Rob Sewell

Managing Azure SQL or Fabric SQL by hand doesn't scale. In this workshop, Jess Pomfret and Rob Sewell show you how to deploy both your Azure SQL infrastructure and your database schemas as code.

Managing Azure SQL or Fabric SQL by hand doesn’t scale. In this workshop, Jess Pomfret and Rob Sewell show you how to deploy both your Azure SQL infrastructure and your database schemas as code.

Modern data teams spend their days designing pipelines, modelling schemas, and wrestling with requirements — but what happens when those same skills escape the office and take over your home? Learn how tinkering at home teaches lessons about requirements, error handling, resilience, scope creep, and communication — and how those lessons flow back into your day job (but in a fun way) We'll even include some Microsoft Fabric. You will see how a simple “let’s automate a light switch” experiment spiralled into a full‑blown, event‑driven, high‑availability, occasionally‑over‑engineered home automation ecosystem. A house that thinks for itself. No home automation experience is required — just curiosity and a willingness to laugh at the familiar chaos of scope creep. We’ll look at how personal tinkering projects become powerful learning tools: how designing a reliable smart‑home workflow mirrors building production‑grade data systems; how debugging flaky sensors teaches you more about error handling than any textbook; and how “disaster recovery” takes on new meaning when your heating system depends on your YAML being valid. Along the way, we’ll explore the two‑way learning loop between home and work: how professional practices improve your home automations, and how home automations sharpen your professional instincts. You’ll leave with new ideas, a few cautionary tales, and a renewed appreciation for how fun, messy, and surprisingly educational side projects can be. Whether you’re building a data platform or just trying to stop your lights from turning off while you’re in the shower.

Learn how tinkering at home teaches lessons about requirements, error handling, resilience, scope creep, and communication — and how those lessons flow back into your day job (but in a fun way)

Let us show you how easy it is to use PowerShell to accomplish many everyday tasks straight from the command line with the community-developed modules dbatools and dbachecks. We will take you beyond ‘dbatools in a Month of Lunches’, into more advanced scenarios and show you how effective and efficient PowerShell can make you. Join Jess Pomfret and Rob Sewell, two of the ‘dbatools in a Month of Lunches’ authors, and take your dbatools and dbachecks skills to the next level. We will show you the skills, scripts, and tricks that we have learned with dbatools and dbachecks and tell you how they have rocketed our careers. There will be many practical examples of how dbatools and dbachecks can help to save time in DBA administration duties such as: • Finding SQL Instances on your estate • High Availability and Disaster Recovery scenarios • Working with Replication • Backup Testing • Instance migrations • Validating your estate with dbachecks • dbatools and dbachecks in DevOps processes • Using PowerShell in the cloud (i.e. working with Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance) • PowerShell coding for performance • Using dbatools and dbachecks in Azure Functions and Azure Runbooks Take your dbatools and dbachecks skills to the next level and become more effective in your role. Register now to reserve your spot!

Committing code is an integral part of the development lifecycle. However, not all commits or commit messages are created equal. As more data professionals are required or expected to use source control within a continuous integration or deployment solution, a lack of good information is reducing the efficacy and usefulness of commit messages. In this session we will explore the source control system git, what makes a commit and what a commit message is for. We will also learn what makes a good, and a bad, commit message and how to automatically link commit messages to User Stories and release notes. You will leave this session with a better understanding of commits and commit messages and useful guidance to make them most effective for yourself and for your team.

Committing code is an integral part of the development lifecycle. However, not all commits or commit messages are created equal. As more data professionals are required or expected to use source control within a continuous integration or deployment solution, a lack of good information is...

Das letzte Mal haben wir meiner technikaffinen Frau Fabric erklärt. Dieses Mal werden wir einige gängige Themen zur psychischen Gesundheit mit der Sprache der Technologie erklären.

Committing code is an integral part of the development lifecycle. However, not all commits or commit messages are created equal. As more data professionals are required or expected to use source control within a continuous integration or deployment solution, a lack of good information is reducing the efficacy and usefulness of commit messages. In this session we will explore the source control system git, what makes a commit and what a commit message is for. We will also learn what makes a good, and a bad, commit message and how to automatically link commit messages to User Stories and release notes.   You will leave this session with a better understanding of commits and commit messages and useful guidance to make them most effective for yourself and for your team.

Wie ich meiner technik-affinen Frau, Fabric und deren leistungsfähige Datenanalyse erkläre Das Erlernen einer neuen Technologie wie Fabric ähnelt dem Erlernen einer neuen Sprache. Es gibt unbekannte Wörter, Grammatik und Konzepte, aber vieles ist ähnlich zu dem, was du bereits kennst.

