Archive: November 2016

  • SQL in Seattle – My PASS Summit 2016

    This year was my first time at the PASS summit in Seattle. I’d of course been to plenty of other community events and conferences, but this was the big one! Spanning 3x days with 15x tracks to choose from in 4x rounds of sessions per day. Excluding precons. Really words don’t do the event or the venue justice. It’s massive. You basically need to see it for yourself. Which leads to the question, why write a blog post about it?…

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  • SQL Server 2016 Licensing Changes, SP1, v.Next CTP1, etc.

    By now you’ve probably heard the exciting news announced at today’s Microsoft Connect conference; SQL Server licensing is changing, significantly, from SQL 2016 SP1. The functionality of SQL Server Standard, Web & Express editions are being brought up to [almost, 99%] match that of Enterprise Edition. This has a number of critical impacts: Developers can write applications using a single set of SQL Server functionality, and can…

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  • Creating Azure Data Factory Custom Activities

    When creating an Azure Data Factory (ADF) solution you’ll quickly find that currently it’s connectors are pretty limited to just other Azure services and the T within ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is completely missing altogether. In these situations where other functionality is required we need to rely on the extensibility of Custom Activities. A Custom Activity allows the use of .Net programming within your ADF pipeline.…

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