There is something equal parts interesting and frightening going on with Southwest Airlines. A bit of background - Southwest was founded by Herb Keller in 1967 and is a short-haul, low cost carrier in the US. Herb Keller was extremely operationally savvy and said from the beginning that the employees were the number one asset. During his tenure as CEO between 1967 and 2004 he was very much “in the trenches” and kept reiterating that the people were key. When he retired in 2004, the long slide into the disaster they’re facing today began, as the new CEO was all about the money (bottom line, shareholder value, etc.

I’m not a developer in any sense of the word, but even I have to at least test run some code from time to time. In this case I was setting up a test environment for my upcoming Debezium session and got acquainted with some less-than-ideal error messages in .NET. I was trying to reference a few packages in my .CSPROJ file like so: <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions.EventHubs" Version="4.3.1" /> <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Functions" Version="4.1.0" /> but I kept hitting errors: Unable to resolve 'Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions.EventHubs (>= 5.0.1)' for 'net6.0'. error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Functions (>= 4.1.0)' for 'net6.0'. Googling these errors doesn’t really result in any help - especially if you’re not a developer.

The other day I tweeted that it was time to retire one of my most successful sessions - the Untruthful Art - Five Ways of Misrepresenting Data. This resulted in some curious questions from the community - questions why I would retire such an important and obviously successful session. I dedcided to write a blog post on the state of this session and where I’m going with it next. A little bit of background First of all - “retire” (in this case) does not mean “put it on a shelf never to be used again”. Quite the opposite; the session will be retired, but not the content.

I was setting up an Azure Synapse Serverless Pools demo environment based on a the excellent data lakehouse architecture originally created by Andy Cutler. I inadvertedly created a shared access signature (SAS) token to reference my data lake storage that expired the very next day. When I went to update it, everything went pear-shaped. I’ll show you what happened to me so you can avoid it: Creating the original credentials I started with creating a scoped credential that referred to my original SAS token. CREATE DATABASE SCOPED CREDENTIAL [SasTokenAA] WITH IDENTITY = 'SHARED ACCESS SIGNATURE', SECRET = '?sv=2021-06-08&ss=b&srt=co&sp=rwdlacx&se=2022-06-16T09:07:00Z&st=2022-06-16T09:00:00Z&spr=https&sig=xxxxxxxxxx'; GO As you can see, that token was set to expire on the 8th.

I’ve been back from SQLBits for a few days and things are slowly starting to settle. It’s been quite a long while since I went to a conference this large in person. A friend of mine commented on being tired but couldn’t grasp why on earth she’d be this tired from just talking to people. I responded that it is probably because of exactly that - talking to people, in person, is not something most of us have done for the past couple of years. I’ve been on stage many, many times over many years and I like to think I’m fairly accustomed to it.

The upcoming week is a hectic one for me. On Tuesday I will be speaking virtually at the Global Power BI Summit - the brainchild of Reza Rad and Leila Etaati of New Zealand. This is an online conference literally spanning the globe. It starts on the 7th and continues to the 11th, moving with the time zones as the world turns. The list of speakers is, put simply, huge, and it feels like every speaker in the Power BI world is present. I’ll be delivering my favorite session: “the Untruthful Art - Four Ways of Misrepresenting Data” at 12:00-13:00 (CET) in Room 6 on the 7th of March.

In 2019 I spoke at 12 conferences outside of Sweden. 2020 was looking up with not only a lot of conferences planned, but also training as well as consulting all over the Nordics. It was not to be. The pandemic hit hard, and just about everything I did stopped in its tracks. When Benni de Jagere told me that they hoped to run DataMinds Connect in Mechelen, Belgium, in person in October, I was elated. The thought of getting to travel again made it an easy choice to send in a completely new abstract. I’m extremely happy to say that the abstract was accepted, and I’m excited to share my new session.

A few weeks ago I created a data lake in Azure and filled it with some CSV files. Then I spun up a Synapse Analytics Workspace and queried the files using Azure Synape Analytics On-demand pools to query the CSV files via the Synapse Analytics Studio. This works great - if you haven’t tried running SQL on text files in Azure data lake, stop reading and go check it out. Next, I created a database in the on-demand pool, and added a view to it, referencing the select OPENROWSET statement. That view can now be used in, say, Power BI or other tools that can connect to the on-demand pool endpoint.