We're kicking off Season 7 with containers!

Spinning up a VM may not be such a big deal anymore; however, most of us still have to request from another group one and wait. Even waiting on an Azure VM can be somewhat painful. Wouldn't it be nice to forget about setting up another development environment just to test something that isn't going to stick around?

Our guest today is Chuck Bryan, and he talks to us about how he is using containers to support his environments and the flexibility it provides to him in his development.

While the Linux containers used to get lots of love, there haven't been too many feature updates lately as much of the focus is on azure services. What is cool to me is there are tools out there that can help us folks running windows get up and running without having to wait on our infrastructure to upgrade to Windows server 2016--or have Azure spend.

Chuck gives us some insights on how he got started with containers. We discuss what environments might benefit from them--and which ones won't. He also gives us a couple of tips on the best places to get started.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 266: Working With Containers. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Compañeros! In May, SQL Data Partners was acquired by Marathon Consulting.  There were many moving parts to get this done and we are excited to finally bring this news to the podcast.  In this episode we introduce the principles of Marathon Consulting, and we discuss the future of the podcast.  Make sure your speakers are adjusted properly when you listen to this episode.  If you have any questions or comments, please let us know via LinkedIn—we always look forward to hearing from you.

 The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 265: WHY and What's Next. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

A backup is only helpful when you can restore the backup. This should not prove to be overly shocking; however, normally we get the satisfaction of taking a backup and feel like all is well. Ideally, we should be testing our backups on some cadence—and it should be more frequent than the annual disaster recovery test. In this episode of the SQL Data Partners Podcast we talk with Chris Marshall, owner of Verified Backups, about how he has solved this problem and how it can benefit your organization. We discuss some of the requirements you’ll need to address in your own testing, and we give some parameters for who might be a good candidate for the service Chris and his team provide.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/04/12/episode-264-verified-backups. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

When we couldn’t confirm a guest speaker by recording time, Eugene, Kevin, Amanda, and I decided the show must go on, so we went into the ideas vault and pulled out a couple of listener questions we hadn’t answered.  In this episode, we talk about how to create your own documentation, SSMS installs, SOS_Scheduler_Yield and Eugene gives us an update on SQL Bits and the conference crud he picked up along the way.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/29/episode-263-sql-server-this-n-that. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Learning new technology can be difficult—especially when it’s a technology in an area you are not familiar with.  In this episode, Eugene walks us through some of the challenges he has faced getting started with Azure Synapse.  We hope that this episode might be helpful to those trying to learn new features.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/15/episode-262-learning-azure-synapse-pt-1. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

It would appear Microsoft has run out of words to use for new features/products, so they are just going to recycle existing words for a bit of fun at our expense.  In this episode we explore the Azure Data Lakehouse—which is not a data lake, nor a traditional data warehouse and Books Online (BOL) refers to it as Databricks Lakehouse.  Luke Moloney walks us through how combining the flexibility of data lake storage with some ACID transaction and data governance gives organizations looking to analyze their data a new option.  The hope is the cost to build, store, and analyze data will be easier and more approachable for organizations who don’t want to go with the traditional data warehouse model.  This still feels like an Enterprise feature to me but let me know if your organization would be interested in this approach.  As always, special thanks to Luke and the folks at Microsoft for making themselves available to us.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/01/episode-261-the-data-lakehouse. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

We’re back with another SQL Server 2022 feature—Contained Availability Groups.  Have you ever failed over to a secondary node and then found a job or login missing?  This new Enterprise-only feature aims to solve this problem by ‘containing’ all the objects—master, msdb, AND the availability database all in one group so you can manage everything you need when you have to fail over.  Brandon Leach returns after more than 200 episodes to give us the lowdown on this new feature and walk us through where you should start planning your upgrade.

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/02/15/episode-260-contained-availability-groups. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

We kick off the new year discussing a new feature in SQL Server 2022 called Transact-SQL snapshot backups. Good luck with the Google search on this feature--we know we had fun. 😊 These are not the snapshot backups you were frustrated with in 2005. We talk a little bit about who will be interested in this feature and what scenarios it will come in handy. The hardware vendors seem particularly excited about this future as they can now introduce snapshots without needing a third-party application like Veeam to do that for them. We predict more collaboration between the database administrator and the hardware administrator with this feature. We also get a couple of use case scenarios from the community that we share in this episode. Are you looking forward to using snapshots more effectively in your environment? Please let us know your thoughts!

The show notes and video for this episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/01/18/episode-259-t-sql-snapshot-backups/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

As we close out the year, we take a look back and think about all those SQL Server 2022 episodes we didn’t record this year—and then make the goal to increase this count in the new year. 😊 We discuss some of the Cardinality Estimation changes in this version and the scenarios in which this may affect other features. I ask Kevin and Eugene what technologies they will be focusing on in the year ahead and how many books Kevin is going to try and write. From all of us at SQL Data Partners, we wish you and yours a Happy New Year!

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2022/12/28/episode-258-leave-2022-enter-2023. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Have you ever thought about working for yourself? It can be very enticing for some, and in this episode, we talk with John Sterrett about the pros and cons of running your own organization. We tackle some of the reasons you might get started and we share some of our experiences of working in our own organizations. Each person’s journey is going to be different and as hard as it will be, you need to ensure you don’t allow others success or failure to overly influence your decisions. As the work environment has shifted in the last two years, it may that be some of the previous ‘whys’ no longer apply. If you have thoughts around this, let us know!!

The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2022/11/30/episode-257-the-business-of-working-for-yourself. Have fun on the SQL Trail!