The fast, ever changing world of development is always bringing enhancements and improvements to the tooling that can be used for development. This session will take a tour through the new capabilities for Azure SQL Database development and show you how they can improve your development and reduce your time to deployment.

The fast, ever changing world of development is always bringing enhancements and improvements to the tooling that can be used for development. This session will take a tour through the new capabilities for Azure SQL Database development and show you how they can improve your development and reduce your time to deployment. The new sqlcmd has so many more features available to enable quick efficient development of databases. The data api builder exposes a modern REST and GraphQL endpoints to your Azure SQL Databases. azd ( the Azure Development CLI) can take you from development environment to Azure in a few short commands. After this session, you will have more knowledge about this capabilities and enough content to be able to start to explore them yourself.

Committing code is an integral part of the development lifecycle. However, not all commits or commit messages are created equal. As more data professionals are required or expected to use source control within a continuous integration or deployment solution, a lack of good information is reducing the efficacy and usefulness of commit messages. In this session we will explore the source control system git, what makes a commit and what a commit message is for. We will also learn what makes a good, and a bad, commit message and how to automatically link commit messages to User Stories and release notes. You will leave this session with a better understanding of commits and commit messages and useful guidance to make them most effective for yourself and for your team.

Introduced with SQL Server 2005 and replacing osql, sqlcmd has been a part of SQL Server professionals toolbox for a long time now. Many people only know it from the sqlcmd mode switch in SSMS, while others use it within automation as a lightweight easily available query runner. I have long recommended that DBAs are familiar with using it as it may be the only option to query an instance in severe emergencies. Times they are a changing. There is a new sqlcmd available and it has some awesome new capabilities. Let me introduce you to the new sqlcmd in a fun filled demo session and show you the new things it can do and why they will be of benefit to all Data Professionals We will cover deploying a database into a container from a backup with one command. Querying it, Opening it in Azure Data Studio, all from the command line and much more

Prepare for a thrilling journey through the skies of the data platform community as six diverse aviators of the digital realm share their high-flying experiences and the turbulence they faced en route to making a lasting impact. In this keynote, our speakers, each with a unique flight plan, will...

dbachecks v1 was released back in 2018, bringing together the DBA PowerShell magic of dbatools with pester, a PowerShell testing framework to create a powerful infrastructure validation tool. dbachecks is able to answer questions such as: - can I connect to all of my instances?

Introduced with SQL Server 2005 and replacing osql, sqlcmd has been a part of SQL Server professionals toolbox for a long time now. Many people only know it from the sqlcmd mode switch in SSMS, while others use it within automation as a lightweight easily available query runner. I have long recommended that DBAs are familiar with using it as it may be the only option to query an instance in severe emergencies. Times they are a changing. There is a new sqlcmd available and it has some awesome new capabilities. Let me introduce you to the new sqlcmd in a fun filled demo session and show you the new things it can do and why they will be of benefit to all Data Professionals We will cover deploying a database into a container from a backup with one command. Querying it, Opening it in Azure Data Studio, all from the command line and much more

Sqlcmd has had an update and there is a lot of new functionality to explore. Let me show you some of the cool and neat things that it can do in this demo filled session.

You need to deploy Azure Data solutions. You may have used the Portal. You may have used ARM templates - or not, because they're just not a joy to work with. Now your estate is growing, your team is popular and you need to control many many more resources. You know that you need to move beyond using the Portal, ARM templates are tricky. What can you do? Ben and Rob have experience and knowledge in this area. Ben has authored a training course on Bicep and Rob has spent the last 18 months helping large corporations to deploy Azure Data estates at scale. Spend a day with us and let us give you an overview of how Bicep, a domain specific language for Azure Deployments, can help you to deploy your Azure Data resources at scale using Infrastructure as Code without all the headaches that those JSON templates may have given you or the mistakes that human beings have done in the Portal. We'll explore the capabilities of Bicep in general and more specifically how using it can ease your Azure Data deployments. You will learn • What Bicep is • How to compose Bicep with VS Code • How to use the Bicep functions and operators • How to write Bicep resource files that deploy resources with the restrictions that your corporation requires • How to create Bicep modules so that you have modular repeatable resource deployment • How to create Infrastructure as Code deployments for complex resource groups • How to create Infrastructure as Code deployments for a large number of resources • How to create a pipeline in Azure DevOps to deploy the infrastructure • The challenges that you will face and some methods to overcome them We will also have a lot of fun along the way You are • Someone interested in Infrastructure as Code for cloud data resources • Interested in learning new things • Want to deploy consistently to Azure • Never heard of Bicep or pipelines If you bring a Laptop with VSCode and have an Azure Subscription (free is sufficient), we will make sure you can follow along live - otherwise, sit back, relax and enjoy the show :)

The last couple of years have been tough, but struggling with Mental Health is not just from the pandemic. Please, come and join us for a chat. Rob and Paul will also share a little of their views and some strategies and advice. Most important is that we have the chance to talk, and we make it normal to talk about Mental Health and the effect it can have, both personally and professionally. From difficulties with self-motivation and sleep patterns through working alongside people struggling with mental health issues and the line management of people dealing with them, we want to talk about it so bring your questions, comments, experiences.

