Back in person again! It is awesome to be able to get back into the SQL community and see fellow data professionals. A huge shout out to the Memphis data community leaders in particular Zach Golden and Rob Demotsis who put on a great event for their first one out of the pandemic. I was also able to get together with fellow 3Clouders – Dawn Clement and Kristyna Hughes.
A new but different opportunity
For me this was a very special event. Not only is it the first event I’ve been able to do in person since COVID started, but it is also the first event that I have presented at since being diagnosed with ALS. There are times I think I talk about this too much, but it is front and center of who I am now. I want to encourage others who have similar disabilities to remain active as they work in their new reality.
So how did this change for me? Well, having presented on SQL many times through the years, I typically use a method of highlighting code in management studio and executing it. That however would not work in this case. I moved all my code over to a notebook in Azure Data Studio. This allowed me to execute the code a step at a time with a simple button push. To read more about the experience of creating a notebook, check out my previous blog post here.
The other key thing that changed for me was having my wife, Sheila, join me on the platform to push the buttons that I needed for the presentation and the demo. This was definitely a new experience for her and me. She did a great job following my cues and sometimes a lack thereof. She was able to get us through the demos and leveraging the clever new notebook I used. This is the new normal for us and I look forward to presenting for as long as I am able.
Azure SQL Elasticity
This was the topic that I spoke on. We covered elastic queries, elastic jobs, and elastic transactions. As promised to the attendees and those of you who are reading this or are following up on my post about notebooks, I have published the notebook on the Data on Wheels GitHub which you can find here.
After you have downloaded the folders from GitHub, Open Azure Data Studio and browse to the Notebooks section. Click the Open Jupyter Book button has shown below.
This will open a File Explorer dialog. Choose azure SQL database elasticity folder and then click Select Jupyter Book.
This will open the Jupyter book which contains the markdown files with information and the notebooks you need to set up and run the demos. Enjoy!
Thanks to those of you who are able to attend. I hope you enjoyed the event as much as I did!