For over ten years, I have been volunteering and speaking at SQL Saturdays, which are free, one-day training events for professionals who use the Microsoft data platform.
These events are organized by local communities and Microsoft MVPs around the world and offer a variety of technical sessions on topics such as SQL Server, Azure SQL Database (including postgreSQL, MySQL, Etc), Business intelligence with Power BI, Analytics with Azure Databricks and Fabric, and more.
Most also have a Women in Technology presentation, as well as other career-oriented topics. The value is in networking with other data professionals, who have a helping mindset.
SQL Saturdays are a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the data platform world, and they cater to all levels of expertise, from beginners to advanced users.
I had the great opportunity to return to SQL Saturday Albany in August, and to present. The organizers as always are terrific, and the event took place on the UAlbany campus.
I had the great pleasure of presenting at the first ever SQL Saturday Syracuse in September, at the beautiful Onondega Country Central Library! Analyse Adams was our host and organizer, and the event was well-run and well-received in the central-western NY region!
As always, this was well run by the organizers and volunteers!
Virtual Events
I had the pleasure of speaking at the Future Data Driven virtual summit in September, which connected hundreds of people around the world in a multi-track conference! This is a great option for people to connect and learn without needing to travel.
I recommend folks check in on meetup, or on eventbrite, or even facebook for what local events are happening, and how you can get involved, or at least get connected for learning!
I presented Microsoft Fabric to the New England SQL User group on May 8th 2024! What a great crowd! If your are local to eastern mass, and do data work with Microsoft products, consider joining!
This content provides a detailed overview of Microsoft Fabric and related terminologies, tutorials, and SKUs.
Here are some of the highlights of the content, and some links to help you dive deeper:
Microsoft Fabric: Microsoft Fabric is the data platform for the era of AI, with everything unified, SaaS-ified, secured and governed
You can follow a guided tour of Microsoft Fabric — there are many experiences, from data science, to data warehousing, data observability, pipelines, real time analytics, and the well-known Power BI reporting.
OneLake is a single SaaS lake for the whole organization, with all data organized in an intuitive hierarchical namespace. The underlying format is Delta on top of Parquet, on Azure storage.
There is a Decision Guide to help you formulate when to you which data store, based on use case.
Metadata to connect you to other storage, without copying data to Onelake, known as shortcuts, connect you to other cloud storage like S3, Google storage, and Databricks delta lake, and letting you query that data remotely.
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is generative AI for every step of your data journey, unlocking data, enhancing productivity, and accelerating insight discovery. Three experiences exist currently:
Partner Ecosystem: Microsoft Fabric has a strong partner ecosystem, with hundreds of partners to help with add on capabilities, or extensions, or system integrators to help you deploy.
Capacity:Capacity is a dedicated set of resources that is available at a given time to be used. Capacity defines the ability of a resource to perform an activity or to produce output. Different items consume different capacity at a certain time. Fabric offers capacity through the Fabric SKU and Trials. For more information, see What is capacity?
Item: An item a set of capabilities within an experience. Users can create, edit, and delete them. Each item type provides different capabilities. For example, the Data Engineering experience includes the lakehouse, notebook, and Spark job definition items.
Tenant: A tenant is a single instance of Fabric for an organization and is aligned with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory ID)
Workspace: A workspace is a collection of items that brings together different functionality in a single environment designed for collaboration. It acts as a container that uses capacity for the work that is executed, and provides controls for who can access the items in it. For example, in a workspace, users create reports, notebooks, semantic models, etc. For more information, see Workspaces article.
Microsoft Fabric operates on two types of SKUs:
Azure – Billed per second with no commitment.
Microsoft 365 – Billed monthly or yearly, with a monthly commitment
Azure SKUs, also known as F SKUs, are the recommended capacities for Microsoft Fabric. You can use your Azure capacity for as long as you want without any commitment. Pricing is regional and billing is made on a per second basis with a minimum of one minute.
Azure capacities offer the following improvements over the Microsoft 365 SKUs.
Pay-as-you-go with no time commitment.
A capacity reservation. This feature allows you to reserve a capacity for a specific period of time, and save money on your Azure bill. A reserved capacity is no longer charged at the pay-as-you-go rates.
In this tutorial, you ingest data with data pipelines and transform data with dataflows, then use the automation and notification to create a complete data integration scenario.
In this set of tutorials, learn about the different Data Science experience capabilities and examples of how ML models can address your common business problems.
