Azure SQL May 2021 New Updates | Data Exposed Live

[Music] hi i'm anna hoffman and welcome to data exposed live we are super excited to have you all here today and we have an exciting roundup of guests to bring you the latest azure sql news um as always we are streaming on learn tv as well as other platforms so if you have any questions feel free to put them in the chat wherever you're streaming from but we recommend going to learn tv this is our 24 hour uh types of news channel bringing the latest anything related to microsoft so you can learn um that way now today we are doing our live news update for may 2021 and you can see we have some great guests on the show today all i think with or almost all of them with demos and i have some demos and we've got a lot of news uh as you may have noticed we move at the speed of the cloud so we're always updating always innovating always blogging which sometimes makes it hard to keep up and this episode is really meant to help you stay up to date and find out what you want to uh learn more about uh as always anything you see today will be published or should be published now uh in the news update blog that should have gone live just when we went live with the show so you can always get all the references today all the links that are mentioned are going to be summarized in that blog post now without further ado i want to go ahead and get started talking about some product updates now i don't have a ton of big product updates for today i really have two and then we're going to bring on a special guest to talk about some of the other ones uh but the first product update is for azure sql manage instance and this update is around service aided subnet configuration and this is going to now allow users and customers to make use of service tags for user defined routes now what this is basically going to do is basically add it add you the ability to add network subnet delegation to certain service tags so for example if you wanted to have in-bound and outbound access to a storage account you could instead use the storage account.west us or it's some nomenclature like that which allows you to just enable those as opposed to going in and having to add every single viral rule or all the different connectivities to that virtual network uh so this is a big one um this is one that's been asked for a lot by customers so definitely one i recommend you checking out um now the next one came into uh public preview this was the announcement of geo replication for azure sql database hyperscale now just a brief recap azure sql database hyperscale is only available in azure sql database not in azure sql managed instance uh before the hyper scale tier we had both the uh we had general purpose and business critical now this hyperscale tier is really interesting because we essentially re-architected sql server to be a cloud-native solution so this means uh we can scale up to a hundred terabytes and in theory that's just a number there's nothing stopping us no hardware limitations stop us from going higher than that um all that being said we've still been working on and adding all of the features that you get in azure sql database today so this geo-replication capability is just one more reason or one more way we're kind of closing the parity gap between the hyperscale service tier and the other service tiers and i wanted to take a look and see how easy this actually was and if it really compared uh to geo replication in the other service tiers so i just have this this quick demo i wanted to show you all so this is an application i have it's a fitness tracking app uh maybe you've seen me demo it before it was a while ago but uh basically this is a hyperscale database and you can see it's currently you know almost 13 terabytes in size and so this is above any limit that any other deployment option or service tier of azure sql platform as a service can handle uh so that's something to keep in mind um now what i wanted to show you is down on the left you can see in preview we now have this geo replication tab so if we click into geo replication um what you're going to see when this loads is a list of all the different regions that i could replicate this database to you can also see that i've gone ahead and created another server fit app server 2 and replicated this database to south central us now this becomes a readable secondary and you know i could add other ones if i wanted here we're still working on some of the things and that's why this is in public preview but you can go ahead and try this out today one thing to keep in mind is that the initial uh you know seeding of this secondary database is a size of data operation so it did take some time to move this 13 terabyte database uh and replicate it over bring the data over but something cool to check out and learn more about this is in public preview and again there'll be more information on what exactly is and is not included in this preview for geo replication now this next announcement is actually pretty exciting i'm going to bring up uh alexandra who is a program manager on the azure sql team um alexandra thanks so much uh for joining us today i believe you're gonna talk about oracle migrations and really i'm just gonna pass it over to you and learn awesome anna thank you very much first of all thanks for having me i'm a program manager in azure data i'm looking over heterogeneous database migration basically i'm looking over sql server migration assistant in the sql server or under the sql server migration assisted umbrella we have actually five tools helping customers modernize their database workloads from db2 oracle mysql cybase and access to azure sql and sql on prem well the tool has a little bit of uh background on the market it has been there for the last three years at least and we have invested a lot in developing new feature but we've just released version 8.19 and what's really cool and new about this release is that we have enabled a new feature before going deeper into the details and what we have done for the tester in ssma i just want to let you know that we have documented all the changes all the small improvements all the system columns that we have enabled in our ssma what's new article so anna has on her blog the links for each and every tool documenting everything that we've changed in each and every release and now let's go to the coolest part of this release which is the ssma tester the tester itself has been on the market for a while but it had two major limitations one was related to the fact that it was available just for sql on-prem targets and the second one was related to the fact that you had to deploy some extensions back on the sql side in order to run the validation well with 8.19 we removed all of those blockers so now