Podcasts about azure synapse

Senior Manager sein - Mensch bleiben Fördert Fabric ein Daten-Chaos wie Access oder der Durchbruch des geordneten Datenmanagements durch die Fachbereiche? Die Vorschau-Phase von Microsoft Fabric neigt sich dem Ende zu und da lohnt es sich, als Praktiker nochmal einen Blick auf das Thema zu werfen. Fabric schließt eine wichtige Lücke - Daten können jetzt persistiert werden. Es könnte das Ende zahlreicher Workarounds mit dem Pseudo-Persistieren über Dataflows und Excel als Datenbank sein. Manche Fragen werden sich erst nach einer längeren Nutzung zeigen, z.B.: wird OneLake wirklich der Durchbruch einer zentralen Datenhaltung und gleichzeitig des Data Mesh? Aber auch ein Deep Dive mit einem Vergleich zwischen Software-as-a-Service und Platform-as-a-Service sowie zwischen Azure Synapse, Databricks und Snowflake haben sich die beiden nicht nehmen lassen. Fabian ist seit Mitte 2021 bei Opitz Consulting und unterstuetzt Kunden auf der Reise zur Data Driven Company. Seinen Start in die Berufswelt begann im CRM Umfeld und fuehrte ihn auf seinem Weg weiter zu den Themen Business Intelligence, Data Analytics und in letzter Zeit auch in den Bereich des maschinellen Lernens. Lieblingsthemen sind BI Frontends & Self-Service. Privat bedient er Informatiker-Klischees und beschaeftigt sich gerne mit Computer- und Videospielen vergangener Epochen. Er lebt als Exilhesse im Ruhrgebiet.

What is Microsoft Fabric, and why do you want some? Richard talks to Andrew Snodgrass of Directions on Microsoft about Microsoft's recently announced Fabric product. Andrew explains that Fabric is an effort to integrate the various data products, including PowerBI, DataLake, Data Factory, and Data Warehousing, under a standard banner. It is early days for Fabric, but it's a great time to take it out for a spin for those who haven't dug into Azure data analytics products. But if you have existing implementations of PowerBI and many other data products, test carefully - the migration paths aren't simple!Links:Microsoft FabricAzure Synapse AnalyticsAzure Data FactoryPower BIFabric WorkspacesOneLakeKusto Query Language (KQL)Parquet Files in FabricMicrosoft PurviewOneLake File ExplorerRecorded July 12, 2023

Willkommen bei unserer Mission New Work. New Rules. - du bist mittendrin!  Wir führen unsere Update Reihe fort und präsentieren euch heute "Microsoft Fabric".   Microsoft betitelt es als "Software as a Service" - es vereint neue und vorhandene Komponenten aus Power BI, Azure Synapse und Azure Data Factory in einer einzigen integrierten Umgebung.   Stand heute ist jetzt der perfekte Zeitraum zum Testen: Ich habe 60 Tage freien Testzeitraum und bis 01.08.23 Zeit, die ganzen Möglichkeiten auszuprobieren, ohne dass Kosten anfallen.  Das Motto lautet: Keine blockierende Haltung einnehmen – sich offen damit beschäftigen.   Gerne auch mit uns in einem Workshop zusammen anschauen und Lösungen finden. Wir begleiten den Weg zur Data Driven Company. Fabric wird aktiv zur Wettbewerbsfähigkeit beitragen können! https://kom4tec.de/bi-analytics/  Das nächste Update zu Microsoft Fabric bekommst du in einem halben Jahr! Also folgt uns um nichts zu verpassen.     Auch bei dieser Folge ließen sich die beiden den WIN WIN Riesling von unserem Sponsor @von.winnning aus Deidesheim schmecken und waren begeistert!       Zitate aus der Folge    Julius  Es braucht den Mensch auch weiterhin hintendrin, das ist natürlich ein entscheidender Faktor.   Gerade wenn jetzt so ein mächtiges Tool auf den Markt kommt. Man kennt Teile davon schon, aber natürlich ist es für die Leute in den Unternehmen auch immer wieder etwas Neues.   Und da muss man natürlich darauf achten, dass man seine Mitarbeiter mitnimmt. Durchaus das Ganze auch mit Vorsicht testen.     Michael  Wenn man „Fabric“ so beschreibt, dann würde ich fast sagen, dass es eigentlich die zentrale Data & Analytics Plattform von Microsoft an einem Punkt ist.    Microsoft hat ja viele verschiedene Komponenten - und das hat man jetzt mit Fabric vereint.   Zu einer Lösung für Data Scienticst, Data Engineers & Business Analysten an einem zentralen Ort.         In den kommenden Podcast-Folgen bekommst du:    Infos und Tipps rund um die M365-Welt und ihre Anwendungen wie Power BI und Power Apps  Inspiration und praktische Tipps für den Kulturwandel für dich oder dein Unternehmen, um immer einen Schritt voraus zu sein  Wertvolle Impulse für ein bewusstes Mindset  Vorbilder, Themen und Ideen zu allen Facetten der New Work  Tipps zu praktischen Tools, die deinen Change unterstützen können, egal ob persönlich oder als Unternehmen  Viele weitere Einblicke in die Welt des New Work    Let's connect  Du hast Ideen, Themenvorschläge oder Anregungen zum Thema, dann teile gerne deine Gedanken mit uns und schick uns eine Nachricht an podcast@kom4tec.de oder auf Instagram @kom4tec  Wir freuen uns von dir zu hören.   Follow us!   Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/KOM4TEC/   Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/kom4tec/   LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/10407066/  

Summary A significant portion of the time spent by data engineering teams is on managing the workflows and operations of their pipelines. DataOps has arisen as a parallel set of practices to that of DevOps teams as a means of reducing wasted effort. Agile Data Engine is a platform designed to handle the infrastructure side of the DataOps equation, as well as providing the insights that you need to manage the human side of the workflow. In this episode Tevje Olin explains how the platform is implemented, the features that it provides to reduce the amount of effort required to keep your pipelines running, and how you can start using it in your own team. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack) Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Tevje Olin about Agile Data Engine, a platform that combines data modeling, transformations, continuous delivery and workload orchestration to help you manage your data products and the whole lifecycle of your warehouse Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Agile Data Engine is and the story behind it? What are some of the tools and architectures that an organization might be able to replace with Agile Data Engine? How does the unified experience of Agile Data Engine change the way that teams think about the lifecycle of their data? What are some of the types of experiments that are enabled by reduced operational overhead? What does CI/CD look like for a data warehouse? How is it different from CI/CD for software applications? Can you describe how Agile Data Engine is architected? How have the design and goals of the system changed since you first started working on it? What are the components that you needed to develop in-house to enable your platform goals? What are the changes in the broader data ecosystem that have had the most influence on your product goals and customer adoption? Can you describe the workflow for a team that is using Agile Data Engine to power their business analytics? What are some of the insights that you generate to help your customers understand how to improve their processes or identify new opportunities? In your "about" page it mentions the unique approaches that you take for warehouse automation. How do your practices differ from the rest of the industry? How have changes in the adoption/implementation of ML and AI impacted the ways that your customers exercise your platform? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the Agile Data Engine platform used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Agile Data Engine? When is Agile Data Engine the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Agile Data Engine? Guest Contact Info LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tevjeolin/?originalSubdomain=fi) Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? About Agile Data Engine Agile Data Engine unlocks the potential of your data to drive business value - in a rapidly changing world. Agile Data Engine is a DataOps Management platform for designing, deploying, operating and managing data products, and managing the whole lifecycle of a data warehouse. It combines data modeling, transformations, continuous delivery and workload orchestration into the same platform. Links Agile Data Engine (https://www.agiledataengine.com/agile-data-engine-x-data-engineering-podcast) Bill Inmon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Inmon) Ralph Kimball (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Kimball) Snowflake (https://www.snowflake.com/en/) Redshift (https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/) BigQuery (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery) Azure Synapse (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/synapse-analytics/) Airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) The intro and outro music is from The Hug (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/Love_death_and_a_drunken_monkey/04_-_The_Hug) by The Freak Fandango Orchestra (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/) / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