In this tutorial, you learn how to use deployment pipelines together with git integration to collaborate with others in the development, testing and publication of your data and reports.
A LOT of information has been swirling ever since ChatGPT hit the news!
ChatGPT! Everyone uses it, right? Fastest growing application of all time! ChatGPT is an AI model that uses deep learning to generate human-like text based on prompts from users like you. It works by predicting the next word in a given text, based on the patterns it has learned from a massive amount of data during its training process. Here’s an example:
Well, what happened since then? In the past 6 months, Microsoft Ignite showcased work on Microsoft products integrating some of these Large Learning Models into Microsoft products.
GPT means Generative Pre-Trained in terms of the AI model. These are Large Learning Models of significant size, generally trained on “much of the internet” for their information contained within.
OpenAI has the mindshare in recent history on these GPT models. There are others, like Amazon’s Bedrock, and Google’s Bard and Salesforce’s Einstein, and Meta’s Llama
Transparency note: I work for Microsoft at the time of this writing.
Microsoft is a 49% investor in OpenAI, and besides investing in OpenAI, also hosts these (and other) models. The Microsoft version of OpenAI are called Azure OpenAI on the Azure cloud. These models on the Azure cloud are bound by the Responsible AI principles. That topic is huge, and in general covers using AI for good, and making sure your data is yours, and your deployment of your model in your Azure tenant is not trained on your data.
These OpenAI Models are being leveraged inside of Microsoft’s product suites to build per-product “Copilots” relevant to those use cases. Why “copilot”? Because you, the human, are still the pilot.
Think of it this way: Copilots are a way to offload the long tedious work, say to a smart, but inexperienced, human assistant.
“Go build me a powerpoint on Gross Domestic Product for the last 20 years” is an example of a human command. Give that to your new hire or intern, and in a day they come back with something. I used the above prompt in PowerPoint copilot to have it generate a draft, including data, of the request. It took about 30 seconds max. I re-did the prompt, and it actually presented a different view of that information into a different set of slides. Here is an example:
Inside of Teams, for example, I installed the M365 Chat app. Here is what it says about itself:
M365 Chat
The Microsoft 365 Chat feature in Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph to help you get things done. If authorized by your organization, you have the option to add plugins for more data sources (like apps and web content) that Copilot will interact with on your behalf. Copilot can synthesize data from multiple sources to give you a summary of things you need to catch up on, including your files, messages, meetings, emails, and people. It can also help you find and use info that’s buried in documents or lost in conversations. And with Copilot by your side, you can create content with it all. Ask a work-related question, or try one of these: – Draft a message with action items from my last meeting – Catch up on my unread email – How do I write a request for proposal? AI-generated content may be incorrect, so sources are provided for your review when possible. Discover more with these helpful links: – [Explore what’s possible with Copilot](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2240275) – [See what’s new with Copilot](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2239566) – Check out our [FAQ](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2238505)Created by Microsoft Corporation
Here’s what this app can do:
•Receive messages and data that I provide to it.
•Send me messages and notifications.
•Access my profile information such as my name, email address, company name, and preferred language.
•Receive messages and data that team members provide to it in a channel.
•Send messages and notifications in a channel.
•Access this team’s information such as team name, channel list and roster (including team member’s names and email addresses) – and use this to contact them.
In M365 chat, I can say “Summarize recent emails from coworker” and it will show many in summary form. What a time saver! Here is an example prompt and result. Note: It always gives you links to the source, so you can validate the accuracy. This also works in the mobile version of teams with the M365 chat app installed.
That’s pretty good. But have you ever wondered where the approved customer-ready powerpoints are? This is where M365, data labelling, and other features shine, with security. In the following case, I will not show the results because they are Microsoft internal. It did return 5 examples.
Copilots are not just in Microsoft 365. Copilots for Power BI, the new Microsoft Fabric data and ai platform, and more will have prebuilt copilot experiences.
Using the AI-infused Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, Avanade reduces workload for sellers with a range of time-saving features.
Keep in mind: These Large Language Models have limitations on accuracy. They are “Creative” and there are settings on “how creative” they should be. You are in charge. You cannot just “copilot and send”. The above m365 chat example which is new, may not always do things in the right order or precision by default. Additional prompt engineering can help with accuracy of results.
For developers who wish to build “Copilots” into their own products, or ISVs who wish to improve their applications similarly can use Azure OpenAI and other Large Language Model-as-a-Service (announced at Microsoft Build in May 2023). You can integrate the latest AI models, such as Llama 2 from Meta and upcoming premium models from Mistral, and Jais from G42, as API endpoints to your applications.
