What kinds of problems are organizations solving with Machine Learning? In this episode, we explore a situation where a public works department was looking for more accurate information to predict future water levels based on rainfall to maintain water tank storage for balancing pressure and to prevent overflow flooding. Marathon data solutions consultants Brian Knox and Andy Yao, built a custom machine learning model and made the results available through Power BI reporting. We talk through some of the data hurdles the project presented, the tools they used, and how their work provided results the client could rely on. We touch on Azure ML environment and future integrations that will come with Power BI and ML. 

Have you done any work in ML or predictive modeling? Did you get any good take-aways from today's podcast? Leave us some love ❤️ on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, or Instagram. 

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 275: Machine Learning and Power BI. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

After discussing the Capabilities Maturity Model in our last episode, it was fate when Andy Levy reached out and suggested a topic which sounds like a case study about his experience with CMM. As the only data professional in his organization at the time of his hiring, Andy went from fixing problems to slowing increasing his role in the organization and participating in the planning meetings—being in the room where decisions are made and change happens. We think this episode will be an interesting perspective for those who might be on the fence about the model, and looking for ways to increase their own visibility in an organization.

Let us know what you think! What do you think of CMM? Did you get any good take-aways from today's podcast? Leave us some love ❤️ on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, or Instagram. 

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 274: A CMM Case Study. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Have you ever felt stuck in a rut, repeating the same tasks, while knowing there is room for improvement? The Capability Maturity Model may be a way for you to start contributing to those improvements. In this podcast episode, Kevin Kline from SolarWinds walks us through how we might go from simply dealing with issues as they come, to being a contributor in decisions about the future of our organization.

Listen in and learn about the levels of CMM, how they relate to those of us in data professions, and how you can apply the methodologies to become a leader who drives positive change, while doing what you love.

Let us know what you think! What CMM level are you in presently? Did you get any good take-aways from today's podcast? Leave us some love ❤️ on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, or Instagram. 

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 273: The Capability Maturity Model for Data Professionals. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Do you find yourself repeating the same actions when pulling SQL Server performance metrics? 

Performance tuning a troublesome SQL Server can be a challenge. Luckily the community continues to produce wonderful folks like Erik Darling who contribute their knowledge to make your life a bit easier. In this episode of the SQL Data Partners podcast, we sit down with Erik and discuss the scripts he built to gather performance metrics. While every potential issue is not captured in these scripts, they'll help you start gathering information so you can decide on the next step to take.

Get the scripts

Have you used Erik’s scripts before? Let us know!

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 272: Performance Tuning Scripts. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

This past November, Eugene and I attended the 2023 PASS Data Community Summit (aka PASS Summit) in Seattle, while Kevin headed down to Orlando for the Microsoft Live! 360 event in Orlando. Having no remote option this year was fine for us, as it was great to reconnect with our friends and colleagues in the data community, as well as get updates live and in-person from Microsoft on all the new features rolling out. The focus of both conferences was eerily similar and in this episode we discuss our experiences along with a picture of what 2024 will look like. Azure services continue to be a focus and Fabric is included in that space; however, I was surprised at the number of Postgres sessions. In fact, PostGres got a whopping 30 minutes out the 90-minute Microsoft keynote.

AI continued to be peppered in the conversation and Kevin gives us his take on where some of this is going. As a side reference, if you are interested in learning more about large language models, check out this video by Andrej Karpathy.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 271: PASS Summit 2023 Wrap-Up. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

Moving up the ranks in the holy technology wars is the medallion architecture, and boy are we interested in getting your thoughts. Not since the 2008 Olympics and Michael Phelps' tenth of a second win over Milorad Cavic has there been so much controversy around bronze, silver, and gold.

This episode of the podcast has a genesis with Databricks and the methodology of getting data into a workable form for all the reporting pieces businesses love so much. We discuss our thoughts on the various layers of a medallion architecture and the implementation in Azure delta lake environments.

Have a different take? Let us know!

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 270: Medallion Architecture. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

In this Episode, Carlos talks about managed services and shares some of the benefits of working with an MSP, as well as potential cons. 

The term manage services refers to the practice of outsourcing business administration or management responsibilities to the third party. Why would you ever want to outsource these pieces?

Listen in to learn more and see if hiring an MSP would be a good decision for your company.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 269: Why Do I Need a Managed Service Provider? Have fun on the SQL Trail!

We love hearing from our listeners!!! In this episode, a long-time listener asked about the future of AI in the data platform space. We thought this was a very interesting topic as Microsoft has been including Artificial Intelligence or AI in more and more of its marketing material. In this episode we'll dive into the definition of AI, what features are currently available, how we can leverage those technologies, and where we think this might go in the future. One of the challenges we currently face is all the buzz and excitement around AI. From a data platform vantage point, we started with analytics and training models to analyze the data. Microsoft has suddenly slapped Artificial Intelligence on some of the feature sets and confuses the issue a bit.

We are excited to have Mike Chrestensen from Duke Health as our episode guest to help us sort it all out. Mike has begun leveraging AI in his work and I think he gives some interesting thoughts on how he has used it to help his team go faster. We hope you enjoy the episode. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 268: AI and the Future of the DBA. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

All your data, all your teams—in one place. What am I? If you said Microsoft Fabric, you win! When I interned with Cisco Systems in 2000, I supported a platform called Unified Messaging. At that time, we were talking about getting your email, voice mail, and faxes all in one place. My, how the times have changed.

To a certain extent, the Microsoft Fabric is an extension, or wrapper, of some of the tools we have talked about in other episodes. The central idea is the ability to store your information in a data lake, and then having multiple tools at your disposal to use that data as required by the business. Power BI is the cherry on top - providing the visualizations and access to the source data that the business users like to get their hands on.

In this episode we talk through the architecture and then discuss when organizations might want to adopt Microsoft Fabric. Would you like to hear more about this in a future episode? Let us know and we’ll look to circle back with long time friend of the podcast Jonathan Stewart.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 267: Microsoft Fabric. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

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!