Voice of the DBA

Tag: Microsoft

  • Announcing the Azure Data Community from Microsoft

    You can see an announcement from Buck Woody (b | t) of Microsoft on Data Exposed. Essentially, Microsoft is providing a number of free resources to help local user groups with their meetings. This is a fantastic way to support the various groups around the world that might not have infrastructure setup after the PASS organization failed.

    The offering from Microsoft includes:

    Community-owned, Microsoft-Empowered is the tagline, and I think that’s a good way to approach things. Microsoft is supporting groups, but not forcing them to run in any particular way. I believe they may ask that some portion of your topics are focused on the Microsoft Data Platform, but you are free to include other data related topics for your members.

    If you are a user group leader, check this out. If you’re a member of a user group, and you think this might help, pass this along to your leadership team.

  • The Pace of Data Platform Change

    I was watching Vicky Harp in the 2020 October GroupBy conference recently talking about her challenges of working with the SQL Server platform as it’s grown. It’s a good keynote, with Vicky noting that she started with SQL Server 2000 and the journey to today is incredible. There’s a great view of her world at the 10:00 mark (after the start).

    She had this quote, which I found really thoughtful. This is something I think is true and something that many of us don’t like.

    “Usually growth comes at the expense of the previous comfort of safety.” – Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning.

    What’s your response? Run, fight? Embrace change? Resist doing anything different? I think many of us want to think that we easily embrace change, but think about the last time someone wanted to change something at work? Reorg, new protocol, etc. Did you resist and think it was silly or go along and give it a chance? For many people, it’s the former.

    To be fair, it is for me as well, and I think many people that have some success in their career often want to stick with the things they are experienced in. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it is worth investigating and embracing some new things, just to see if they might be better.

    The data platform is certainly one of those technologies in my life that has changed dramatically, and the pace is sometimes overwhelming. At this point, it’s hard to keep up, and hard to understand sometimes if new tech is better or worse. I’ve started to try and assume there is some good reason why Microsoft makes some changes, and then experiment, test, and evaluate the tech.

    Not just once when something is released or I encounter it, but by also watching what others do and then learning where they’ve had success or failure. ADF is one of those areas where I initially dismissed it as a poor port of SSIS, but I’ve come to appreciate some of the ways in which this is an improvement to many flows, especially with hybrid workflows.

    The data platform is an exciting place to work these days, and I hope you embrace some of the changes and see where a new technology might improve your environment. Of course, lots of traditional features out there work very well, and it’s not worth changing just to change. Make sure there is value and an improvement in some way, beyond you just enjoying working with something shiny and new.

    Steve Jones

    Note: Podcasts are suspended for a week as I deal with the PASS Summit.

  • The App Compatibility Promise

    I was listening to one of the Ignite keynotes, and I heard an executive say something about “if your app doesn’t work, we’ll help you fix it at no additional cost, or fix Windows.” I had stop and rewind and check, and then go look around. Sure enough, there is an App Assure promise for Windows 10 and apps.

    This isn’t just for commercial software, but it lists custom line-of-business apps, third party apps, and more. Now, this doesn’t appear to be for everyone. The eligibility for at last the FastTrack portion of this is 150 or more licenses of Windows, Office, etc. However, it is a guarantee that they will help you.

    There’s also a note that there isn’t a requirement for ISVs building Windows 10 apps. To me, that means there’s no good reason why more companies don’t take advantage of it. I do think, however, that there’s a missing component here.

    Big parts of the Ignite keynotes, and in Microsoft’s marketing and messaging, is about data. That should mean that SQL Server and CosmosDB ought to be included in this promise. If there are regressions or bad plans, I’d hope that Microsoft would help them fix things. Or maybe promise that the compatibility mode would insulate apps.

    I know that execution plans regress, sometimes on the same version, and guaranteeing performance or a plan across versions isn’t likely possible. However, I do think that Microsoft could provide more guarantees, perhaps with some caveats that if they need you to change code you will.

    We all know that we need to test, test, test to ensure we aren’t introducing regressions or other issues. This isn’t a panacea, but it also isn’t a project. It’s an ongoing part of building any software, including database software. Many of us do this, but it becomes harder and more complex for ISVs that often deal with many versions. However, we pay lots of money, and I’d expect that they at least are supporting patches to existing software. I think that’s part of an informal contract that they ought to believe in.

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Build Book of News

    Every year Microsoft has held the Build conference for developers. I’ve been lucky enough to go a few times, and I was hoping to get the chance to attend again. With the pandemic, the entire event went virtual, and was held across 48 continuous hours. I was slightly disappointed as a few sessions I wanted to see were early in the morning or late at night, but I am sure most of these will be available on demand later, so I can watch them if I wish.

    One of the things Microsoft has done is produce a Build Book of News, a 55 page PDF book of all their announcements and changes. You can download it from Paul Andrew’s blog, or you can look at the announcements online at Microsoft News.

    I randomly watched Build on and off this past week, having some of the sessions in the background while doing other things. There certainly were some interesting sections, though not a lot of data platform focus, but I found a few items that you might like.

    We’re all remote now, or the majority of us are, and I can see that remote tools are
    important. I know there has been some remote code work in Visual Studio in the past, but I didn’t think many people would use it. Now in watching some of the remote code demos, I think these tools might be interesting, especially when a few people are trying to debug a crisis situation. Being able to see the code on my own machine, and seeing what others might change or think is a better (or worse) solution could be very helpful.

    The mobile GitHub tools for review are getting better, and that’s good. Since it’s likely more of us might be in different locations, on different schedules, the ability to approve a PR could prove really helpful. Codespaces are especially interesting. Maybe not so much for databases, but maybe. I wonder if we could easily get data provisioning in here.

    Azure CosmosDB is still something I want to play with, though I’ve been hesitant to set up a db because of cost. Serverless CosmosDB might get me to try something. I have no real excuse since they’re an emulator, so maybe not. I wonder how many of you might try CosmosDB out. There are also announcements about PostgreSQL and MySQL on as PaaS services getting feature parity with SQL Server in many ways.

    Lots of Synapse changes, which might be of interest to those of you with larger warehouses and looking to take advantage of the cloud offering. Quite a few AI changes as well, with Bots, speech, ML, and more. I especially liked the keynote on AI, which I think was interesting. It provides some vision of what could be possible.

    Tons of developer sessions, and I’d suggest that you browse or search the sessions to see what interests you. There aren’t a ton on demand as I write this, but likely more will appear this coming week. I hope the Cloud Skills Challenge will also remain up there, as I’d like to spend some time experimenting with services. If you haven’t worked with the Azure services, I might give that a try and get a feel for what’s possible.

    Build is always interesting, and I’m not sure if I love this virtual format, but I’m glad the event was still available and once again I’m impressed with all the work Microsoft is doing to help developers build solutions.

    Steve Jones