the tester is available for azure sql db and sql mi and also you don't need to install any extension pack all the logic behind has been moved on the client side so what can you actually test and why do we call it tester it's basically a component that you can use a post migration to see if the data matches if the data is identical at table level store procedure level function level view and also standalone statement level so you have a lot of flexibility in configuring your test cases and we cover all major objects how do we actually validate what is the validation criteria that we are looking at well we are not just looking at the data value itself that's the basic part that we do for tables we are also looking at the parameter values we are looking at the result set if you have a stored procedure or if you have a function that you would like to execute we look at the values of those parameters as well as the output of the result set but what if a stored procedure would actually change data on your table well we've got that covered for you as well if you wanna execute a stored procedure or validate a function that actually changes data in your table within the tester you can use the backup functionality to backup your table or tables before executing or confirming the validation scenario this will guarantee that post validation you will be able to restore the previous state of your table and since i think a picture is more important than words i'm just going to walk you through a very basic test case that you can configure so for people who haven't seen the tool before this is sql server migration assistant interface i'm running the oracle to sql version and we've just today we're just gonna look at the tester tab here right now i'm connected to an azure sql db so i'm not cheating i'm not connecting to sql on prem and i haven't installed any extension pack so what do we need to do first we need to create a test case well the first thing you need to do is provide the name for your test key so i'm just gonna say uh live demo hope it works well go so that's that's my test case now i'm just gonna have to choose the objects that i want to validate today i'm just gonna look at the tables but in the following weeks we are gonna release an episode that would walk you through the entire process of validating functions procedures and also backing up and restore your tables so stay tuned for that for today i'm just going to choose the countries table i'm going to choose next here i don't have any affiliated objects it's just a simple table i don't have any uh other dependent objects for this table and the next step it's going to be a validation of the object that i've chosen which is hr it's hr schemas country stable just going go for the next steps and once i'm done i'm going to click finish now finish is going to take me to an interface where i see all the test cases it's not run it's just configured you can edit you can remove it you can do whatever you want and you can also invoke previous test cases if you wish to today i'm just gonna run this test case and i'm going to press the run button it requires reconnection to your source and target so here i'm reconnecting to my oracle server and then i'm gonna reconnect to my azure sql db it's always fingers crossed with live demo and i'm very lucky with live demos as well and right now we are doing the validation for table hr countries it's pretty fast it's not a big table and i can also have a look at the report so here in the details i have the table comparison result and i see the results that are fully equal this is a basic this is really a basic test that we can do the tester component itself is much more powerful and stay tuned for the next episode where we are gonna walk you through the procedures and also backup and restore and please download ssma 8.19 and share your feedback with us awesome thanks so much alexandra and i just want to stress like ssma is such a cool tool like i had never seen it before a few weeks ago when we started recording these episodes that alexander's talking about so you're definitely going to want to go check out the references that will be in my blog everything alexandra talked about and then make sure you subscribe to data exposed because we have recorded a bunch of episodes around migration and assessment and seeing some of the cool things that you can do uh with ssma so thanks so much alexandra we're looking forward to releasing your episodes of the future awesome and there's also another cool thing that i forgot to mention is the fact that this reports this validation test cases are stored locally on your disk so if you have other migration projects just copy that folder from one migration project to the other it's that awesome cool well thanks so much again alexandra um always great to have you on the show and we are going to move right along so our next segment uh is kind of something new for data expos we're going to be talking about situs and open source and this is something i really don't know that much about um so i'm gonna bring up uh claire claire thanks so much for joining us today um since we haven't had anyone uh from your team on the show before i would love if you could give us a brief overview about what you do and what your team is i am happy to do that thank you so much for having me here today anna um so i work on the postgres team at microsoft and um specifically on the situs team and on the postgres team we operate a managed service on azure that many of your viewers have probably heard of azure database for postgres and it has a few different deployment options and one of them is hyperscale situs which is based on the situs extension to postgres which is open source i'm showing a screenshot right now of our github repo if after this session any of you are curious want to go see what's going on there's a lot of activity on this repo and i put a short form url on the screen right now aka dot ms slash scitis that you can use to go see what's happening but what sinus does is it distributes your database across multiple nodes that's the claim to fame um and it does that as an extension not a fork and so um when you're using situs when using hyperscale situs you're also using postgres under the covers as well so it's not something that that gets out of date it stays consistent with the latest releases and it's as simple as creating a distributed table and then we don't just distribute your tables across multiple nodes we transform your queries and we distribute the queries across multiple nodes as well so you get all the performance benefits of parallelism now the reason i'm here today is people are pretty excited about the latest zeitus 10 open source release and so this is our release graphic showing on the screen right now