To help you train or use or implement the variety of AI, including the above mentioned models, there is Microsoft AI Studio. To Quote: “Your platform for developing generative AI solutions and custom copilots”
Finally for a low code alternative, there is Microsoft Copilot Studio. “Copilot Studio offers graphical development environment to build copilots using generative AI, sophisticated dialog creation, plugin capabilities, process automation, and built-in analytics that work with Microsoft conversational AI tools.”
I encourage you to “Try a demo” in the above website, enter your favorite website with information on it, and ask questions of that. My example would be: http://www.microsoft.com and ask who is the ceo, or president of the board for example. Check this out: My question is on the right.
I hope this information helps, and you can find value in a new way to accelerate your work.
After writing most of this blog, I found the “AI Assistant” in WordPress. It gave me tips to improve the content before publishing! I want your input however.
Please let me know if you have any questions, and I encourage feedback!
With an introduction like that, I should probably remind everyone that this is my personal blog, my personal perspective, and my personal opinions. Although I am a Microsoft employee, I am not speaking for or otherwise representing my employer with this post or anything else on this blog.
I strongly encourage you to reach out if you think you might want to speak. There are coaches available, to help guide you. Many user groups are happy to have new speakers try out a short presentation, and then grow from there.
Side note, the event hands out prizes from the sponsors at the end!
It may help you to look over the relative cost in terms of effort for administering your infrastructure versus physical, virtual on premises, Azure VM, or PaaS for your MySQL choices. This diagram works for many other products, like SQL Server, or web servers, or other infrastructure as well.
MySQL on Azure VMs. This option falls into the industry category of IaaS. With this service, you can run MySQL Server inside a managed virtual machine on the Azure cloud platform. All recent versions and editions of MySQL can be installed in the virtual machine.
Azure database for MySQL is a Platform Service (PaaS), fully managed MySQL database engine based on the stable version of MySQL community edition. With a managed instance of MySQL on Azure, you can use built-in features viz automated patching, high availability, automated backups, elastic scaling, enterprise grade security, compliance and governance, monitoring and alerting that require extensive configuration when MySQL Server is either on-premises or in an Azure VM.
Azure Database for MySQL, powered by the MySQL community edition, available in two deployment modes:
Flexible Server – A fully managed production-ready database service designed for more granular control and flexibility over database management functions and configuration settings. The flexible server architecture allows users to opt for high availability within a single availability zone and across multiple availability zones. The service supports the community version of MySQL 5.7 and 8.0. The service is generally available today in various Azure regions. Flexible servers are best suited for all new developments and migration of production workloads to Azure Database for MySQL service.
Single Server is a fully managed database service designed for minimal customization. The single server platform is designed to handle most database management functions such as patching, backups, high availability, and security with minimal user configuration and control. The architecture is optimized for built-in high availability with 99.99% availability in a single availability zone. It supports the community version of MySQL 5.6 (retired), 5.7, and 8.0. The service is generally available today in various Azure regions. Single servers are best-suited only for existing applications already leveraging single server. A Flexible Server would be the recommended deployment option for all new developments or migrations.
I have two customers, who each had in-house developed applications with MySQL as the database engine, chose Azure Database for MySQL to migrate to as they moved from on-premises to Azure. Each customer has over 200 databases hosted on many MySQL servers.
Migration choices for Azure Database for MySQL
For detailed information and use cases about migrating databases to Azure Database for MySQL, refer to the Database Migration Guide. This document provides pointers to help you successfully plan and execute a MySQL migration to Azure.
Now that Covid has receded from the forefront, in-person events are getting back into the swing.
October 2022!
I had the great pleasure of presenting to both SQL Saturday Boston, as well as the Capital Area SQL Server user group near Albany NY!
I encourage each of you, no matter what the topic, to consider doing a small presentation with a local user group. I would suggest meetup for many tech-oriented groups.
Feel free to reach out to me as well. I can offer reviews of your work, because others may see value.
The goal of this post is to show Azure SQL Database, and how the vulnerability scans available can help you baseline security, and how to remediate one of the items.
Azure SQL Database is a great way to host your relational data in Azure. One of the benefits you get is vulnerability assessments, with clear explanations and links for remediation.
I wanted to share some resources to help businesses out in this day and age. These links are both about managing and working remotely, as well as using Teams to facilitate videoconferencing. I have a previous post as well for some recommendations on working remotely
George Walters 
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