RunAs Radio

Your company is sold on the idea of data analytics, but is it ready for it? Richard talks to Jen Stirrup about her experiences getting organizations started with data analytics, which means really focusing on the quality of the data that a company is collecting. Jen discusses her process of figuring out how data is collected, how often it needs to be corrected and how much gets missed and stays incorrect inside the data stores. The conversation also explores the other locations of important data for analysis like weblogs. As Jen says, some data problems are business puzzles and some are business mysteries - and it takes different tools and techniques to answer them!

Desired State Configuration now works boths ways! Richard talks to fellow Canadian Nik Charlebois, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, about his work building ReverseDSC. The open source tool is available in the PowerShell Gallery and opens the door to a ton of interesting possibilities. Nik talks about how his work as a PFE is made much easier when he can use ReverseDSC to create a copy of the configuration of a system he is trying to troubleshoot so that he can explore and experiment with no risk. But there's so much more that ReverseDSC can do, especially when you start thinking about continuously deployed infrastructure - creation, deployment, testing and debugging of infrastructure all facilitated by ReverseDSC!

How do you make your work visible to your team, your division, your entire organization? Richard talks to Dominica DeGrandis about her book 'Making Work Visible' and the challenges that IT folks have showing workloads and flow. The discussion turns to the Kanban board, both digital and physical. Dominica talks about methods for identifying work items, showing them flow and making it easy for everyone to see the huge scope of work the average IT team handles.

Office macros need security? Yes! Richard chats with Karim El-Melhaoui about the issues around Office macros. With default settings, VBA macros in the Office suite are incredibly powerful and are an effective malware vector. While Microsoft has some built-in capabilities to warn users about enabling macros, modern malware makers have been socially engineering users to bypass those protections. You can go heavy handed and disable macros with group policy, but what if you need them? Karim talks about some of the latest features coming in the Windows 10 Creators Update to provide more granular security for Office macros. But maybe it's time to move away from them entirely?

Data analytics has evolved - have you kept up? Richard chats with Andrew Brust about the revolution taking place in data analytics in general and Microsoft efforts in the space specifically. Andrew talks about how tools like SQL Server OLAP Services renamed to become Analytics Services, and then moved into the cloud. Not that you need to be in the cloud to do analytics - there are plenty of on-premises tools as well, but it sure does help to be in the cloud. Data analytics workloads are very bursty and well suited to the utility computing offered by the cloud. Lots of links in the show notes, check them out!

Can SQL Server be part of a DevOps practice? It has to be! While at Connect in New York, Richard sat down with Michael Upton to discuss the role of SQL Server in the DevOps practice and the tooling that can make your life easier. The conversation digs into the hard bit - not destroying data. Michael works at Red Gate, who have been building SQL Server data management tools for decades. And they know you can't afford to lose data, so the process of updating has to be done carefully. It can be done, and the effort is worth it - your database can also continuously deploy!

Service Fabric is not just for Azure! While at Connect in New York, Richard sat down with Mikkel Mork Hegnhoj to talk about what Service Fabric can do for your applications. Mikkel talks about the ability to host both Windows and Ubuntu VMs in Service Fabric, on Azure and on-premises. Think of Service Fabric as software to facilitate the architecture of cloud as much as the product - you can configure failover rules, scaling settings and more. And it will run on pretty much anything!

Have you looked into CosmosDB? While at Connect in New York, Richard sat down with Kirill Gavrylyuk of the CosmosDB team to talk about the latest features. CosmosDB an update to Azure DocumentDB that focuses on global distribution and ultra-high performance. On top of that, CosmosDB has different API layers you can call through, including MongoDB and now the Apache Cassandra API. Kirill talks about being a drop-in replacement for these existing data stores, typically when confronted with an application that needs to scale substantially. And you only pay for what you use!

How do you do your business intelligence? While at DevIntersection in Las Vegas, Richard sat down with Jason Himmelstein to talk about PowerBI, the latest reporting and analytics tool from Microsoft. Jason talks about how PowerBI fits into Azure and Office365, but today there is also the PowerBI Reporting Server, which is an advanced version of SQL Server Reporting Services that runs on-premises. This leads to a discussion about how you build a hybrid reporting solution between the cloud and your own data services. Lots of good thinking around business intelligence!

Fall in Vegas - time for a SQL Server Questions and Answer panel! Richard hosts a panel of Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Aaron Bertrand, Jes Borland, David Pless and Tim Radney to answer the questions that the SQL Intersection attendees have. The conversation ranges over SQL 2017, containers, partitioning, mirroring and what the modern DBA will be doing in the future. SQL continues to evolve and there's a lot to explore!