Use AI To Make Your Data Job Easier (and More Fun)

Even a casual glance at the news lately shows that AI and the things it can do is all the rage. Is a lot of it overblown hype? Yes. But, does it enable technical professionals to do more than they could before? Also yes! I've been working with Azure AI for six years and it is exciting to see the convergency between low-code/no-code development tools and the power of AI in the cloud. Join me for this demo-rich session where I show you how AI-powered and connected tools can help you do your job more efficiently, help you have a little more fun at work, and possibly help you leverage your new found AI knowledge to a new job!

Azure Data Studio: One (More) Studio to (Maybe) Rule Them All?

You may have heard of Azure Data Studio and thought "my databases are on-premises, that won't work for me" or "I don't use SQL Server in Azure, I can't have that" or "I'm a DBA and that's a development tool" or many variations of those - and if you took them to heart you'd be missing out on a great tool to work your data! Is it everything for everybody? It isn't, but from notebooks to data visualization to support for multiple operating systems, there is *some*thing here for nearly everybody. It's worth 60 minutes of your time to learn about how this tool may add to (or replace) your arsenal and how powerful and flexible it can be for you. Join me for a demo-heavy walkthrough of Azure Data Studio and what it can do for you if you work with data (and who doesn't these days?).

This Is Fine - Firefighting for the DBA

Whether you've been a DBA for a week, a year, or a decade, you've likely had that day where it felt like you were fighting multiple fires at the same time. That often makes you feel like you have no idea what you're doing - but you do. I've been both an on-call DBA and a consultant in my career so I've seen how to handle firestorms like this correctly - and how to set fire to everything by handling them wrong. Join me for an hour where I share some technical tips, some horror stories, and some success stories. Hopefully you will walk away with some tips to improve your incident response while improving your sanity during the storm as well!

The Data Talks Back: Speech & Language AI for the Data Professional

AI is, was, and will be a part of our world for a long time to come. The Speech and Language areas of Azure Cognitive Services provide powerful opportunities for data professionals to enable richer reporting, create chatbots to answer repetitive questions, or just bolster their resume for their next job. Even though my day-to-day job is a DBA/Data Architect, I've worked with these AI technologies for years to provide instant information to my employees, enable richer interactions on internal and external websites, and easily localize apps and documentation to local languages. Want to know more about AI and how it can help you? Attend this session. Want to know more about AI and how it can help you level up in your career? Attend this session. Want to know more about how much fun it is to play with Language and Speech in Cognitive Services? Attend this session. Let's kickoff your AI journey, wherever it leads, together!

It's Alive!: From Doc to Bot in 60 Minutes

Chatbots take days to build, right? I need to write a bunch of code and understand how all this AI stuff works and I just don't have time for that - it's for another day. What if I told you it was possible to have a conversation with any documented information you had within an hour? Once that is setup, you can tell people to ask your bot the simple and mundane questions so you can focus on the fun part of your job. Come to this session and I'll walk you through setting up conversational AI to your own data in an hour.

I Broke It So You Don’t Have To - HA/DR Fails and Fun

You know when you go to a session and the speaker talks about all the times they and their genius has saved the day? This session is the exact opposite of that. Join me as we spend an hour discussing mistakes I’ve made over the years - big and small. We’ll talk through what you would have done better, what I ended up doing, and what we can all learn from my failures and foibles through the years. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot (right and wrong), and look forward to our conversation helping everyone in the room!

From Stutterer to Speaker: Overcoming Your Fears

Are you terrified of public speaking? For 37 years of my life, I was too! Now, when I speak at community events, I'm often asked how I got into speaking and how I got over my fears of public speaking. In this free-wheeling session I'll tell you the tips and tricks that I took to heart to go from a little kid in speech therapy to somebody that volunteers to speak in front of people and actually enjoys it. I sincerely hope this session helps encourage people to overcome their fears of public speaking - or that you at least enjoy giggling at pictures of 6-year-old me in speech therapy headphones when I lived in Worthington, OH!

Dialogue with your Data: Interactive AI with Azure Cognitive Services

Customers and users increasingly demand personal and prompt communication from companies and brands with which they interact. How can data professionals help fill that need? The incredible power and instant accessibility of the Azure Cognitive Services Language and Speech APIs, alongside other Azure services, put the power in our hands. From translating between languages for better communication to analyzing the quality of customer support communications, Azure Cognitive Services allows data professionals to enhance a company’s ability to communicate and understand. This demo-heavy session walks through practical applications of these APIs that you can apply anywhere immediately after the session.

Conversational AI with Cognitive Services: Discussions with Your Data

Customers and users increasingly demand personal and prompt communication from companies and brands with which they interact. How can data professionals help fill that need? The incredible power and instant accessibility of the Azure Cognitive Services Language and Speech APIs, alongside other Azure services, put the power in our hands. From translating between languages for better communication to analyzing the quality of customer support communications, Azure Cognitive Services allows data professionals to enhance a company’s ability to communicate and understand. This demo-heavy session walks through practical applications of these APIs that you can apply anywhere immediately after the session.

Chatbots: Talk To My Data So I Can Get Some Work Done

Are you a data professional tired of answering the same questions over and over again? Whether you're a DBA or a developer, those constant, monotonous questions can take your focus away from the task at hand. "What server is that on?" "What report contains that data?" "What environment has that bug?" While it may be considered rude to tell somebody to "talk to the hand", "go ask my chatbot" sounds less rude, more fun, and actually helpful! During this session you will learn how to build a chatbot and its underlying components so you feed it the data that will help your colleagues make decisions without interrupting your workflow. You'll also be able to supplement your data professional skills with AI and chatbot knowledge as well!

Azure-d Availability: SQL Server HA In and To the Cloud

Has your manager come to you and said "I expect the SQL Server machines to have zero downtime?" Have you been told to make your environment "Always On" without any guidance (or budget) as to how to do that or what that means? Are you facing pressure to have data in Azure as well? Help is here! This session will walk you through the high availability options in on-premises SQL Server, the high availability options in Azure SQL Database and Managed Instances, and how some or all of those can be combined to enable you to achieve the ambitious goals of your management. Beyond the academic knowledge, we'll discuss frequently seen scenarios from the field covering exactly how your on-premises environments and Azure services can work together to keep your phone quiet at night.

Crushing a Cloud Migration: Moving Mountains While Migrating Data

Are you an architect or DBA who has been tasked with executing a cloud migration? Are you a consultant who is trying to wrestle with the scale and scope of a cloud migration for a client? While there are certainly technical issues to solve and tooling selections to understand and execute, what often gets lost in a migration are the political and organizational mountains that need to be moved for the project to be successful. Technical success will not happen with our organizational success - they work hand in hand to lead to a successful conclusion.

As we walk through this session we will discuss and demo the technologies and tools that are useful for a cloud migration - and we\'ll review some that are not useful and talk about why they should be avoided. We will also mix in discussions of successful migrations and how the team worked together to move those organizational and political mountains out of the way in order to execute a successful cloud migration to make clients, customers.

Can be delivered from 50-75 minutes in length