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

The story begins with a process that has been running forever and suddenly decides to cause grief by filling up tempdb. We talk about patching, and we talk about mental health. We talk a little about various topics.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/02/10/episode-217-a-little-something-about-a-few-things. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

When working on a customer on an import process, she made the comment—if we were doing true EDI, we’d  [Do X]. The comment got me thinking—Aren’t we working on an EDI process? As someone who frequently has multiple roles on projects, I perhaps had lumped all the various 3 letter acronyms into the same spaghetti salad. In this episode of the podcast, Eugene and I chat about the differences—and how thy might impact your team. Data projects can get complex with lots of moving pieces and understanding the different pieces can be helpful as you work to solve your specific pieces of the puzzle.

The show notes for this episode and the video to watch Eugene's Query Folding demo in action can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/02/03/episode-216-edi-vs-etl. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

We have been moving data for years with technologies like DTS and SSIS; however, these were very much designed for on-premises moves in mind. As more cloud services were being offered Microsoft needed a service to help customers using those services move data around. Azure Data Factory was born with the initial premise of moving data between cloud services; however, it has added the ability to connect with on-premises systems and continues to add a variety of connectors it can now natively support.

In this episode, we chat with our friend Andy Leonard about Azure Data Factory, his experience working with the product team, and how customers can leverage the cloud to get business done faster.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2021/01/27/episode-215-azure-data-factory/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!