From OLAP to Vertipaq to Power BI, Microsoft has a rich history of innovation and evolution in business intelligence. As data becomes an ever-increasing priority for organizations around the globe, Microsoft is now focused on the future with the launch of Microsoft Fabric, a unified SaaS solution which integrates all your data in one place. Fabric makes data management easier and more accessible for every user who works with data. In this episode you'll learn: How Amir and his team first pitched the idea of what is now Microsoft OLAP Services What happens when you think about the unevenness of data as a design principle Why you should demo products with things, people have opinions about Some questions we ask: How did the transition from OLAP to Vertipaq happen? When is the next great thing coming from Microsoft? What is Microsoft Fabric, and what will it do for the world of data? Guest bio Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft's Intelligence Platform, including Power BI, Synapse, and more, joins Patrick LeBlanc on this week's episode of Insights Tomorrow. Amir is one of the leading world experts in business intelligence and analytics, holding over 80 patents. He is also the chief architect of Microsoft's BI offerings, including Power BI, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, and more. Resources: View Amir Netz on LinkedIn View Patrick LeBlanc on LinkedIn Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Data modernization refers to the process of upgrading and transforming data systems, infrastructure, and processes to meet the demands of modern data-driven organizations. It involves the adoption of new technologies and techniques to increase data quality, speed, scalability, and agility. To help organizations navigate this complex process, several data modernization patterns have emerged that provide a framework for modernizing data systems. In this episode, you'll learn: The types of challenges that come with building a data warehouse How customers can embrace modernization The challenges an organization may face going on-premises or to the cloud Some questions we ask: How does modernization data differ from traditional data warehouses? What are some of the major challenges that customers face today? Is the data warehouse dead? Guest bio Entrepreneur and International Business Management Executive Jeeva Akr leads the Cloud Scale Analytics go-to-market for Microsoft, growing the global sales of Azure Cloud Scale Analytics offerings, including Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Purview, and more. He leads a direct team of sales strategists, program owners, go-to-market leaders, and partner development leaders, providing thought leadership and managing sales execution of the entire global business. Resources: Jeeva Akr on LinkedIn Patrick LeBlanc on LinkedIn Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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!

In this first episode of 2023, the trio sift through the news, covering Outlook roaming signatures, the challenges facing Tableau, news from Azure Synapse and Power BI, changes to CosmosDB naming and what's new in Windows Autopatch.They also dive into a discussion about representing or not on social media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a 360-degree view into how to bring big data from Microsoft 365 and related services into Azure Synapse Analytics with Microsoft Graph Data Connect. This works internally and externally with your network of customers, suppliers and partners. Harness information that goes above and beyond what's possible compared to other reporting options in Microsoft 365, and get available solution templates to quickly get started. Principal Program Manager Lead from the Microsoft Graph team, Jeremy Thake, joins Jeremy Chapman to show how to keep people and your organization connected with Microsoft Graph Data Connect and Azure Synapse. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction 00:53 - Internal and external collaboration 02:24 - Behind Microsoft Graph and Azure Synapse 03:55 - Build a customer 360 solution 06:29 - Data environment behind Power BI dashboard 07:40 - How to bring Graph data into Synapse 09:14 - How to build out a B2B example 10:33 - Wrap up ► Link References: Set it up with a step-by-step guide at https://aka.ms/MGDCsetup ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website • To get the newest tech for IT in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/msftmechanics ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics   

In this episode, Alexander and Simon talk news from Azure Synapse, Power BI, Intune and Azure Virtual Desktop, as well as discuss patch management in Windows and the current state of Windows-as-a-service! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's episode, we sit down with P3 Adaptive's own Justin Mannhardt to get the inside scoop on delivering results and backing into data infrastructure, aka the origin story of P3 Adaptive's Solutions Architect Team and the impact it can have on an analytics project. Justin explains the expanded focus to fulfill analytics needs through a more holistic approach to drive adoption and deliver results. With his own experience, he explains how results must sometimes come first as a proof of concept but once results are verified, more support is often needed to ensure a smooth functioning process. Rob often refers to this as the faucet first analogy, and it has the power to convince the exec team that analytics can be fruitful for businesses of all sizes. We don't just talk shop, though, we also learn how Justin discovered his affinity for data after an educational background in music. And, for fun, you get to hear Justin's P3 Adaptive Diabolical Assessment story and how he increased his data skills and learned Power BI because he wanted to work for P3 Adaptive. He gets brutally honest about his interview and shares how he exited the process the first time only to come back and ace the process to become one of P3's finest solution architects! Additionally, you can hear about the recent P3 Adaptive employee retreat in Miami where many of our team met face to face for the first time and, to sound a little cheesy, it was a lot like coming home. Family pranks and tacos by the pool makes a great feel-good story as we come into the holiday season. Finally, if you enjoyed hearing Justin's story, be sure to catch him next week presenting at the PASS Data Community Summit. Justin will be on site with the P3 Adaptive team sharing his knowledge and presenting a session on snapshotting your CRM data with Azure Synapse. Be sure to catch him live or on the hybrid video feed. If you are in Seattle, stop by the booth and tell him Mullet Man sent you. He'll know what you mean! Also on this episode: Why was Ronald McDonald cancelled? Faucets v Plumbing blog Bugs Bunny left turn at Albuquerque Mel Brooks - Space Balls Did Cortez burn his ships in the harbor? P3 Adaptive Advanced DAX training Chumbawamba This is Pop Abba episode Def Leppard – Pyromania Rob P3 Fantasy Football gloat video Meatloaf – Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

Can you use artificial intelligence technologies in data analytics? Richard chats with Priscilla Camp about using cognitive services in PowerBI for image recognition, natural language processing, and even sentiment analysis. Priscilla describes her experience doing analysis on data from the Universal Studio theme parks in Orlando, going beyond simple happy/neutral/sad ranking into analyzing the thousands of comments made by folks in the park. Through sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction, those comments can be turned into actions the park can take to improve people's experiences - and potentially increase revenues!Links:Azure Data FactoryAzure Synapse AnalyticsPowerBICognitive Services in PowerBIAzure Cognitive ServicesKey Phrase ExtractionKaggleLearning Cognitive ServicesRecorded August 5, 2022

Lakshmi Murthy joins Scott Hanselman to show how to build your enterprise data model using Azure Synapse database templates to add rich business context to your data and drive meaningful analytics. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:07 - Azure Synapse database templates 04:54 - Demo: Creating a lake database 10:35 - Demo: Customizing and querying 17:04 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Lake database templates Announcing GA of Database Templates in Azure Synapse Analytics How-to: Create a lake database from database templates Create a Pay-as-You-Go account (Azure) Create a free account (Azure) Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter: @AzureFriday

Lakshmi Murthy joins Scott Hanselman to show how to build your enterprise data model using Azure Synapse database templates to add rich business context to your data and drive meaningful analytics. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:07 - Azure Synapse database templates 04:54 - Demo: Creating a lake database 10:35 - Demo: Customizing and querying 17:04 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Lake database templates Announcing GA of Database Templates in Azure Synapse Analytics How-to: Create a lake database from database templates Create a Pay-as-You-Go account (Azure) Create a free account (Azure) Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter: @AzureFriday

We're all trying to work faster and smarter to solve today's data-driven challenges. Microsoft's Intelligent Data Platform can help by removing silos around data and providing near real-time insights, augmented with predictive AI and built-in controls that protect your data wherever it goes. Sharieff Mansour, a leader on the Data and AI team at Microsoft, joins Jeremy Chapman for a closer look at how databases, analytics, machine learning, and governance come together in the Intelligent Data Platform. See how you can use these integrated services to build powerful new apps or modernize your current ones. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 Introduction of Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform 01:05 Improve the way you work with data 01:37 Foundational advantages of Intelligent Data Platform 02:09 Demo of how Intelligent Data Platform solves a real-world problem 05:30 Tech behind the app 07:37 Built-in AI predictions 10:32 Remove tech and people silos to make data work for you 12:04 Personalize customer interaction with Power Virtual Agent BOT ► Link Reference: Find the latest information on Intelligent Data Platform at: aka.ms/MicrosoftIDP ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? • As the Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website • To get the newest tech for IT in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/msftmechanics ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/microsoftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics

Data, data data! Vad är det som är viktigt med data och vad kan du göra med data och vilka verktyg kan du använda för att hantera det? I dagens avsnitt går vi in på vad är egentligen Azure Synapse och vad är storheten med det? Vi pratar om att samla in data från externa källor och få stenkoll på ditt interna data och hur det hänger ihop med datalakes, spark och databricksKom igång med Azure SynapseMS Learn om Azure Synapse Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Does your organization have a data culture? Richard talks with Microsoft CVP Rohan Kumar, and Mars VP Santosh Jamadagni about building organizations focused on data rather than opinion to drive the company forward. Rohan talks about getting data out of silos and into the hands of folks that can act on the information to make better business decisions. Santosh discusses how Mars has empowered workers throughout the Mars organization with real-time information. The conversation digs into the need to apply security rules to data as it enters the organization so that it is immediately available to the right people at the right time. Data availability is the key to a data culture!Links:Microsoft Data PlatformAzure Synapse LinkAzure PurviewRecorded May 4, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Columbus.   The data and reporting needs of Dynamics ERP customers have changed over the years, but the skills and tools have not always kept up. Preparing for the next phase of operational and financial management is largely about gaining control of business data as strategies and processes change, workers face new  demands on their time, and executives envision a landscape driven by cloud technology.   On this episode we are talking about the evolving challenges of data management and analysis with Michael Simms VP of digital advisory and data & analytics at Columbus. Simms is a veteran of the Dynamics AX and F&SCM space and has been on the front lines with customers for many years, working to help organizations get control of their business data with reporting and analysis.   Show Notes: 2:30 - The state of traditional data warehouses 4:00 - The importance of curated data sets in today's data management landscape 5:15 - Modernizing data skills for today's demands 9:00 - The emergence of data lakes and how it relates to Dynamics ERPs 10:15 - What to do with legacy data warehouses when planning for future cloud investments 14:30 - The strengths of Azure Synapse and Mike's recent experiences helping clients 17:45 - The importance of creating authoritative data sets and the governance challenges 21:00 - Looking ahead to new reporting suites for business apps 22:00 - Advice on developing expertise as a Microsoft customer   For more information about Columbus and our data and analytics solutions, visit us at https://www.columbusglobal.com/en-us/solutions/data-analytics