we create new graphics for each open source release and of course i love it there's always an elephant because that's of course the mascot for the postgres open source database and there is a blog post online that if after this you want to go read more learn more um it's the definitive post written by the technical lead for the cytus open source project marco slot and i put another one of those short urls on the screen to make it easy to get to but i'm going to quickly in the time i have allowed try to tell you about the four big exciting things that are in the status 10 open source release and the first is that you can now shard postgres you can now use situs on a single node and in the context of azure in the context of hyperscale situs that's referred to as basic tier and it's available in preview right now on azure database for postgres and so what that means is you can use and adopt a distributed data model from the very beginning so that can be useful for um just trying it out right it's just easier to try situs but also if you've got an application that doesn't need the scale of a multiple node cluster but you know you're going to grow to that level um it by adopting the distributed data model from the very beginning you make it so much easier when it's time to scale out later um because then you just add nodes rebalance your shards and um you're off to the races i hope i'm not making that seem too simple obviously data is important and there's a lot of thought that goes into these transitions so like i said it makes it easier to get started and this is a screenshot of the azure portal um in the provisioning workflow for azure database for postgres and you can now see that in preview there's a basic tier option as well as the standard tier and that starts at like 27 cents an hour i think that's a u.s east price um and so it makes it super easy to just try things out for a couple of hours whereas before you would have had to provision multiple nodes and obviously it would have been more than 27 cents an hour it also makes it easier to just try things out with cytus open source so there's a single docker run command that you can now run to just kick the tires and get started with situs and i put a short url on the screen to get to our download page where you can you know download packages and whatever flavor operating system and or get access to the instructions and the single docker run command and then the other big thing that people are excited about is columnar compression now culinary databases have been around for a long time and there are many of them i'm sure most of you are familiar with them but what's new here is the fact that you can now use columnar tables um with postgres with situs open source um and in combination with robase tables as well and we created a new syntax in situs called using columner that you can use to create um columner tables and i'm just putting a screenshot here of a video that jeff davis one of the technical architects for this project he's also a postgres committer um he created and this video is short not so long it's about 14 minutes long and it's on the microsoft developer channel you can find it there on youtube um and he does a really good job giving a demo of this but what i think is interesting is that you can also take your tables or your partitions and convert them from heap to columnar or columnar to heap so you can kind of go back and forth and so if you think about using something like columnar along with postgres native range partitioning you can imagine that over time you might have these older partitions on a table that all get compressed and by compressing using a lot less disk space you're reducing your iops you're improving your performance you're improving your vacuum performance but your newest partition can still be hot it can still get lots of updates it can still be row-based um so people are pretty excited about it and in fact the first day it rolled out we got this comment from a user who said that he shrunk his append only table down from 80 gig to 6 gig and he was just super super excited and this was you know just within hours of posting the blog post so we were we were pretty pleased with that um the fourth thing that i want to flag is that the shard rebalancer which has been part of cytus for a long time and is of course available um in our azure managed postgres service um we open sourced it as well and so people are pretty excited about it and shard rebalancing basically is about making sure that these shards these small postgres tables are balanced properly um across the nodes in your cluster so you can imagine on the left you add a new node it doesn't have any data on it so you need to kind of rebalance things to make your performance um optimal so that's all i've got for you i hope i didn't go too too fast um we do have a monthly technical newsletter um which shares links not just about citis and new blog posts written by our engineers but also about postgres and azure postgres and people seem to really like it we've got about 12 000 subscribers and if this is an area you're interested in aka dot ms slash cydis hyphen newsletter please sign up and enjoy thank you anna awesome thanks so much claire that was really really an awesome session uh i did just want to throw up um one comment we got on twitch is people really think the new logo is pretty cool for the sinus tin release so um hopefully that encourages more people to go check it out uh we don't have an animal logo for azure sql but maybe it's something we should consider well i'm sure our designer isaac will be thrilled to hear that and uh we'll have to wait and see what the the release graphic will be for 10.1 awesome thanks so much claire thank you all right so that was awesome i haven't you know we haven't done a lot of open source stuff so maybe we'll start adding some stuff to the show uh if you guys want to learn more about what we're doing in the realm of open source databases um so now moving right along we're going to talk about blogs and videos as you know if you try to keep up with any of our blogs there's about you know eighteen thousand of them i'm exaggerating there's about five or six blogs and we're always posting different updates different tips and tricks uh so i just like to take some time to go through some of them show you some things i learned i actually go through and read all of them and try to figure out uh what you all might be interested in so yeah let's start with the azure blog and i do want to say that i only pull a selection from here because there are a lot of blogs that go up on the azure all-up blog that aren't necessarily uh relevant to a data person um so with that being said these are the few that i thought were interesting uh the first is the azure cost