The John Barker Mentoring Project

John Barker retired from the US Air Force in or around 1975. He returned home to rural Blackstone Virginia, in part to help care for his aging parents. He had experience in electronics as a technician and built a Southwest Technical Products M6800 computer kit. Although I’m not sure this is an accurate image of …
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XMheck (formerly “XMhell”)

09 Aug 2023 Update: Yitzhak Khabinsky and I met via Microsoft Teams to continue the conversation that started in the comments section of this post and was continued on LinkedIn.  There will likely be more to come… Why Use XML to Transfer Data? I asked Brave Search, “Why use XML?” Brave responded with a Summarizer …
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Presenting A Day of Azure Data Factory at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2023 – BI & Analytics Edition

I am honored to present A Day of Azure Data Factory at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2023 – BI & Data Analytics Edition (#1042) 24 Feb 2023! Abstract In this session we provision an Azure Data Factory (ADF) and demonstrate many uses for ADF in the modern data enterprise, including: Editing ADF pipeline JSON Version control integration Copying data …
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Enterprise Data Warehouse Maintenance Costs More Than Development

This post is part of a series titled Enterprise Data Warehouses: Uncomfortable Truths. There are cases where developing Enterprise Data Warehouses costs less than maintaining Enterprise Data Warehouses. Which cases? When enterprises do not maintain their Data Warehouse, EDW maintenance costs nothing (or nearly nothing). One side-effect of not maintaining an EDW is the Enterprise Data …
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Enterprise Data Warehouse: Uncomfortable Truths

Most enterprises recognize the need to capture, store, collect, and surface enterprise data analytics. Why, then, do most enterprise data warehouse projects disappoint or outright fail? The author proposes to share three reasons gleaned from decades of delivering and writing about data warehouse solutions: Enterprise Data Warehouse Maintenance Costs More Than Development Enterprise Data Warehouse …
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In 2020, Two Full Training Days, Two Continents

It dawned on me that I am honored to deliver two full-day conference training presentations in early 2020 on two continents! At the Difinity 2020 conference in Auckland New Zealand, Sandy Winarko and I are co-presenting Intelligent Data Integration with SSIS and Azure Data Factory 20 Feb 2020. Sandy is Principal Program Manager – Azure …
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My PASS Summit 2019 Presentations

SSIS DevOps and Azure Containers I was honored to co-present SSIS DevOps and Azure Containers with Sreeja Pullagura and Elizabeth Baron. Liz and Sreeja work for Teach for America, a really cool non-profit headquartered in NYC. This was their very first time presenting at the PASS Summit. We were even featured on PASStv! . You …
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Wrapping up the Summer o’ ADF 2019

As the 2019 Summer o’ ADF 2019 draws to a close, we look forward to shorter and cooler Autumn days (in the northern hemisphere, at least!), conference season, and the fast-approaching holidays. As always, I had an absolute blast sharing tips and tricks for using Azure Data Factory in the enterprise. I must admit that …
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Free Webinar: Using the Azure Data Factory Lookup and ForEach Activities

Join me Wednesday 05 Jun 2019 for the next free webinar from Enterprise Data & Analytics titled Using the Azure Data Factory Lookup and ForEach Activities! Abstract In this demo-tastic presentation, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and author Andy Leonard walks through loading a dataset using the Lookup Activity, followed by iterating dataset values using a …
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The Recording for “A Data Science Story” by Shannon Lowder is Available

Shannon Lowder (@shannonlowder | shannonlowder.com) did a fantastic job presenting the true story of a data science project. He presented the problem he was trying to solve, the places he looked for data, issues and obstacles he encountered, and solutions he developed. Enjoy! Links Storm Events files NOAA Hail Data files Microsoft Azure Machine Learning: …
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