A daily look at the relevant information security news from overnight.Episode 235 - 07 May 2022Putin pwned - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-display-blood-is-on-your-hands-on-russian-tv-take-down-rutube/EU Points finger - https://www.securityweek.com/eu-blames-russia-satellite-hack-ahead-ukraine-invasionChemical phish - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ukraine-warns-of-chemical-attack-phishing-pushing-stealer-malware/Azure RCE - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-releases-fixes-for-azure-flaw-allowing-rce-attacks/NCF counter attack- https://www.zdnet.com/article/government-hackers-made-hundreds-of-thousands-of-stolen-credit-cards-worthless-to-crooks/Hi, I'm Paul Torgersen. It's Tuesday May 10th, 2022, and this is a look at the information security news from overnight. From BleepingComputer.com:While Russian President Vladimir Putin was giving his "Victory Day" speech, pro-Ukrainian hacking groups defaced the online Russian TV schedule page to display anti-war messages. The name of every programme was changed to "On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war” At the same time, a cyberattack took down the Russian video sharing site RuTube. More details in the link. From SecurityWeek.com:The European Union this week accused Russian authorities of carrying out a cyberattack against a satellite network an hour before they invaded Ukraine. The target was the KA-SAT network operated by Viasat. This is significant as it marks the first time the EU has ever formally accused Russia of carrying out a cyber attack. From BleepingComputer.com:Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team is warning of the mass phishing campaign distributing the Jester Stealer malware. The emails warn of impending chemical attacks to scare recipients into opening the XLS attachments, which are of course laced with malicious macros. Additional details in the article. Also from BleepingComputer.com:Microsoft has released updates to address a security flaw affecting Azure Synapse and Azure Data Factory pipelines that could allow remote code execution across the Integration Runtime infrastructure. The vulnerability was found in the third-party ODBC data connector used to connect to Amazon Redshift, in Integration Runtime, in Azure Synapse Pipelines, and Azure Data Factory. Details and a link to the security advisory in the article. And last today, from ZDNet.com:From the One for the Good Guys file. Britain's National Cyber Force, which is a joint effort using the combined resources of the GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence, took direct action against computer networks used by cyber criminals, and made hundreds of thousands of stolen credit cards, worthless to the crooks that stole them. Well done you. That's all for me today. Remember to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. And as always, until next time, be safe out there.

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/362A short introduction about Allan De Castro's life – family, hobbies and country of origin A story about Allan's journey into technology and how did it start Career and educational background of Allan What took him into the area of Microsoft Business Applications The type of work Allan is focused on right now Allan's involvement and as a consultant Allan's thoughts about AZURE Synapse and Dataverse - where are these two coming together? Talks about Allan's journey into becoming a Microsoft MVP and the process involved. What made Allan start blogging and what was the impact? Allan's involvement in the community 90 Day Mentoring Challenge - https://ako.nz365guy.com/ How to Become a Microsoft MVP - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzf0yupPbVkqdRJDPVE4PtTlm6quDhiu7AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy)

It's 2022, time for a new version of SQL Server! Richard chats with Bob Ward about Microsoft's latest release of their ubiquitous database. The conversation starts out with a little bit of history of how SQL Server has evolved over the decades - and how there's still a need for a database in organizations, but the feature set has changed. Bob talks about making hybrid really work, whether it's an on-premises database that backs up and fails over to the cloud, or how tools like Azure Purview can live in the cloud and help monitor and govern on-premises databases. And if you do choose to migrate to the cloud, these hybrid options make life easier - especially with SQL 2022!Links:Azure SQL RevealedSQL Server 2022Azure SQL Managed InstanceAzure Synapse AnalyticsSQL Query Store with Erin StellatoAzure PurviewAzure ArcRecorded January 13, 2022