management and billing updates uh this isn't explicitly related to azure data but i found it really interesting because basically it's gonna give you real examples of how azure is constantly working to improve not only your experience when it comes to reviewing costs but also how we're we're kind of doing everything that we can to save costs and help you only pay for what you actually need and use so it's pretty cool maybe counter-intuitive to what you think uh something like azure would do but really we want you to save costs uh so that you stay with us and that you're happy and that sort of thing so that's a great one to check out just to see how much we're investing as a platform and an organization and a company into helping you manage your costs uh the next thing i wanted to mention is these new vm series that came out in preview now again this is going to be relevant potentially to customers using sql server in azure vm or if you're just using azure vms for other things uh some of these new vms are really going to were announced as part of the upcoming preview of azure confidential computing um so you're going to want to check into these uh some of them are mid-sized vms for memory intensive operations um and then the other one is for business critical applications uh so for things like in-memory analytics and that sort of thing so maybe not related directly to azure sql but could be relevant to some of the other projects that you're working on in azure now another one i wanted to mention is this one by uh jg uh he uh released a blog about how microsoft is teaming up with coursera which is an online uh learning platform and we're basically using this to introduce new courses around azure specialization so maybe you're familiar with microsoft learn where we do a lot of this stuff for free online but we're also partnering with coursera to help you get certified in things like azure fundamentals az 900 in things like azure data engineer or even things like uh the the what is it dp 300 which is the managing relational databases in azure exams so you can just see how we're trying to help here and one of the things that i found really interesting from this article whoops didn't mean to go to the next slide let's go back but one of the things i found really interesting about this article is that uh a study that they referenced says that 150 million new tech jobs will be created uh in the next year or five years i think it was five years i'm trying to check my notes in the next five years so that's a lot of tech jobs so we're gonna do everything we can to make sure you're skilled up and you're prepared for this increasingly tech-heavy world that we're headed towards um okay the last one is kind of a fun one it's this thing called azure trivia and uh this blog basically talks about how it's back and better than ever now i was not someone familiar with azure trivia before so uh for me back i was like what is this so i actually went and explored it let me hop back to my browser um so what you're seeing here is this uh tweet for this week so basically every week i think on monday they're announcing a new trivia question and you can see i already played so i already tried to answer this question you basically tweet your answer and then you're entered into a sweepstakes to get things like um an iot set and some other cool prizes so this is a cool way to just kind of engage and quiz yourself and um you know get involved on twitter i think a lot of our community is on twitter and so it's cool that we're kind of running prizes through twitter maybe one day uh data exposed can run something like that um speaking of data exposed i want to talk about all the great episodes we've released this month um you you know us here at data expos we're trying to stay up to date trying to release everything we can and we released a bunch of episodes in the past month you can see uh kate smith came on most recently to talk about intelligent query processing this was just a chat so we just got sat down we chatted about uh iqp what it means how it's useful and how it relates to azure sql it was really an interesting conversation i learned a lot and so you know you might consider checking it out uh our mvp edition so for those of you that aren't aware every month we do one mvp episode which is an episode with a member of the microsoft most valuable professionals community uh this month it was on storage 101. this was really interesting because a lot of times as an azure sql person or a database person you don't necessarily think about the storage underneath but it's definitely really important and relevant to understand how these packets and how these blocks are moving across the network and how that's going to impact your workloads we also talked about parameterizing notebooks in azure data studio with aaron nelson this was really cool uh you can basically run a notebook and supply parameters so that's a great one amit came on to talk about helm charts to deploy sql server 2019 on kubernetes now this is not something i was super familiar with so it was really cool to watch him step through this process he goes step by step so you can kind of follow along if you want to try this yourself uh minos from the azure data explorer team talked about using apache spark for azure synapse analytics this was a great one as well uh might have been one of the top viewed ones of this month and then muhammad came on we basically re released a new data migration website so maybe y'all were familiar with the old website that we had but we uh revamped it updated everything added some videos added some customer stories um and so muhammad walks through how you can get the most out of these data migration guides um now on the live front so similar to what you're seeing here we stream every wednesday not just once a month but every wednesday at 9am uh we talked about uh something old something new this is a show i do with buck woody where we talk about data science topics uh this one was really interesting we talked about classification how you can do that with different services um and even the math behind it so that's a good one and then the azure sql security series is another like mini series we're running as part of data exposed live we're going to go through various topics related to azure sql security this one was really great we had muric and andreas from the security team go through access and authentication i learned a ton so i would definitely recommend checking that one out as well um and finally we had a fun one i i say fun it's always interesting to have buck woody and bob ward on the show at the same time um and that's what we did for the ask the expert session we had a lot of interesting questions uh questions like uh sql server dead and questions also