Data Driven

PASS 2018 is this week in Seattle, Washington. Andy is on site and he even has a booth for Enterprise DNA! Rumor has it that there’s even a Data Driven logo on the booth! We are also excited to have Timothy McAliley as our very first “roving reporter” covering events and happenings all around the conference. Be sure to like us on Facebook to stay up to date and have access to all the bloopers we make while recording DataPoints!

Hurricane Florence hit the US East Coast nearly seven weeks ago, yet the cleanup is on going and many people’s lives are still not back to normal. In this DataPoint, Andy talks about the importance to remembering that there are people behind the statistics and data we gather. Frank’s Thoughts: What prompted me to think about this was how in the first few years after 9/11, I had shared my photos of the event with a researcher at NIST. In email exchange, I remember explaining to him that I would send him more data after I attended “another memorial service, third one this week.” He wrote back snarkily, “you know a lot of dead people.” To which I replied, “I knew a lot of people in the Towers.” He wrote back quickly, apologizing how his excitement for data collection got the better of him and he never really thought about the people who died and that he’s not just researching a fire, but a mass murder. That interchange stuck with me and, as I saw parallels between our excitement about “Andy Weather,” I thought it would be a teachable moment.It also helped that he was down in NC to volunteer to help the people whose lives have been upended by the storm. Andy’s Thoughts: Frank is spot on. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the numbers and forget that the numbers represent lives. Hurricanes are massive storms. The damage they cause takes months and years to fix. Some of the damage – like lives lost or permanently altered – is irreversible. That’s easy to overlook in some moments and – often – requires a paradigm shift in thinking for data driven people (like me). We should strive to help others at every opportunity – especially those recovering from disasters – because we are the only “us” we’ve got. It’s data. But it’s not just data.  

In his session from Azure Data Fest Reston 2018, Frank explores reinforcement learning.  As an added bonus, Andy (who’s holding the camera) chimes in now and then.

In this keynote session from Azure Data Fest 2018 Reston, Data Driven’s very own Andy Leonard discusses and demonstrates migrating SSIS to Azure Data Factory Integration Runtime.

In this keynote from the Azure Data Fest 2018 in Reston, Mark Brown dives deep into Microsoft Azure’s globally distributed database, Cosmos DB. He covers concepts then dive into specific features and capabilities that make this database the key to building global applications and services in the cloud.

In this keynote from the Azure Data Fest 2018 in Reston, Tim McAliley and Devin Jaswal explore the data services available in Azure.

In this Data Point, Frank and Andy talk about reinforcement learning, Mario Brothers, and then get sidetracked. Then Joel Cochran stops by and they really get sidetracked.

In this episode, Frank and Andy talk with Rie Irish about her path from sociology to database administration, women in technology, and getting people to walk around in circles.

We love experimenting around here and examining the resulting data. After all, we are Data Driven: not just in name but also in spirit. In this webinar Andy recorded, he also streamed it live on our Facebook page. We thought it was good enough to share with our larger audience here. Let us know what you think. Both Frank and Andy have been recording/streaming their live events and we’re curious to hear what you have to say about this innovation in how we podcast.

Andy is at SQL Saturday Boston and he runs into another Andy from SentryOne.