About AndrewI create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.Links: ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/ PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown TranscriptAndrew: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is… well, he's challenging to describe. He's the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training, Inc. but everyone knows him better as Andrew Brown because he does so many different things in the AWS ecosystem that it's sometimes challenging—at least for me—to wind up keeping track of them all. Andrew, thanks for joining.Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: How do I even begin describing you? You're an AWS Community Hero and have been for almost two years, I believe; you've done a whole bunch of work as far as training videos; you're, I think, responsible for #100daysofcloud; you recently started showing up on my TikTok feed because I'm pretending that I am 20 years younger than I am and hanging out on TikTok with the kids, and now I feel extremely old. And obviously, you're popping up an awful lot of places.Andrew: Oh, yeah. A few other places like PolyWork, which is an alternative to LinkedIn, so that's a space that I'm starting to build up on there as well. Active in Discord, Slack channels. I'm just kind of everywhere. There's some kind of internet obsession here. My wife gets really mad and says, “Hey, maybe tone down the social media.” But I really enjoy it. So.Corey: You're one of those folks where I have this challenge of I wind up having a bunch of different AWS community Slacks and cloud community, Slacks and Discords and the past, and we DM on Twitter sometimes. And I'm constantly trying to figure out where was that conversational thread that I had with you? And tracking it down is an increasingly large search problem. I really wish that—forget the unified messaging platform. I want a unified search platform for all the different messaging channels that I'm using to talk to people.Andrew: Yeah, it's very hard to keep up with all the channels for myself there. But somehow I do seem to manage it, but just with a bit less sleep than most others.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like trying to figure out, like, “All right, he said something really useful. What was that? Was that a Twitter DM? Was it on that Slack channel? Was it that Discord? No, it was on that brick that he threw through my window with a note tied to it. There we go.”That's always the baseline stuff of figuring out where things are. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, you are the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro, which is interesting because unlike most of the community stuff that you do and are known for, you don't generally talk about that an awful lot. What's the deal there?Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of people give me a hard time because they say, Andrew, you should really be promoting yourself more and trying to make more sales, but that's not why I'm out here doing what I'm doing. Of course, I do have a for-profit business called ExamPro, where we create cloud certification study courses for things like AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, but you know, that money just goes to fuel what I really want to do, is just to do community activities to help people change their lives. And I just decided to do that via cloud because that's my domain expertise. At least that's what I say because I've learned up on in the last four or five years. I'm hoping that there's some kind of impact I can make doing that.Corey: I take a somewhat similar approach. I mean, at The Duckbill Group, we fixed the horrifying AWS bill, but I've always found that's not generally a problem that people tend to advertise having. On Twitter, like, “Oh, man, my AWS bill is killing me this month. I've got to do something about it,” and you check where they work, and it's like a Fortune 50. It's, yeah, that moves markets and no one talks about that.So, my approach was always, be out there, be present in the community, talk about this stuff, and the people who genuinely have billing problems will eventually find their way to me. That was always my approach because turning everything I do into a sales pitch doesn't work. It just erodes confidence, it reminds people of the used mattress salesman, and I just don't want to be that person in that community. My approach has always been if I can help someone with a 15-minute call or whatnot, yeah, let's jump on a phone call. I'm not interested in nickel-and-diming folks.Andrew: Yeah. I think that if you're out there doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of it, it becomes undeniable the value you're putting out there, and then people just will want to give you money, right? And for me, I just feel really bad about taking anybody's money, and so even when there's some kind of benefit—like my courses, I could charge for access for them, but I always feel I have to give something in terms of taking somebody's money, but I would never ask anyone to give me their money. So, it's bizarre. [laugh] so.Corey: I had a whole bunch of people a year or so after I started asking, like, “I really find your content helpful. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” And it's, I don't know how to charge people a dollar figure that doesn't have a comma in it because it's easy for me to ask a company for money; that is the currency of effort, work, et cetera, that companies are accustomed to. People view money very differently, and if I ask you personally for money versus your company for money, it's a very different flow. So, my solution to it was to build the annual charity t-shirt drive, where it's, great, spend 35 bucks or whatever on a snarky t-shirt once a year for ten days and all proceeds go to benefit a nonprofit that is, sort of, assuaged that.But one of my business philosophies has always been, “Work for free before you work for cheap.” And dealing with individuals and whatnot, I do not charge them for things. It's, “Oh, can you—I need some advice in my career. Can I pay you to give me some advice?” “No, but you can jump on a Zoom call with me.” Please, the reason I exist at all is because people who didn't have any reason to did me favors, once upon a time, and I feel obligated to pay that forward.Andrew: And I appreciate, you know, there are people out there that you know, do need to charge for their time. Like—Corey: Oh. Oh, yes.Andrew: —I won't judge anybody that wants to. But you know, for me, it's just I can't do it because of the way I was raised. Like, my grandfather was very involved in the community. Like, he was recognized by the city for all of his volunteer work, and doing volunteer work was, like, mandatory for me as a kid. Like, every weekend, and so for me, it's just like, I can't imagine trying to take people's money.Which is not a great thing, but it turns out that the community is very supportive, and they will come beat you down with a stick, to give you money to make sure you keep doing what you're doing. But you know, I could be making lots of money, but it's just not my priority, so I've avoided any kind of funding so like, you know, I don't become a money-driven company, and I will see how long that lasts, but hopefully, a lot longer.Corey: I wish you well. And again, you're right; no shade to anyone who winds up charging for their time to individuals. I get it. I just always had challenges with it, so I decided not to do it. The only time I find myself begrudging people who do that are someone who picked something up six months ago and decided, oh, I'm going to build some video course on how to do this thing. The end. And charge a bunch of money for it and put myself out as an expert in that space.And you look at what the content they're putting out is, and one, it's inaccurate, which just drives me up a wall, and two, there's a lack of awareness that teaching is its own skill. In some areas, I know how to teach certain things, and in other areas, I'm a complete disaster at it. Public speaking is a great example. A lot of what I do on the public speaking stage is something that comes to me somewhat naturally. So, can you teach me to be a good public speaker? Not really, it's like, well, you gave that talk and it was bad. Could you try giving it only make it good? Like, that is not a helpful coaching statement, so I stay out of that mess.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's really challenging to know, if you feel like you're authority enough to put something out there. And there's been a few courses where I didn't feel like I was the most knowledgeable, but I produced those courses, and they had done extremely well. But as I was going through the course, I was just like, “Yeah, I don't know how any this stuff works, but this is my best guess translating from here.” And so you know, at least for my content, people have seen me as, like, the lens of AWS on top of other platforms, right? So, I might not know—I'm not an expert in Azure, but I've made a lot of Azure content, and I just translate that over and I talk about the frustrations around, like, using scale sets compared to AWS auto-scaling groups, and that seems to really help people get through the motions of it.I know if I pass, at least they'll pass, but by no means do I ever feel like an expert. Like, right now I'm doing, like, Kubernetes. Like, I have no idea how I'm doing it, but I have, like, help with three other people. And so I'll just be honest about it and say, “Hey, yeah, I'm learning this as well, but at least I know I passed, so you know, you can pass, too.” Whatever that's worth.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back when I was starting out, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn't know everything about the AWS billing system and how it worked and all the different things people can do with it, and things they can ask. And now, five years later, when the industry basically acknowledges I'm an expert, I feel like a fraud because I couldn't possibly understand everything about the AWS billing system and how it works. It's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize that there is yet to learn. I'm better equipped these days to find the answers to the things I need to know, but I'm still learning things every day. If I ever get to a point of complete and total understanding of a given topic, I'm wrong. You can always go deeper.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, by no means am I even an expert in AWS, though people seem to think that I am just because I have a lot of confidence in there and I produce a lot of content. But that's a lot different from making a course than implementing stuff. And I do implement stuff, but you know, it's just at the scale that I'm doing that. So, just food for thought for people there.Corey: Oh, yeah. Whatever, I implement something. It's great. In my previous engineering life, I would work on large-scale systems, so I know how a thing that works in your test environment is going to blow up in a production scale environment. And I bring those lessons, written on my bones the painful way, through outages, to the way that I build things now.But the stuff that I'm building is mostly to keep my head in the game, as opposed to solving an explicit business need. Could I theoretically build a podcast transcription system on top of Transcribe or something like that for these episodes? Yeah. But I've been paying a person to do this for many years to do it themselves; they know the terms of art, they know how this stuff works, and they're building a glossary as they go, and understanding the nuances of what I say and how I say it. And that is the better business outcome; that's the answer. And if it's production facing, I probably shouldn't be tinkering with it too much, just based upon where the—I don't want to be the bottleneck for the business functioning.Andrew: I've been spending so much time doing the same thing over and over again, but for different cloud providers, and the more I do, the less I want to go deep on these things because I just feel like I'm dumping all this information I'm going to forget, and that I have those broad strokes, and when I need to go deep dive, I have that confidence. So, I'd really prefer people were to build up confidence in saying, “Yes, I think I can do this.” As opposed to being like, “Oh, I have proof that I know every single feature in AWS Systems Manager.” Just because, like, our platform, ExamPro, like, I built it with my co-founder, and it's a quite a system. And so I'm going well, that's all I need to know.And I talk to other CTOs, and there's only so much you need to know. And so I don't know if there's, like, a shift between—or difference between, like, application development where, let's say you're doing React and using Vercel and stuff like that, where you have to have super deep knowledge for that technical stack, whereas cloud is so broad or diverse that maybe just having confidence and hypothesizing the work that you can do and seeing what the outcome is a bit different, right? Not having to prove one hundred percent that you know it inside and out on day one, but have the confidence.Corey: And there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of value to it. It's the magic word I always found in interviewing, on both sides of the interview table, has always been someone who's unsure about something start with, “I'm not sure, but if I had to guess,” and then say whatever it is you were going to say. Because if you get it right, wow, you're really good at figuring this out, and your understanding is pretty decent. If you're wrong, well, you've shown them how you think but you've also called them out because you're allowed to be wrong; you're not allowed to be authoritatively wrong. Because once that happens, I can't trust anything you say.Andrew: Yeah. In terms of, like, how do cloud certifications help you for your career path? I mean, I find that they're really well structured, and they give you a goal to work towards. So, like, passing that exam is your motivation to make sure that you complete it. Do employers care? It depends. I would say mostly no. I mean, for me, like, when I'm hiring, I actually do care about certifications because we make certification courses but—Corey: In your case, you're a very specific expression of this that is not typical.Andrew: Yeah. And there are some, like, cases where, like, if you work for a larger cloud consultancy, you're expected to have a professional certification so that customers feel secure in your ability to execute. But it's not like they were trying to hire you with that requirement, right? And so I hope that people realize that and that they look at showing that practical skills, by building up cloud projects. And so that's usually a strong pairing I'll have, which is like, “Great. Get the certifications to help you just have a structured journey, and then do a Cloud project to prove that you can do what you say you can do.”Corey: One area where I've seen certifications act as an interesting proxy for knowledge is when you have a company that has 5000 folks who work in IT in varying ways, and, “All right. We're doing a big old cloud migration.” The certification program, in many respects, seems to act as a bit of a proxy for gauging where people are on upskilling, how much they have to learn, where they are in that journey. And at that scale, it begins to make some sense to me. Where do you stand on that?Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's hard because it really depends on how those paths are built. So, when you look at the AWS certification roadmap, they have the Certified Cloud Practitioner, they have three associates, two professionals, and a bunch of specialties. And I think that you might think, “Well, oh, solutions architect must be very popular.” But I think that's because AWS decided to make the most popular, the most generic one called that, and so you might think that's what's most popular.But what they probably should have done is renamed that Solution Architect to be a Cloud Engineer because very few people become Solutions Architect. Like that's more… if there's Junior Solutions Architect, I don't know where they are, but Solutions Architect is more of, like, a senior role where you have strong communications, pre-sales, obviously, the role is going to vary based on what companies decide a Solution Architect is—Corey: Oh, absolutely take a solutions architect, give him a crash course in finance, and we call them a cloud economist.Andrew: Sure. You just add modifiers there, and they're something else. And so I really think that they should have named that one as the cloud engineer, and they should have extracted it out as its own tier. So, you'd have the Fundamental, the Certified Cloud Practitioner, then the Cloud Engineer, and then you could say, “Look, now you could do developer or the sysops.” And so you're creating this path where you have a better trajectory to see where people really want to go.But the problem is, a lot of people come in and they just do the solutions architect, and then they don't even touch the other two because they say, well, I got an associate, so I'll move on the next one. So, I think there's some structuring there that comes into play. You look at Azure, they've really, really caught up to AWS, and may I might even say surpass them in terms of the quality and the way they market them and how they construct their certifications. There's things I don't like about them, but they have, like, all these fundamental certifications. Like, you have Azure Fundamentals, Data Fundamentals, AI Fundamentals, there's a Security Fundamentals.And to me, that's a lot more valuable than going over to an associate. And so I did all those, and you know, I still think, like, should I go translate those over for AWS because you have to wait for a specialty before you pick up security. And they say, like, it's intertwined with all the certifications, but, really isn't. Like—and I feel like that would be a lot better for AWS. But that's just my personal opinion. So.Corey: My experience with AWS certifications has been somewhat minimal. I got the Cloud Practitioner a few years ago, under the working theory of I wanted to get into the certified lounge at some of the events because sometimes I needed to charge things and grab a cup of coffee. I viewed it as a lounge pass with a really strange entrance questionnaire. And in my case, yeah, I passed it relatively easily; if not, I would have some questions about how much I actually know about these things. As I recall, I got one question wrong because I was honest, instead of going by the book answer for, “How long does it take to restore an RDS database from a snapshot?”I've had some edge cases there that give the wrong answer, except that's what happened. And then I wound up having that expire and lapse. And okay, now I'll do it—it was in beta at the time, but I got the sysops associate cert to go with it. And that had a whole bunch of trivia thrown into it, like, “Which of these is the proper syntax for this thing?” And that's the kind of question that's always bothered me because when I'm trying to figure things like that out, I have entire internet at my fingertips. Understanding the exact syntax, or command-line option, or flag that needs to do a thing is a five-second Google search away in most cases. But measuring for people's ability to memorize and retain that has always struck me as a relatively poor proxy for knowledge.Andrew: It's hard across the board. Like Azure, AWS, GCP, they all have different approaches—like, Terraform, all of them, they're all different. And you know, when you go to interview process, you have to kind of extract where the value is. And I would think that the majority of the industry, you know, don't have best practices when hiring, there's, like, a superficial—AWS is like, “Oh, if you do well, in STAR program format, you must speak a communicator.” Like, well, I'm dyslexic, so that stuff is not easy for me, and I will never do well in that.So like, a lot of companies hinge on those kinds of components. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't matter; if you have a certain scale, you're going to have attrition. There's no perfect system. But when you look at these certifications, and you say, “Well, how much do they match up with the job?” Well, they don't, right? It's just Jeopardy.But you know, I still think there's value for yourself in terms of being able to internalize it. I still think that does prove that you have done something. But taking the AWS certification is not the same as taking Andrew Brown's course. So, like, my certified cloud practitioner was built after I did GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure Fundamentals, a bunch of other Azure fundamental certifications, cloud-native stuff, and then I brought it over because was missing, right? So like, if you went through my course, and that I had a qualifier, then I could attest to say, like, you are of this skill level, right?But it really depends on what that testament is and whether somebody even cares about what my opinion of, like, your skillset is. But I can't imagine like, when you have a security incident, there's going to be a pop-up that shows you multiple-choice answer to remediate the security incident. Now, we might get there at some point, right, with all the cloud automation, but we're not there yet.Corey: It's been sort of thing we've been chasing and never quite get there. I wish. I hope I live to see it truly I do. My belief is also that the value of a certification changes depending upon what career stage someone is at. Regardless of what level you are at, a hiring manager or a company is looking for more or less a piece of paper that attests that they're to solve the problem that they are hiring to solve.And entry-level, that is often a degree or a certification or something like that in the space that shows you have at least the baseline fundamentals slash know how to learn things. After a few years, I feel like that starts to shift into okay, you've worked in various places solving similar problems on your resume that the type that we have—because the most valuable thing you can hear when you ask someone, “How would we solve this problem?” Is, “Well, the last time I solved it, here's what we learned.” Great. That's experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience? Yes, there is: Hiring people with experience.Then, at some level, you wind up at the very far side of people who are late-career in many cases where the piece of paper that shows that they know what they're doing is have you tried googling their name and looking at the Wikipedia article that spits out, how they built fundamental parts of a system like that. I think that certifications are one of those things that bias for early-career folks. And of course, partners when there are other business reasons to get it. But as people grow in seniority, I feel like the need for those begins to fall off. Do you agree? Disagree? You're much closer to this industry in that aspect of it than I am.Andrew: The more senior you are, and if you have big names under your resume there, no one's going to care if you have certification, right? When I was looking to switch careers—I used to have a consultancy, and I was just tired of building another failed startup for somebody that was willing to pay me. And I'm like—I was not very nice about it. I was like, “Your startup's not going to work out. You really shouldn't be building this.” And they still give me the money and it would fail, and I'd move on to the next one. It was very frustrating.So, closed up shop on that. And I said, “Okay, I got to reenter the market.” I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have big names on my resume, and Toronto is a very competitive market. And so I was feeling friction because people were not valuing my projects. I had, like, full-stack projects, I would show them.And they said, “No, no. Just do these, like, CompSci algorithms and stuff like that.” And so I went, “Okay, well, I really don't want to be doing that. I don't want to spend all my time learning algorithms just so I can get a job to prove that I already have the knowledge I have.” And so I saw a big opportunity in cloud, and I thought certifications would be the proof to say, “I can do these things.”And when I actually ended up going for the interviews, I didn't even have certifications and I was getting those opportunities because the certifications helped me prove it, but nobody cared about the certifications, even then, and that was, like, 2017. But not to say, like, they didn't help me, but it wasn't the fact that people went, “Oh, you have a certification. We'll get you this job.”Corey: Yeah. When I'm talking to consulting clients, I've never once been asked, “Well, do you have the certifications?” Or, “Are you an AWS partner?” In my case, no, neither of those things. The reason that we know what we're doing is because we've done this before. It's the expertise approach.I question whether that would still be true if we were saying, “Oh, yeah, and we're going to drop a dozen engineers on who are going to build things out of your environment.” “Well, are they certified?” is a logical question to ask when you're bringing in an external service provider? Or is this just a bunch of people you found somewhere on Upwork or whatnot, and you're throwing them at it with no quality control? Like, what is the baseline level experience? That's a fair question. People are putting big levels of trust when they bring people in.Andrew: I mean, I could see that as a factor of some clients caring, just because like, when I used to work in startups, I knew customers where it's like their second startup, and they're flush with a lot of money, and they're deciding who they want to partner with, and they're literally looking at what level of SSL certificate they purchased, right? Like now, obviously, they're all free and they're very easy to get to get; there was one point where you had different tiers—as if you would know—and they would look and they would say—Corey: Extended validation certs attend your browser bar green. Remember those?Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like that, and they're like, “We should partner with them because they were able to afford that and we know, like…” whatever, whatever, right? So, you know, there is that kind of thought process for people at an executive level. I'm not saying it's widespread, but I've seen it.When you talk to people that are in cloud consultancy, like solutions architects, they always tell me they're driven to go get those professional certifications [unintelligible 00:22:19] their customers matter. I don't know if the customers care or not, but they seem to think so. So, I don't know if it's just more driven by those people because it's an expectation because everyone else has it, or it's like a package of things, like, you know, like the green bar in the certifications, SOC 2 compliance, things like that, that kind of wrap it up and say, “Okay, as a package, this looks really good.” So, more of an expectation, but not necessarily matters, it's just superficial; I'm not sure.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: You've been building out certifications for multiple cloud providers, so I'm curious to get your take on something that Forrest Brazeal, who's now head of content over at Google Cloud, has been talking about lately, the idea that as an engineer is advised to learn more than one cloud provider; even if you have one as a primary, learning how another one works makes you a better engineer. Now, setting aside entirely the idea that well, yeah, if I worked at Google, I probably be saying something fairly similar.Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Do you think there's validity to the idea that most people should be broad across multiple providers, or do you think specialization on one is the right path?Andrew: Sure. Just to contextualize for our listeners, Google Cloud is highly, highly promoting multi-cloud workloads, and one of their flagship products is—well, they say it's a flagship product—is Anthos. And they put a lot of money—I don't know that was subsidized, but they put a lot of money in it because they really want to push multi-cloud, right? And so when we say Forrest works in Google Cloud, it should be no surprise that he's promoting it.But I don't work for Google, and I can tell you, like, learning multi-cloud is, like, way more valuable than just staying in one vertical. It just opened my eyes. When I went from AWS to Azure, it was just like, “Oh, I'm missing out on so much in the industry.” And it really just made me such a more well-rounded person. And I went over to Google Cloud, and it was just like… because you're learning the same thing in different variations, and then you're also poly-filling for things that you will never touch.Or like, I shouldn't say you never touch, but you would never touch if you just stayed in that vertical when you're learning. So, in the industry, Azure Active Directory is, like, widespread, but if you just stayed in your little AWS box, you're not going to notice it on that learning path, right? And so a lot of times, I tell people, “Go get your CLF-C01 and then go get your AZ-900 or AZ-104.” Again, I don't care if people go and sit the exams. I want them to go learn the content because it is a large eye-opener.A lot of people are against multi-cloud from a learning perspective because say, it's too much to learn all at the same time. But a lot of people I don't think have actually gone across the cloud, right? So, they're sitting from their chair, only staying in one vertical saying, “Well, you can't learn them all at the same time.” And I'm going, “I see a way that you could teach them all at the same time.” And I might be the first person that will do it.Corey: And the principles do convey as well. It's, “Oh, well I know how SNS works on AWS, so I would never be able to understand how Google Pub/Sub works.” Those are functionally identical; I don't know that is actually true. It's just different to interface points and different guarantees, but fine. You at least understand the part that it plays.I've built things out on Google Cloud somewhat recently, and for me, every time I do, it's a refreshing eye-opener to oh, this is what developer experience in the cloud could be. And for a lot of customers, it is. But staying too far within the bounds of one ecosystem does lend itself to a loss of perspective, if you're not careful. I agree with that.Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, just the paint more of a picture of differences, like, Google Cloud has a lot about digital transformation. They just updated their—I'm not happy that they changed it, but I'm fine that they did that, but they updated their Google Digital Cloud Leader Exam Guide this month, and it like is one hundred percent all about digital transformation. So, they love talking about digital transformation, and those kind of concepts there. They are really good at defining migration strategies, like, at a high level.Over to Azure, they have their own cloud adoption framework, and it's so detailed, in terms of, like, execution, where you go over to AWS and they have, like, the worst cloud adoption framework. It's just the laziest thing I've ever seen produced in my life compared to out of all the providers in that space. I didn't know about zero-trust model until I start using Azure because Azure has Active Directory, and you can do risk-based policy procedures over there. So, you know, like, if you don't go over to these places, you're not going to get covered other places, so you're just going to be missing information till you get the job and, you know, that job has that information requiring you to know it.Corey: I would say that for someone early career—and I don't know where this falls on the list of career advice ranging from, “That is genius,” to, “Okay, Boomer,” but I would argue that figuring out what companies in your geographic area, or the companies that you have connections with what they're using for a cloud provider, I would bias for learning one enough to get hired there and from there, letting what you learn next be dictated by the environment you find yourself in. Because especially larger companies, there's always something that lives in a different provider. My default worst practice is multi-cloud. And I don't say that because multi-cloud doesn't exist, and I'm not saying it because it's a bad idea, but this idea of one workload—to me—that runs across multiple providers is generally a challenge. What I see a lot more, done intelligently, is, “Okay, we're going to use this provider for some things, this other provider for other things, and this third provider for yet more things.” And every company does that.If not, there's something very strange going on. Even Amazon uses—if not Office 365, at least exchange to run their email systems instead of Amazon WorkMail because—Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Let's be serious. That tells me a lot. But I don't generally find myself in a scenario where I want to build this application that is anything more than Hello World, where I want it to run seamlessly and flawlessly across two different cloud providers. That's an awful lot of work that I struggle to identify significant value for most workloads.Andrew: I don't want to think about securing, like, multiple workloads, and that's I think a lot of friction for a lot of companies are ingress-egress costs, which I'm sure you might have some knowledge on there about the ingress-egress costs across providers.Corey: Oh, a little bit, yeah.Andrew: A little bit, probably.Corey: Oh, throwing data between clouds is always expensive.Andrew: Sure. So, I mean, like, I call multi-cloud using multiple providers, but not in tandem. Cross-cloud is when you want to use something like Anthos or Azure Arc or something like that where you extend your data plane or control pla—whatever the plane is, whatever plane across all the providers. But you know, in practice, I don't think many people are doing cross-cloud; they're doing multi-cloud, like, “I use AWS to run my primary workloads, and then I use Microsoft Office Suite, and so we happen to use Azure Active Directory, or, you know, run particular VM machines, like Windows machines for our accounting.” You know?So, it's a mixed bag, but I do think that using more than one thing is becoming more popular just because you want to use the best in breed no matter where you are. So like, I love BigQuery. BigQuery is amazing. So, like, I ingest a lot of our data from, you know, third-party services right into that. I could be doing that in Redshift, which is expensive; I could be doing that in Azure Synapse, which is also expensive. I mean, there's a serverless thing. I don't really get serverless. So, I think that, you know, people are doing multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. I tend to do things like that myself, and whenever I see it generally makes sense. This is my general guidance. When I talk to individuals who say, “Well, we're running multi-cloud like this.” And my response is, “Great. You're probably right.”Because I'm talking in the general sense, someone building something out on day one where they don't know, like, “Everyone's saying multi-cloud. Should I do that?” No, I don't believe you should. Now, if your company has done that intentionally, rather than by accident, there's almost certainly a reason and context that I do not have. “Well, we have to run our SaaS application in multiple cloud providers because that's where our customers are.” “Yeah, you should probably do that.” But your marketing, your billing systems, your back-end reconciliation stuff generally does not live across all of those providers. It lives in one. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I think we're in violent agreement here.Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Kubernetes obviously is becoming very popular because people believe that they'll have a lot more mobility, Whereas when you use all the different managed—and I'm still learning Kubernetes myself from the next certification I have coming out, like, study course—but, you know, like, those managed services have all different kind of kinks that are completely different. And so, you know, it's not going to be a smooth process. And you're still leveraging, like, for key things like your database, you're not going to be running that in Kubernetes Cluster. You're going to be using a managed service.And so, those have their own kind of expectations in terms of configuration. So, I don't know, it's tricky to say what to do, but I think that, you know, if you have a need for it, and you don't have a security concern—like, usually it's security or cost, right, for multi-cloud.Corey: For me, at least, the lock-in has always been twofold that people don't talk about. More—less lock-in than buy-in. One is the security model where IAM is super fraught and challenging and tricky, and trying to map a security model to multiple providers is super hard. Then on top of that, you also have the buy-in story of a bunch of engineers who are very good at one cloud provider, and that skill set is not in less demand now than it was a year ago. So okay, you're going to start over and learn a new cloud provider is often something that a lot of engineers won't want to countenance.If your team is dead set against it, there's going to be some friction there and there's going to be a challenge. I mean, for me at least, to say that someone knows a cloud provider is not the naive approach of, “Oh yeah, they know how it works across the board.” They know how it breaks. For me, one of the most valuable reasons to run something on AWS is I know what a failure mode looks like, I know how it degrades, I know how to find out what's going on when I see that degradation. That to me is a very hard barrier to overcome. Alternately, it's entirely possible that I'm just old.Andrew: Oh, I think we're starting to see some wins all over the place in terms of being able to learn one thing and bring it other places, like OpenTelemetry, which I believe is a cloud-native Kubernetes… CNCF. I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Linux Foundation, but for cloud-native. And so OpenTelemetry is just a standardized way of handling your logs, metrics, and traces, right? And so maybe CloudWatch will be the 1.0 of observability in AWS, and then maybe OpenTelemetry will become more of the standard, right, and so maybe we might see more managed services like Prometheus and Grafa—well, obviously, AWS has a managed Prometheus, but other things like that. So, maybe some of those things will melt away. But yeah, it's hard to say what approach to take.Corey: Yeah, I'm wondering, on some level, whether what the things we're talking about today, how well that's going to map forward. Because the industry is constantly changing. The guidance I would give about should you be in cloud five years ago would have been a nuanced, “Mmm, depends. Maybe for yes, maybe for no. Here's the story.” It's a lot less hedge-y and a lot less edge case-y these days when I answer that question. So, I wonder in five years from now when we look back at this podcast episode, how well this discussion about what the future looks like, and certifications, and multi-cloud, how well that's going to reflect?Andrew: Well, when we look at, like, Kubernetes or Web3, we're just seeing kind of like the standardized boilerplate way of doing a bunch of things, right, all over the place. This distributed way of, like, having this generic API across the board. And how well that will take, I have no idea, but we do see a large split between, like, serverless and cloud-natives. So, it's like, what direction? Or we'll just have both? Probably just have both, right?Corey: [Like that 00:33:08]. I hope so. It's been a wild industry ride, and I'm really curious to see what changes as we wind up continuing to grow. But we'll see. That's the nice thing about this is, worst case, if oh, turns out that we were wrong on this whole cloud thing, and everyone starts exodusing back to data centers, well, okay. That's the nice thing about being a small company. It doesn't take either of us that long to address the reality we see in the industry.Andrew: Well, that or these cloud service providers are just going to get better at offering those services within carrier hotels, or data centers, or on your on-premise under your desk, right? So… I don't know, we'll see. It's hard to say what the future will be, but I do believe that cloud is sticking around in one form or another. And it basically is, like, an essential skill or table stakes for anybody that's in the industry. I mean, of course, not everywhere, but like, mostly, I would say. So.Corey: Andrew, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about your opinions, how you view these things, et cetera. Where can they find you?Andrew: You know, I think the best place to find me right now is Twitter. So, if you go to twitter.com/andrewbrown—all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens—you'll find me there. I'm so surprised I was able to get that handle. It's like the only place where I have my handle.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:25]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Andrew: Well, thanks for having me on the show.Corey: Andrew Brown, co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training and so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me that I do not understand certifications at all because you're an accountant, and certifications matter more in that industry.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Azure Synapse Link is a feature coming to SQL Server in the next release. While there are few details on what the new feature will look like, we discuss how this same service is implemented in other Azure services. The show notes and video for this episode can found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2022/01/05/episode-240-azure-synapse-link. Have fun on the SQL Trail!