about buck that were not related to azure sql at all but you know that's what happens when you get buck and bob on the same show so that's what was happening with data exposed if you want to subscribe to our youtube channel in that top right link that's how you can stay up to date on what we're doing and what we're posting now let's get into some of the blogs now on the sql server tech community blogs a lot of updates around uh sql server as well as the data sql client um a few things i wanted to to comment on the inference of ml models in sql server for external languages this one's really interesting because what it allows you to do is basically import models from other places so you know you might have a pi torch or a tensorflow or even an sklearn model that you want to import um and the way we're allowing you to do this is through onyx so onyx is this uh kind of open source way of uh interpreting models and so now we have support and sql server to actually import and recognize onyx models so you can train models somewhere else using some other tool and then bring them into sql server very easily so that was an interesting one one that i'll have to play with and hopefully we'll get to cover in something old something new in the coming months another one i wanted to call is the microsoft.data.sql client library this one's really cool because uh what we've decided is we're basically going to do two gas a year and in between the gas we're going to do these preview launches and so this is the second preview the biggest thing in this release or even in preview one in preview two is this idea of configurable retry logic that we're just building in for you so this is a big thing when you move to azure sql um so it's cool to see that we're just kind of doing a lot of that for you um okay so yeah lots of updates on sql server definitely recommend checking those out cu 10 was released so you might want to check it out how it relates to sql server 2019 as well as big data clusters if you're using it on to the azure sql blog just a few things to mention again you can go deeper into that hyperscale preview i demoed earlier about geo replication you can also learn about cross instance dtc with azure sql manage instance uh we're really trying to make this easier and we're listening to your feedback and we're implementing it as fast as we can um so that's an interesting blog post to kind of learn more about what we're doing and how you can use it and take advantage of it and how you can also submit feedback um the third one was this new t-sql functionality and i don't think this is something we do very frequently so i thought it was pretty interesting um the greatest and least sql function so when i first saw this i was like well we already have minimum and maximum what would i need this for so i want to show you a quick demo because i went and played with it um so here i am in ssms and uh what you can see is i'm basically able to specify multiple columns or multiple items and it's going to pick in each row of the table it's going to pick the greatest value of each of those options and similarly we have a least functionality as well so we're going to be able to pick the one with the highest or lowest values using this new functionality so if we take a look at it and just try to understand what it's doing um in this one we're looking at unit price extended amount and product standard cost so you can see unit price extended amount and product standard cost and then we're seeing the greatest price so you can see it's comparing all these and saying that 2024 994 is the greatest price and just similarly if we were comparing tax and freight uh we're gonna pick the lowest cost there and you can see it's also picking the lowest there so pretty simple in what it's doing but before there was some complicated t sql you had to run it wasn't actually as simple as just saying least or greatest so this is a pretty cool functionality uh to me i chatted with one of the engineers and i was just really excited about the quote because he wrote this blog and he explained some of the scenarios and the quote he put in this uh at the bottom was uh providing the greatest developer experience in azure is the least we can do and as someone who just loves puns i just thought this was brilliant i laughed to myself by myself and so i thought maybe you guys would enjoy it as well but that's from john steen uh the software engineer that actually worked on this capability so that's azure sql tech community we also have an azure database support blog uh so this is basically members of our support team they blog about certain things that they see so i'm just gonna pull all these up there i think that's all of them um so these are all the blogs that they release uh there's this one guy who does these lessons learned so he has a case that he finds interesting and he'll actually blog about it and so you'll see he's up on 170 he's got a bunch of different ones that he's done um so you can learn about both insert using python and azure sql he actually learned in this that you know python isn't necessarily always the fastest way to go about this uh so that was a pretty interesting one uh let's see what else did i read about oh azure sql db and manage instance uh tempdb this article was super interesting uh it basically summarizes and kind of reminds serves as a refresher to how tempdb works in db and mi it explains you the limits and even the different queries you can use to try to monitor and understand uh what's going on the different error messages that you see uh when compared to sql server and tips on how to address each of those errors so i think this is a good review or learning exercise for everyone to review um i learned a few things that i had forgotten um so i definitely recommend that one as well a few other things you know like for example if you've ever faced this error of uh revocation of the ssl certificate when you're using aad auth uh this step-by-step walks by how to address that very specific issue so this is one of the cool things about the azure database support blog um now one thing i did do from here is this one on how to auto scale azure sql databases um now uh in in a previous episode of data expose a while back we might have talked about this auto scaling functionality for hyperscale which we've released on github and i can find that link and add it to the blog but this one is using uh azure automation and that's something i hadn't played with a ton so i actually wanted to step through uh this blog post so let me switch back again to my browser and show you so basically in the blog pro blog post if i could speak basically in the blog post uh the the writer goes through how to configure this so i went step by step through their instructions uh and