The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
EightKB Schedule Announcement
Our first small topic was to let everyone know that EightKB is coming up soon. Registration is free and I highly recommend signing up if you’re interested in a deep dive into advanced data platform topics.
What Is Standard Edition?
The first major topic was jumped off of a comment from Erik Darling around SQL Server editions. Erik correctly notes that Standard Edition does not mean 128 GB of RAM for the database engine—it means 128 GB of buffer pool, but there is more to SQL Server than the buffer pool. And with modern versions of SQL Server, you can slam a lot more in between columnstore indexes and In-Memory OLTP. We also talked about how things have changed over time, how SQL Server 2016 SP1 is the greatest gift of all time for DBAs, and more.
Power BI Recommendations
The second major topic came from Mike, who wanted some recommendations for learning about Power BI and DAX. I immediately name-dropped The Italians, as well as Meagan Longoria, Guy in a Cube, and (though it isn’t Power BI-specific) Storytelling with Data. There’s a lot of other content, of course, but these are four of the places I’d have a new person start with.
Quick Hits on the Microsoft Data Platform
The final question came in under the wire. It was a request to explain where various Microsoft (and affiliated) data platform technologies fit: Log Analytics, Synapse, Azure Data Factory, Power BI, Databricks, SQL Server, and Microsoft Fabric. I quickly (for some definition of “quickly”) described why the different technologies exist, how they tend to serve different use cases, and where there’s overlap between the products.