This is episode 215 recorded on December 17th, 2021 where John & Jason talk to Kim Manis, Director of Product for Azure Synapse. Kim fills us in on what Synapses is, exactly, why it should matter to Power BI users, and shares her vision on the future of both Synapse and Power BI. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

A first look at SQL Server 2022—the latest Azure-enabled database and data integration innovations. See what it means for your hybrid workloads, including first-time bi-directional high availability and disaster recovery between Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server, Azure Synapse Link integration with SQL for ETL free near real-time reporting and analytics over your operational data, and new next-generation built-in query intelligence with parameter sensitive plan optimization. Bob Ward, SQL engineering leader, joins Jeremy Chapman to share the focus on this round of updates. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Introduction 00:38 - Overview of updates 02:19 - Disaster recovery 04:26 - Failover and restore example 06:16 - Azure Synapse integration 09:04 - Built-in query intelligence 10:19 - See it in action 12:52 - Wrap up ► Link References: Learn more about SQL Server 2022 at https://aka.ms/SQLServer2022 Apply to join our private preview, and try it out at https://aka.ms/EAPSignUp ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft's official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen via podcast here: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ 

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team's collective brain power got a boost from guest hosts Rob Martin of the FinOps Foundation and Ben Garrison of JumpCloud. Also, AWS releases Data Exchange, Google automates Cloud DLP, and Azure Synapse Analytics is available for pre-purchase.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

Data engineering is one of the most involved, dull, and repetitive tasks in the data industry today. Bringing up the subject is a sure way to instantly clear the room at a party or make your friends groan in despair. The work includes a lot of complicated tools, many, many lines of code, and a not-insignificant amount of gnashing of teeth. But what if I told you there is a way to quickly, easily, and cheaply do both data engineering and data exploration on most data without even having to import it into a database? What if I told you that Azure Synapse has a just about magical tool that can instantly connect to flat files and make them available as nice, well-behaved tables? I'm talking about Azure Synapse serverless pools, a great tool for both initial exploration and surprisingly complex data engineering. I'll walk you through what it is, how to set it up, and give you a few examples of basic data exploration, as well as a tad more complex data engineering. Oh, and did I mention you can actually store the end result in several different formats as well...?[00:56] Azure Synapse Serverless Pools Overview[01:54] Demo[11:05] Getting startedResources:Andy Cutler's blog on serverless poolsAndy Mallon's blog on bucketing with T-SQLAbout Alexander Arvidsson:Alexander is a principal solutions architect at Attollo in Sweden. Nobody really knows what it means to be a principal solutions architect, but he spends his days speaking, teaching courses or helping clients of all shapes and sizes to take better care of their data.He has spent the last 25 years toying with data, databases and related infrastructure services such as storage, networking and virtualization, occasionally emerging from the technical darkness to attend a Star Wars convention somewhere in the world.He is a frequent international speaker, Data Platform MVP, podcaster, Pluralsight author, blogger and a Microsoft Certified Trainer, focusing on the Microsoft data platform stack.About MVPs:Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community. They are always on the "bleeding edge" and have an unstoppable urge to get their hands on new, exciting technologies. They have a very deep knowledge of Microsoft products and services, while also being able to bring together diverse platforms, products, and solutions, to solve real-world problems. MVPs make up a global community of over 4,000 technical experts and community leaders across 90 countries/regions and are driven by their passion, community spirit, and the quest for knowledge. Above all and in addition to their amazing technical abilities, MVPs are always willing to help others - that's what sets them apart. Learn more: https://aka.ms/mvpprogram

Data engineering is one of the most involved, dull, and repetitive tasks in the data industry today. Bringing up the subject is a sure way to instantly clear the room at a party or make your friends groan in despair. The work includes a lot of complicated tools, many, many lines of code, and a not-insignificant amount of gnashing of teeth. But what if I told you there is a way to quickly, easily, and cheaply do both data engineering and data exploration on most data without even having to import it into a database? What if I told you that Azure Synapse has a just about magical tool that can instantly connect to flat files and make them available as nice, well-behaved tables? I'm talking about Azure Synapse serverless pools, a great tool for both initial exploration and surprisingly complex data engineering. I'll walk you through what it is, how to set it up, and give you a few examples of basic data exploration, as well as a tad more complex data engineering. Oh, and did I mention you can actually store the end result in several different formats as well...?[00:56] Azure Synapse Serverless Pools Overview[01:54] Demo[11:05] Getting startedResources:Andy Cutler's blog on serverless poolsAndy Mallon's blog on bucketing with T-SQLAbout Alexander Arvidsson:Alexander is a principal solutions architect at Attollo in Sweden. Nobody really knows what it means to be a principal solutions architect, but he spends his days speaking, teaching courses or helping clients of all shapes and sizes to take better care of their data.He has spent the last 25 years toying with data, databases and related infrastructure services such as storage, networking and virtualization, occasionally emerging from the technical darkness to attend a Star Wars convention somewhere in the world.He is a frequent international speaker, Data Platform MVP, podcaster, Pluralsight author, blogger and a Microsoft Certified Trainer, focusing on the Microsoft data platform stack.About MVPs:Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community. They are always on the "bleeding edge" and have an unstoppable urge to get their hands on new, exciting technologies. They have a very deep knowledge of Microsoft products and services, while also being able to bring together diverse platforms, products, and solutions, to solve real-world problems. MVPs make up a global community of over 4,000 technical experts and community leaders across 90 countries/regions and are driven by their passion, community spirit, and the quest for knowledge. Above all and in addition to their amazing technical abilities, MVPs are always willing to help others - that's what sets them apart. Learn more: https://aka.ms/mvpprogram

We discuss Qlik Data Integration with Azure Synapse to enable real-time insights on SAP data with our guests Matt Hayes and Kevin Pardue Show Insight: Extend and Innovate is not an official Gartner Magic Quadrant item; the show refers to it as a collection of individual things such as EiPaaS, Cloud DBMS, Analytics, IoT, Low Code, PaaS, etc. Reference Links Gain real-time insights on SAP ERP data with Azure and Qlik Data Integration: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gain-realtime-insights-on-sap-erp-data-with-azure-and-qlik-data-integration/ Efficient SAP data replication to Azure (Case Study): https://www.qlik.com/us/-/media/files/resource-library/global-us/direct/case-studies/cs-greene-tweed-qdi-partner-case-study-en.pdf

Josh Caplan, Sabin Nair, and Priyanka Langade join Scott Hanselman to show how you can use native Azure Synapse Analytical runtimes to analyze Dataverse data and get actionable insights.  Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner.  Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is the fastest path to success for you to slice and dice large volumes of Dataverse data and run AI and ML on it. [0:00:00]– Intro[0:00:51]– Josh Caplan: Overview[0:03:20]– Sabin Nair: Dataverse and the Power Apps Portal[0:08:32]– Priyanka Langade: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse[0:12:51]– Josh Caplan: Wrap-upAccelerate time to insight with Azure Synapse Link for DataverseWhat is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to AzureCreate an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace (Preview)Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse integration (YouTube)Create a free account (Azure)

Josh Caplan, Sabin Nair, and Priyanka Langade join Scott Hanselman to show how you can use native Azure Synapse Analytical runtimes to analyze Dataverse data and get actionable insights.  Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner.  Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is the fastest path to success for you to slice and dice large volumes of Dataverse data and run AI and ML on it. [0:00:00]– Intro[0:00:51]– Josh Caplan: Overview[0:03:20]– Sabin Nair: Dataverse and the Power Apps Portal[0:08:32]– Priyanka Langade: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse[0:12:51]– Josh Caplan: Wrap-upAccelerate time to insight with Azure Synapse Link for DataverseWhat is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to AzureCreate an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace (Preview)Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse integration (YouTube)Create a free account (Azure)

Josh Caplan, Sabin Nair, and Priyanka Langade join Scott Hanselman to show how you can use native Azure Synapse Analytical runtimes to analyze Dataverse data and get actionable insights. Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner. Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is the fastest path to success for you to slice and dice large volumes of Dataverse data and run AI and ML on it. [0:00:00]– Intro[0:00:51]– Josh Caplan: Overview[0:03:20]– Sabin Nair: Dataverse and the Power Apps Portal[0:08:32]– Priyanka Langade: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse[0:12:51]– Josh Caplan: Wrap-upAccelerate time to insight with Azure Synapse Link for DataverseWhat is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to AzureCreate an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace (Preview)Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse integration (YouTube)Create a free account (Azure)