was able to pretty easily set this up so what you see is i have a sql database on a server it's general purpose 2v core so it's the lowest course it can be at this moment and what i was basically able to do is create an alert so down at the bottom you can see i have some alerts and hopefully it will load and you'll be able to see my alerts in the past 24 hours you can see this one alert is informational so this is alert that i set up through the process of following along this vlog and we can see what the alert is called it's called cpu is high so we're scaling up so basically what happens is you can see i triggered this a few times just to see how it works um and you can change the threshold in the article they set the threshold to 85 but just for demo purposes i set it to uh 50 so you can see that every time we went above a threshold then this alert was triggered so you can see that it's triggered then we go down we're not using high cpu utilization and then if i want to see more about this i can go into the alert rule um so what this is going to load up is again uh something i built using the blog post uh so let's see exploding but it was really easy to follow uh the instructions and this is actually some cool capabilities i haven't done a lot with alerting really easy to set up this alert you can see the hierarchy of of what i'm monitoring what i'm setting up here what the condition is so like i said i set the condition to whenever the max cpu percentage is greater than 50 i want to go ahead and scale up my database and um so that's the condition and then i can set different actions so the first action is uh this well i guess there's only one action it's the scaling action group so you can see it contains a few actions uh what you can see is it contains a notification action so basically i set up an email to be sent when this alert happens i want to get an email and say hey cpu utilization is high we're going to scale up your database and then i also have this this automation run book and so this automation runbook uh this one is based on a powershell script but it's basically going to use this to scale me up to the next tier so it's going to go i think goes from two v core to four v core um and it will scale up accordingly if i continue to over overdue or overuse that over hit that cpu utilization of a max of 50 this is a pretty cool one i do want to mention there's also a github sample that will actually do this for you as well but you know it's nice to have options and people have different things that they like to use uh whether it's open source code or setting up azure automation um so that's another really cool one as well um so again just to kind of wrap up the vlogs and videos there's always a ton of blogs and videos uh coming up um and uh yeah i was just taking a look at the comments looks like some people have had some issues with freezing hopefully everyone's able to see okay uh we will post the on demand so if you do have issues you can always come back and watch them later um now i'm excited because we're kind of announcing a new uh segment which we're going to be doing hopefully on a monthly basis uh and this segment is called sql in a minute uh so for that i'm going to bring on the lead for that uh cheryl cheryl thanks so much for joining us today we're so excited to have you can you tell folks a little bit about you and also like what we're trying to do with sql in a minute well you know and thank you so much for having me it's a great opportunity to bring some focus to content that we use every day sql docs has such a large repository and we use it frequently for development for learning some even use it for teaching so my hope is to bring that light to that space and really talk about how you can benefit and leverage the documentation that we create awesome wonderful well i'm just so excited to have you on the show and i know you have another guest jason so i'll go ahead and bring jason up uh jason can you tell us a little bit about uh your role as well uh yeah absolutely thank you anna um i'm jason roth i'm the manager of the sql docs team uh and we publish content to docs.microsoft.com for sql server uh azure sql and azure synapse analytics and partner closely with the product team and to try to make sure that we um get the right docs out for for all all of you customers awesome great well i'll pass it over to to y'all to tell us about what's new in sql in a minute thank you so much you know i want to welcome everyone to our first segment here today you're going to get a virtual backstage pass to the sql docs team where we publish and update sql related content articles every month we look forward to continuing to share important updates to sql today i want to welcome again jason roth our sql docs team manager good morning jason how are you good morning cheryl it's been great well let's get started i know we spoke a little bit already but let's talk a little bit more about yourself and about the sql docs team yeah absolutely um so as i said we have a talented team of of content developers and and we try to manage a very large set of sql server content and azure sql and azure snaps analytics content to produce the com the best content uh to to help customers use the latest features of sql you know i'm aware that we have such a large repository of content in the sql repo in fact one of the largest at microsoft can you share some of the tips you might have for maybe navigating that content uh sure so i've got the docs.microsoft.com hub page up here um if i click on sql server we'll get to the sql hub and then go to the on-premises documentation so our on-premises documentation um has evolved over decades to cover about 15 000 topics and that's a lot of content and it's a lot of deca a lot of different versions of sql so one tip i have is that if you're working in a previous version of sql you can get to archived versions of our documentation both offline and online but we also starting in 2016 have started managing a current content set and so not everybody may realize that there's this version drop down up here and i'm just going to illustrate that briefly if we go to a topic in linux for example and we say like how do i install sql server on red hat the default is going to be sql server 2019 but let's say that you want to run 2017 on red hat this particular article has been versioned so if i drop down the version drop down and i select sql server 2017 we'll see that the context of the article changes to 2017 and also the instructions changed to 2017. and now most articles haven't been versioned uh because they might apply to all of the versions uh 2016 and up but there are certain there's certain articles that do change when you change the version and it's important to kind of understand that mechanism