Speaking at the PASS Data Community Summit

Posted on July 22, 2025 by way0utwest

I’m honored to be speaking at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle this fall. I’ll be delivering a Professional Development session (Blogging for the Tech Professional), which might be more interesting this year with so many people looking for work. Blogging is a great way to show some skills, let managers perform some due diligence, and help drive the interview. If you can come, register now for savings.

There are lots of great speakers that will be there as well, and it’s quite a lineup. The exact lineup for the main conference isn’t out, but the list of speakers is nice. There are also a great set of pre-cons to choose from as well.

This is one of the best data conferences to attend and I’ve been lucky enough to go most years and learn lots while networking with fellow data professionals.

Talk to your organization and make a case to come. Register early for savings, and plan on a busy week of learning, networking, and notes. Bring back practical tips, tricks, and ideas to your boss and they’ll send you again next year.

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The PASS Summit on Tour in the Netherlands

Posted on July 15, 2025 by way0utwest

The PASS Summit goes on tour this year, with the final date the first few days of October  in the Netherlands, Utrect to be exact. This is the first event in the series, and I’m excited to go back to New York City for the event. You can register here and come see some amazing speakers on Oct 1-2, 2025.

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The lineup is small and short, but it’s a one pre-con day with two half-day sessions and then a one full day of hour long sessions. The pre-cons include Fabric, leadership, performance tuning and more. All from industry experts. The regular sessions are across four tracks with a variety of things you can learn during the 5 time slots throughout the day.

There is also a Redgate Summit on Friday. That’s got Redgate specific content, but if you’re interested (or a customer), stay an extra day for that as well.

If you’re near Dallas, or can convince your boss to send you, register today and join us on tour. The larger main event is still in Seattle, and if you prefer that, come for a full week in November.

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Sample Data with GenAI in Seconds

Posted on July 14, 2025 by way0utwest

A friend was asking for help with some data analysis. This was in PowerBI, and the source data was PII. I asked them to mask the data for me to work with but realized that’s a chore. I could mock it myself with AI.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

The Process

I started by building a table. It’s what I often do to solve problems. I could have asked the AI, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted and across 5 minutes or so I was thinking about the problem and what data was needed.

This is a subset. The original table and model had many more columns, but after thinking for a couple of minutes, I realized these would let me model the report someone wanted. At least enough to see if the requirements might be correct and the code work or not work.

CREATE TABLE MarketData
( UserID INT
, ContactDate DATETIME
, ContactType VARCHAR(10)
, ContactDesc VARCHAR(30)
)
GO

Once I had the code, I jumped over to Claude to give this a try. You can see the prompt below, but it was this: I need sample data for this schema. Duplicate some customerIDs across various dates, and duplicate contacttype for each customer (from 1 to 5), but randomly mix these in across dates. Not every customer needs every contact type. Make this for 10 customers across two years

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I could then move on to another task, since I was getting going in the am and answering emails around this task. As it generated, I realized this wasn’t quite what I needed. So I addd this prompt.

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I got a bunch of data.

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This wasn’t perfect, and I actually went back and asked for more users with only a “1” and got the data altered.

I could have done this, but I’ve also found myself sometimes spending as much time mocking an environment as I did writing a query to solve a problem. I can use this to answer questions on SQL Server Central and even quickly strip code out of poorly asked questions.

It’s amazing. Don’t be afraid of AI. Give it a try. Keep trying. If it fails after a few prompts, just do the work you’re do, but go back and try again later.

I’ve got a video walkthrough of this below.

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The PASS Summit on Tour in Dallas

Posted on July 9, 2025 by way0utwest

The PASS Summit goes on tour this year, with a September stop in Dallas. This is the first event in the series, and I’m excited to go back to New York City for the event. You can register here and come see some amazing speakers on Sep 15-16, 2025.

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The lineup is small and short, but it’s a one pre-con day with two half-day sessions and then a one full day of hour long sessions. The pre-cons include Fabric, leadership, performance tuning and more. All from industry experts. The regular sessions are across four tracks with a variety of things you can learn during the 5 time slots throughout the day.

There is also a Redgate Summit in Dallas on Wednesday. That’s got Redgate specific content, but if you’re interested (or a customer), stay an extra day for that as well.

If you’re near Dallas, or can convince your boss to send you, register today and join us on tour. The larger main event is still in Seattle, and if you prefer that, come for a full week in November.

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