Josh Caplan, Sabin Nair, and Priyanka Langade join Scott Hanselman to show how you can use native Azure Synapse Analytical runtimes to analyze Dataverse data and get actionable insights. Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner. Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is the fastest path to success for you to slice and dice large volumes of Dataverse data and run AI and ML on it. [0:00:00]– Intro[0:00:51]– Josh Caplan: Overview[0:03:20]– Sabin Nair: Dataverse and the Power Apps Portal[0:08:32]– Priyanka Langade: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse[0:12:51]– Josh Caplan: Wrap-upAccelerate time to insight with Azure Synapse Link for DataverseWhat is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to AzureCreate an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace (Preview)Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse integration (YouTube)Create a free account (Azure)

Josh Caplan, Sabin Nair, and Priyanka Langade join Scott Hanselman to show how you can use native Azure Synapse Analytical runtimes to analyze Dataverse data and get actionable insights. Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner. Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is the fastest path to success for you to slice and dice large volumes of Dataverse data and run AI and ML on it. [0:00:00]– Intro[0:00:51]– Josh Caplan: Overview[0:03:20]– Sabin Nair: Dataverse and the Power Apps Portal[0:08:32]– Priyanka Langade: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse[0:12:51]– Josh Caplan: Wrap-upAccelerate time to insight with Azure Synapse Link for DataverseWhat is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to AzureCreate an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace (Preview)Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse integration (YouTube)Create a free account (Azure)

In Episode 55 of the SAP on Azure Video Podcast we talk about BTP High availability setups, resizing peered Azure virtual networks, GitHub Codespaces, Logic App & SAP and look at using Azure NetApp Files for the SAP Global transport directory. Then Bartosz Jarkowski introduces us to his latest blog post series on the SAP Community Network about using OData services with Azure Synapse Pipelines. He is even doing a live publication of his latest episode: Part 6 – Introduction to delta extraction. https://youtu.be/Yn4_JTYgGaY https://github.com/hobru/SAPonAzure

In Episode 53 of the SAP on Azure Video Podcast we talk about lessons learned from Microsoft Digitals SAP on Azure migration, a look at Azure Global Infrastructure, working with Azure Synapse and OData Part 4, Terraform and Ansible with RedHat, OAuth to SuccessFactors from SAP Cloud Integration and moving file shares to Azure Files SMB. Then Ralf Klahr joins us to talk about SAP HANA system refresh with local secure store and Azure NetApp Files. https://youtu.be/Al30Ufo2Z2M https://github.com/hobru/SAPonAzure https://github.com/hobru/SAPonAzure/blob/master/Presentations/ANF_Training_Part_IV.pdf

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

The Hashmap RTE team sits down with Hashmap On Tap host Kelly Kohlleffel to provide a sneak-peek into their recent 2021 Cloud Data Platform Benchmarking and Analysis where they spent 400+ hours comparing Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, & Databricks using the industry-standard TPC-DC dataset measuring query performance, load rates, transformation speed, and overall cost across 33 dimensions to provide an unbiased perspective and see how they shape up. Listen in to find out how they achieved their in-depth technical analysis. Show Notes: 2021 Cloud Data Platform Benchmark Analysis Workshop: https://www.hashmapinc.com/snowflake-benchmarking On tap for today's episode: Matcha Green Tea, Yogi Blueberry Slim Life, Lipton Black Tea, & Chai Tea Contact Us: https://www.hashmapinc.com/reach-out

Vesa Tikkanen on Twitter Vesa Tikkanen on LinkedIn Azure Synapse Analytics (Microsoft Docs) Azure Databricks (Microsoft Docs) Getting started with Snowflake on Azure (Snowflake.com)

https://themummichogblog.com/azure-synapse-analytics-come-funziona12-06-2020/ Azure Synapse Analytics: Come Funziona Guarda come i clienti sono sempre più dai loro dati Registrati GRATIS Dicci qualcosa su di te. Nome di battesimo * Cognome * E-mail * Nome della ditta * Dimensione aziendale * Ruolo * Telefono * Paese / Regione ... * Iscriviti ora *campi richiesti Mercoledì 17 giugno 2020 10:00-11: 00 ora del Pacifico Una cultura basata sui dati è fondamentale per le aziende di oggi. soluzioni cloud di analisi possono aiutare a ridurre i costi per la vostra piattaforma di analisi, il tempo di velocità per intuizione, e massimizzare il ROI. Unisciti a noi per questo evento virtuale di ascoltare direttamente dai clienti che utilizzano le più recenti caratteristiche Azure Synapse. Vedere i loro demo tecniche che mettono in risalto come:

Chris Savage, IT Leader and Azure Synapse expert discusses AI: How machine learning delivers valuable business intelligence Spotting people hiding behind spreadsheets & PowerPoint presentations Due Diligence, governance, and learning to delegate The 286 days in Austin networking our homes Managing people effectively and the heartaches you’ll encounter Resources and support for new IT leaders...

In Episode #41 we talk about even more SAP certified machines on Azure, Azure Application Consistent Snapshot, price reduction for Azure Ultra Disks, Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks, Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platform, Azure Static Web Apps, discussions with the Logic Apps team, Power Platform & IoT, Using the SAP ERP Connector, SAP Digital Heroes at SAP, updated Azure architecture icons, Microsoft Digitals insights into SAP, SAP Business ByDesign for Teams and an upcoming Q&A with Jürgen Müller. Then Roman Broich takes us on an end-to-end tour to connect and extract data from SAP into an Azure data lake, using Synapse to create views and then visualize the data in Power BI and Notebooks. https://github.com/hobru/SAPonAzure

Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/296

Microsoft has been making significant waves in the analytics and data governance space recently with its release of Azure Synapse and Purview. Join Matt Smith, Microsoft’s CDO for the West Enterprise shares Microsoft’s Go To Market strategy to enable digital and data transformation in the enterprise. Matt will share his career and customer experiences and how they have influenced Microsoft’s customer and partner ecosystem to achieve more.    What you will learn during this session: Enabling change without changing How platform convergence is enabling acceleration Democratizing AI for all workers Adoption of groundbreaking innovation on the front lines Enabling enterprises to get their arms around their data corpus.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Bruno Borges (@brunoborges) about: YAML is a great technology to see whitespaces, JSON to YAML conversion, merging YAML is painful, CSV is also great for reading, servers vs runtimes, Microsoft acquired JClarity, Microsoft sponsors adoptopenjdk.net project since 2018, a new Java Engineering Group was formed at Microsoft, Microsoft contributed patches to openJDK project, Microsoft has thousands of Java develoepers, Minecraft Java Edition allows modifications, Microsoft releases GPU optimized Java, linked-in's and Yammer's backends are implemented in Java, Azure Synapse is similar to Google's Big Query, Microsoft is going to release a double screen Android phone - Surface Duo, now you can deploy Java FX applications to Microsoft's hardware, Microsoft Azure Application Hosting Service with Azul JDK based on Zulu Community Edition, App Service comes with predefined Java images, App Service might be a use case to deploy uber JARs, App Service supports the separation of infrastructure and application code, Quarkus and Helidon are separating the runtime from the application code out-of-the-box, serverless deployment of Java code as Azure Functions is also supported, Java 11 is going to be supported on Azure Functions, Azure Container Instances is Docker without Orchestration, Azure Kubernetes Service - full experience with YAML included, JVM is monitored in Azure Kubernetes and Azure Container Instances out-of-the-box, a Java agent is injected which enables monitoring, MicroProfile on Azure, MicroProfile Config with Azure Key Vault, secret injection and JWT authentication are important use cases, opentelemetry merges integrates tracing and metrics: opentelemetry.io, JAX-RS monitoring, business monitoring with MicroProfile metrics, pulling metrics from database instead of pulling from the service, avoiding wasteful metrics, Quarkus saves RAM, garbage collection and metrics, Microsoft employs the most Java Champions?, Visual Studio Live Share, managing multiple JDKs: article on medium, azure.com/free, Bruno Borges on twitter: @brunoborges and LinkedIn

What was going to be a podcast episode largely recapping Ignite 2019 has become much more. There were two important Microsoft partnership updates this week and a notable ISV acquisition, all which deserved some discussion. We also recap Ignite 2019 news and observations, plus other notable events of recent weeks like license margin changes and Dynamics 365 product re-alignment. Articles referenced in this episode include: Salesforce draws closer to Microsoft with Azure usage, Teams integration Adobe and Microsoft announce broad new round of integration update plans Mediagrif to acquire k-eCommerce Microsoft to drop margins on Dynamics ERP, CRM perpetual licenses Ignite 2019: Microsoft has doubled production customers on Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations in last year Ignite 2019: Microsoft looking to Teams integration as one way to accelerate Power Platform usage Ignite 2019: Microsoft emphasizes strategic value, technical growth of Azure Ignite 2019: Microsoft moves into RPA with latest Power Platform updates Ignite 2019: Microsoft says Azure Synapse is the next evolution of cloud data analytics With Customer Engagement relegated to on-prem, partners will bear the Dynamics 365 branding burden With Microsoft talking e-commerce, established players see opportunity and challenge With Microsoft's DoD JEDI cloud contract win, partners are optimistic on the possibilities