well those are all really great points and i really want to focus on just the environment that we work in you know one of the things that i really appreciate about microsoft in the docs team is our effort to raise awareness with our open source model of documentation can you share a little bit more about how people become part of our community yeah absolutely so if um let me go to azure sql this time and in let's say you're in the azure sql uh documentation in the create uh database a single database if you saw an error on this page um you might not realize that this is open source documentation and you can contribute and become one of the contributors on the uh the tagline up here uh you just have to click edit at the top of the page and then sign in to github and then you're able to click the pencil icon to edit this article in markdown if you make the change that you see that you want to propose to the docs team and click propose change at the bottom in this case it's making me sign in again it will go ahead and bring up a screen that lets you review your change and create a pull request and that kind of change goes directly to the docs team for review and we talk to the product team and make sure that that's something that we want to publish but this is a way for us to scale and have all of you experts out in the community make our docs better and with so many topics um you guys are the experts and we want that kind of feedback um there's also a feedback mechanism at the bottom of the article that you can do general feedback product and article but um we have a uh just wanted to let everybody know we have a road show that we've been giving to different sql user groups and conferences where we go through this process in more detail kind of talk about behind the scenes uh give you tips on on how to contribute and if you're interested in giving that we'd love to give that to your user group in the community you know i've had the opportunity to moderate one of these sessions about becoming a contributor and it does an excellent job on explaining how to create your first pull request to contribute to the docs team it's a definite must see you know one of the biggest pluses for me is the community engagement during the time that we're giving this presentation there's an open space for questions and people can pose some of the questions they have about making that first pull request it seems like you presented a lot of good information what are some other options for reaching out and connecting with the docs team yeah absolutely let me bring up the the next slide um if you want to reach out to us you can definitely contact us on twitter at sql docs but we also have an email alias that you could reach us at sql docs at microsoft.com for example if you if you wanted to talk about that presentation i mentioned but one of the main ways the best ways of getting in touch with us is to make those public pull requests and uh and issue feedback at the bottom of the article and that comes straight to us and then we can engage with you on your specific feedback items um these two aka links provide a link to the documentation and the contributors guide that that talks a little bit about how to contribute to the sql docs so both of those uh could come in handy as well um so thank you well you know and i appreciate all of this information this is wonderful and great you know that about wraps our segment up and i'm sure you'll find all of these resources very helpful i want to thank jason for stopping by this morning and laying the foundation that we will be speaking about which is sql docs i also want to give a personal shout out to galaxymuffin16 for that wonderful piece of artwork that she put together i want to make this a personal invitation to you to become part of our community by making a contribution to our docs we look forward to hearing from you take care and be well back to you anna awesome thanks so much and and thank you both for being on the show i think the docs is such a crucial part of everything that anyone does on our platform or in azure or just in general uh so really appreciate y'all being on the show and we're looking forward uh to future months updates thank you thank you all right um so moving on to our next segment uh we have uh marisa brazile who is going to come on and talk to us about our upcoming events now if you all haven't met marisa before uh justin fyi she is the uh the producer and the machine behind this show uh so if you ever see her uh be sure to uh thank her if you like the show um if you don't like the show too okay takes it all uh you know we're just so lucky to have you marisa but i'll pass it over to you to talk about upcoming events yeah thanks anna um and you know this show is great and if you do seriously have any feedback um we appreciate it and we will take it and we will take it into consideration so thanks all um so events so there's a lot going on this month for events the azure data team is super busy this month um the first one up is next tuesday on may 10th uh it's called sequel actually monday starts monday and tuesday it's may 10th at sequel day 2021 and that's a poland event with the data community and we have a bunch of sessions there um i know anna's actually doing a pre-con there we have a keynote from bob ward and um buckwoody and bob ward are also doing sessions there on may 11 there is the azure webinar series debugging web apps on azure sql app service and azure sql on may 14th there's pycon 2021 we have a session we're presenting there on may 15 in may um actually two saturdays and two keynotes buck is doing at data weekender and data saturday southwest um on may 18th we have the redgate azure sql manage instance webinar bob ward is presenting inside azure sql manage instance on may 18 there's techorama julie's actually doing a session there about notebooks on may 20th we have the azure sql webinar series another one this one is about implementing devops best practices on azure sql and then on may 25th through the 27th there is microsoft build which is you know a huge event for microsoft we actually have a few speakers from our team presenting there and including anna um but we have a keynote there we're doing two round table sessions and we're also doing a uh lerp learn live session um and that's with anna hoffman and davide mari and they're doing a session on build full stack applications with azure static web apps and azure sql database so the fun thing about that is that is one module of their learning path that they're also launching at microsoft build um so you're kind of getting a sneak peek by attending that session what you can expect in that learning path that's also launching on may 25th and we'll share more about that later in addition to these upcoming events