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!

Never heard of ScriptDOM? Neither had we…okay, except Kevin, who obviously knows all. Apparently, the documentation is scarce. Mala Mahadevan uses it, loves it, and graciously offered to come back to the podcast to educate us and our listeners on a product that can help us parse, process and format our SQL queries. 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!

Explore the rookie mistakes IT pros make in visualization design, transitioning from Excel to Power BI, understanding color vision deficiency, importance of visual indicators, understanding different audiences in design, and upcoming conferences.