Tag Archives: SQLDatabase

SQLSaturday Redmond(SQLSat212) – A quick recap !

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That was indeed a great day at Redmond. I had a great time talking to some of the best SQLServer minds and learned something new.

It all started with a wonderful keynote by Buck Woody(B/T),and he delivered quite an interesting talk on SQLServer history. A journey way back from 1989 to 2012.

SQLSat2121

The first session which I attended was AlwaysOn – Finally, A usable ‘mirror’! by Jim Murphy(B/T). This was a beginner level session and Jim delivered it really well. I/m sure anyone who is new to Always ON AGs had lot of takeaways from this session. Jim spoke quite a lot about VNN  – Availability Group listener and gave some good demos on how flexible Always ON AGs fail-over is.

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Attending the 2nd session was really a challenge for me. There were 3 sessions happening at the same time and all 3 were interesting to me. This is when things gets really tricky.

Finally I decided to attend the session Being the DBA of the future – a world of on-premise and cloud by Dandy Weyn as I’m focusing on a lot of things related to cloud these days, and eventually will move lot of things to the cloud.

This was an intermediate level session and I had lot of take away’s from this session. Dandy was a great speaker and he gave some cool demos by setting up a virtual machine in Windows Azure platform and showed some real networking concepts to connect that VM to your domain. This was something which I was really looking for.

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After a yummy lunch(Yep, SQLSaturday offers great food too) I was all set for the big one.

This was one session I was eagerly waiting for, Machine Learning for Mere Mortals by Dev Nambi (B/T).  The session was super exciting and everything was new to me for this one. Machine learning is all about building predictive models from available data. Dev gave multiple real life examples and gave some good demos explaining the concept from a high level perspective. Lot of learning for me and I’m looking forward to read/explore more on this.

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Next up was Windows Azure SQL Database – your cloud database by Scott Klein . This was a Windows Azure SQL Database 101 talk and Scott was a real good speaker. There were couple of good demos explaining the whole SQLDatabase concepts and he was kind enough to answer my multiple questions offline via an email after the event.

The final session for the day was like icing on the cake. I have no words to describe how useful was the session Why I Won’t Be Hiring You by Nicholas Cain(B/T). The session was all about how good you need to present your resume to a recruiter. The session was really interactive and there were lot of great questions. Nicholas is a super nice speaker and he really knows what he is talking about. Kudos to him !

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I had a great time meeting and talking to wonderful #SQLFamily members and my first SQLSaturday experience was indeed memorable.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more.

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SQLSailor is exploring(Part1) – Creating my first SQL Database on Windows Azure

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The all new Windows Azure platform was announced yesterday by Scott Gu(CVP,Windows Azure Application Platform) and an online event was hosted here at http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/

You can watch the recorded keynote on demand here at http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/Conversations

There were lot of new features announced yesterday, and the whole event was packed with heavy and exciting demos.

You can refer the blog post written by ScottGu to get a feel of what Windows Azure is going to offer during the coming days.

Another good blog post written by Bob Kelly explains the new services and changes for the existing services can be read here

The new portal looks really cool. It’s all HTML 5 and metro style enabled. Let’s see what Paras Doshi(B/T) has to say about the portal here.

I decided to start playing with the portal to understand more about the offerings, and as always my first attention was towards SQL Database.

Windows Azure SQL Database is a relational database service offered on the Windows Azure platform.Its based on SQL Server 2012.

Here is my experience creating the first ever SQL Database on Azure –

Portal View

The interface is really neat with metro style layouts.

SQL Database Creation(Initial Steps)

There is a wizard to guide you to start creating the database, and there are two options Quick Create and Custom Create

I decided to go with Custom Create as that option will give me better control on what I am doing.

The wizard comes again with cool interface asking me to enter the Name, Edition, Max Size, Collation, Server details.

There are 2 edition selection options  WEB and BUSINESS.Web edition will allow max size of the database as 5 GB and Business edition allows max size of the database as 150 GB.

I am using the evaluation subscription, so I decided to choose the web edition with 1GB limit.

I also entered the New SQL Database Server option as this was the first time I am creating a database, and I had setup no server for this subscription.

The next option was to add a Login (Only SQL login option is available), password, confirmation and region where you want the server to be deployed.

Confirmation for SQL Database Availability

In a matter of seconds (3 or 5 !) the database was up and running on cloud.

Conclusion


The new Windows Azure platform is really powerful, flexible and friendly and over the next few days I will write more about my experience working with SQL Databases and much more.

Keep checking this space for more !

Thanks for reading.