we have the schedule for data exposed live that's coming up this month uh next wednesday there is another episode in the azure sql virtual machine virtual reimagined series uh with david pless and pam and on may 19th we're doing a deep dive about azure sql insights with elaine and so lots coming up this month um if you want to register or learn more about any of these events and where we're speaking at that will be in the blog post that anna launched today as well awesome give it back to you anna thank you thank you thanks so much marissa just to follow up there did you say buck is double keynoting on the same day that can do so many you know wonderful things i don't know how he's going to be in two places so yeah awesome well thanks so much marisa of course uh you know definitely check out some of these um events i'm looking forward to seeing how buck is in two places at once uh but in this virtual world i guess anything is possible um moving on we're going to talk about our monthly microsoft learn module of the month uh basically during this segment i highlight a different module in microsoft learn that i found interesting or that i was a part of creating so there is some bias here but it's always going to be related to azure sql um so this one i think is a very interesting one this one is about availability in azure sql database and azure sql managed instance uh you know when you talk to a lot of people about moving from on-prem to azure sql platform as a service uh the high availability that you get built in with azure sql is a lot of things that people talk about so this is a great way to get hands on just to show you a brief uh glimpse and i'm sorry this is in dark mode right now i forgot to change it but basically this is part of the azure sql fundamentals learning path you've heard me talk about this many times before uh we've had lots of people go through this learning path and then pass dp300 uh so definitely leverage this one of the greatest things about it is uh if we go into this module for example uh the highly available highly available one uh they have exercises in all of them and these exercises have built-in sandboxes so basically um as long as you sign in which i'm not right now but as long as you sign in and accept the permissions you can actually get four hour increments of free azure resources so you can play with all this stuff for free uh for example we have exercises on a point in time restore or picture uh we also have a general purpose h a and business critical aha exercises where you can see how fast failovers can be in azure sql um you're also going to learn about the architectures underneath of each of these service tiers so that's something you'll get to learn about which is really interesting especially if you're coming from a sql server background uh you'll learn about auto failover groups and geo replication which is something you kind of learned about in the uh with the hyper skill announcement that i demoed uh at the beginning of the show and we'll also talk about availability so this is a great resource please use it please share it uh give us feedback you can give us feedback very similarly to how you get feedback uh in the documentation um and let's see the other thing i wanted to highlight is my pick of the month so every month i go and i pick something and i choose to highlight it um and today i want to highlight the innovate today with azure sql azure sql digital event uh this actually happened yesterday may the fourth be with you uh but um what it was was this great event let me just pull it up where we pulled on some really big players like rohan kumar bob ward uh i had the honor of doing a demo there but there were also like six on-demand or eight on-demand demos by microsoft mvps uh by program managers on the team um as well as some customer videos which were really interesting i just watched the komatsu one again before this is really cool uh so if you register now you can still get everything just in the on demand form uh we also also did get a scott guthrie cameo in this so a little spoiler but you know it's already happened so i don't feel that bad doing that um but yeah this is my pick of the month if you want that on demand access you can go to the azure sql digital event url which i will also share in my blog that is already live um and then the other thing i wanted to call out which marisa kind of talked about is at build uh we are working on a new learning path i'm really excited about it it's about building serverless full stack applications and azure uh we have been showing the the solution or the scenario off uh in various platforms already so maybe you've seen some things about the catching the bus sample but basically this is a great way to learn about azure services how azure sql database plays into all these services and how you can use things like azure static web apps uh azure sql database serverless azure functions azure logic apps github actions for ci cd um and devops and and more tools like visual studio code azure data studio uh this is something i'm really excited about again a little bit of bias here but i'm very excited about it it's launching it build and we're launching it with a learn live session so if you register for build you can register for our learn live session where you'll get a glimpse at one of the modules in this learning path so very excited about that as well um with that we are about at the top of the hour so i wanted to just make a plug for aka dot ms slash news update you've heard from a lot of people you've learned a lot of things and maybe you want to look into some things around ssma especially with regards to oracle migrations or other types of migrations or you want to learn more about cytus 10 or you want to learn more about the docs and how you can contribute or play with any of the demos that that i did from various blog posts um then this is the one url for you to go to because this is going to have all those references everything we talked about today is summarized um there so we encourage you to check out the news update url you can also comment on that if you have questions about any updates you can also comment or like uh this video depending on how you feel about it and with that you know i want to thank you all for joining us again for this episode of dd exposed live and really we hope to see you next time on data exposed [Music] you

Channel: Azure SQL

Views: 654

Keywords: Microsoft, Developer, Azure SQL, Azure SQL Managed Instance, service aided subnet configuration, Postgres, oracle migrations, azure sql database hyperscale, Citus extension to Postgres, citus, Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Id: TdUacpMsSrY

Length: 66min 8sec (3968 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021