Dev containers are a VS Code feature that allow us to define the perfect development environment for our project. This enables a definition of a working development environment for all of your team or your open-source contributors to be quickly and easily provisioned and updated. It will even work in a browser! No more worrying about the right hardware, software installations, dependencies, or updates. You can control it all with dev containers and make it simple and easy. In this session we'll cover why dev containers can be so useful, show off an example we built to make contributing to dbachecks (an open-source module combining pester & dbatools to test our infrastructure) easy, and how you can easily add a dev container to your own projects.

In March Jess and I gave a Training Day for 5 million* attendees about dbatools. For those that dont know, dbatools is the most popular SQL Server open source PowerShell module and has used blog posts from many of the SQL community as inspiration for over 900 million* commands written by over 4tn* contributors. As we did not know even right up till the day whether we would be delivering together or separately, in person or remotely, we decided to put our demo into a repository and deliver it from a controlled environment (two containers) using GitHub Actions, Docker Hub and VS Code. We learned some things along the way and had some fun also and we shall share this all with you. * It is highly likely that some numbers may have been exaggerated

Join Rob and Ben for a fun filled hour from the community for the community as they invite a concatenation of community experts on stage and let them show us what their favorite data platform feature is and why!

Jupyter Notebooks were once the realm of Data Scientists. New releases of Azure Data Studio, Visual Studio Code, and .NET interactive tooling have brought this tooling into the Operational team's area.

While you might have read about notebooks being used for Data Science, this session is for DBAs. You will see how you can use SQL Notebooks to simplify your work.

An Azure Data Studio recent release introduced SQL Notebooks as a capability. While you might have read about notebooks being used for Data Science, this session is for DBAs. You will see how you can use SQL Notebooks to simplify your work. You will learn about SQL Notebooks from installing them in Azure Data Studio to creating a Notebook for Glenn Berry's Diagnostic queries as well as numerous use cases for you to use in your daily workload

Come and join Hamish and Rob, two MVPs from two different continents to learn practical solutions to bring DevOps to your database. In this all day training session, based on using the Microsoft Azure platform, you will learn • The importance of getting your database code into source control. • How to test your database changes. • A process for deploying database changes that will keep Change and Release Management happy through the use of branching, Pull Requests and Approval Gates. • Some of the tools that you can use to automate build and test processes. • How to build an automated deployment process for your database with Azure DevOps. • Deploying your entire pipeline as and when it is needed from Dev to Prod saving your organisation money. Database upgrades and data in general are often the most complicated part of your deployment process, so having a robust deployment path and checks before getting to production is very important. The demonstrations will showcase practical solutions that can help you and your team bring DevOps to your database. This will include using Azure DevOps, infrastructure as code, docker containers, source control, unit test frameworks and SQL Server Data Tools – all leading up to using Kubernetes in Azure. The demonstrations will also showcase alternative methods to achieve the same result using various technology platforms and will be relevant to your workplace experiences. The training will appeal to database administrators who want to understand what DevOps is and how it can help achieve repeatable, reliable deployments to their database systems. It will also benefit developers and anyone else involved in deploying data changes who want to extend their knowledge of Continuous Delivery. This will be a fun-filled fast paced day and you will have access to all materials to take away and will learn skills which will bring immediate benefit to your organisation.

From finding all of your SQL Server instances to masking your data to supporting VLDB migrations, we had some lofty goals for dbatools 1.0. In this session, you'll find out more about the must-haves the team wanted to include before going RTM.

So, I've got my initial CI/CD pipeline set up, and now I want to work with data. What happens If I want to drop a column? What are my options if I want to prevent certain changes to certain tables? Can I source control data of my lookup tables? In this demo-rich session we look at the data side of CI/CD, because, hey, the code side is easy!

An Azure Data Studio recent release introduced SQL Notebooks as a capability. While you might have read about notebooks being used for Data Science, this session is for DBAs. You will see how you can use SQL Notebooks to simplify your work. You will learn about SQL Notebooks from installing them in Azure Data Studio to creating a Notebook for Glenn Berry's Diagnostic queries as well as numerous use cases for you to use in your daily workload