Seminar @ New Era University 2/24/2018

Having a speaking engagement in New Era University is perhaps one of the unique experiences in my life as a resource speaker. It allowed me to experience a slice of the “Iglesia Culture” and I am really surprised to see that the men and the women are seated on different sides of the room!

 I started the talk by telling the students how I started in the industry and how I discovered Microsoft’s “Power” tools. Basically how I came to be. After that, we run through the BI Concepts and started to discuss in detail the different uses of the visuals. I demonstrated each visual and how they were used in Analog Devices General Trias. I also demonstrated how to import custom visuals along with the import of themes.

We also run through a few data visualization no-nos. mainly the impact of each visual’s property (volume, area, intensity of color etc) and how it may mislead people looking at the graphs.

Seminar @ UE Caloocan 2/15/2018

I was invited by Coding Girls Manila to talk at my alma mater. Even if I am not from the hosting department (the hosting department is College of Computer Systems Studies, while I am from the College of Engineering), the delivery of the talk seems okay. The talk is more of a run through the different visualization capabilities of Power BI which includes the Custom Visuals and the new Theming capability.

I was surprised to see that one of the speakers is from the company behind HERE Maps. he claimed that Bing Maps is Based on HERE maps. He also voiced out slowness on the map visualization whenever there are too many data points. I simply advised him to use geolocation on his ETL step so that he can aggregate the data based on the city, just a quick and dirty work around.

I was nice to see my former school and my former professors again.

Seminar @ PUP Taguig 2/10/2018

This activity was scheduled years ago, and I am very surprised that the organizers we able to materialize their event registrants. almost every time I organize a Programmers, Developers Meetup, the turn out is almost always 25%-35% so whenever I am creating eventbrite event page, I always pump up the tickets to 250-300. But in this events case, the turn out is somewhere ~86% It seems that the combination of topics is pretty much in line with the participants interests.

The talk was smooth. Most of the people in front were engaged and someone already invited me to do a talk at their venue. Hopefully he soon reach out to me. The difference between this Business Intelligence talk is more on the application of Business Intelligence on Analog Devices General Trias warehouse.

We also get to me Sir Robert “Bob” Reyes, a Mozilla Evangelist.

Here is the official photographer’s coverage of the event

 

Seminar @ Universidad de Manila 2/3/2018

I was lucky enough to be invited @ Universidad de Manila. The students were keen into understanding the concepts of Business Intelligence. Out of al my talks, this is by far the most complete program since it includes an intermission number hehehe.

SQL Tutorial Series S01

Other than LPU Tech Day’s PowerBI Workshop, LPU-Cavite is generous enough to let the student organization host Three more workshops with me as their facilitator, this series is called SQL Tutorial Series S01.

EP1: Database Basics

We talked about system analysis and design with a special focus on entity relationship diagrams and how can we utilize SSMS to easily turn this diagram into database.
EP2: Interfacing Database using C# and WPF

We took time in understanding source control and SSDT’s ability to script and rebuild databases from scripts.

EP3: SQL Server Reporting Services

From the usual workshop, we were left with a seminar. We discussed SSRS from Installation up to report deployment. as a quick demonstration, I also showed them how to generate reports on the server using the ReportViewer Control.

I want you, LPU guys, to know that I enjoyed each and every minute that we’ve spent together, on the grounds of LPU-Cavite, inside the laboratory, and outside whenever we see each other. I have high hopes that I am able to introduce the two most basic and most available features of SQL Server, and how to integrate them with your application.

I want you guys to know that all of your efforts, from organizing and administrative tasks related to events and student organization, to the installation of the software requirements, to attending, listening, stepping out of your comfort zone, and absorbing what I can offer.

I want you guys to know that the technical communities of the Philippines is here, and that they are doing different events on different parts of the country on different kinds and combinations of technologies. the key word is “User Group”, go ahead and search it out in facebook so that you’ll be updated on the current events. Programmers,Developers had compiled a list of known technical communities: https://www.facebook.com/notes/361338743928370/1299944663401102 I’ll have this updated before the end of 2018.

Now the big question is: Will there be a Season 2? Only time will tell 🙂

DevCon Summit 2017

PHINUG, PHISSUG, PD and MONDPH represent! 😃 #ChangingTheGamePH pic.twitter.com/AU9eLVrUvk

— NathanielBrionSison (@ngsison) November 19, 2017

This is my first time attending a DevCon Summit. It’s so expensive. But I can say that the network connections are far more valuable than the Php 2,000 entrance. I went out of my comfort zone and talked to different people and different booths, hoping that we could establish partnership between them (I almost forgotten about this, I should get started on that slide deck).

Bryan Anthony Garcia, Mond PH  Lead.

From left: LPU Professor Ryan Azure, Pablo Sapitan, and PHINUG Lead Jon Limjap

PHINUG was kind enough to let Pd share their booth.

There are many participating technical communities in this summit. Some of them are AWS User Group, WordPress User Group, Philippine Android Developers Community, Women Who Code, SwiftPh, Mobile .Net Developers Philippines, and Philippine .Net Users Group. PHINUG is kind enough to let us share their booth (Hopefully we’ll be given a chance to participate next year).

Me with the PHISSUG Members

Joshua is a VR PH Ambassador that came all the way from Dagupan, Pangasinan.

John Tan is a student of LPU-Cavite, he want all the wat from General Trias just to attend the DevCon Summit.

Pd’s Team  Potential! Letran’s Senior Highschool Students.

It was a great coffee with this guy. we talked about lot of things. specially the APAC MVP Community Connection on Seoul and the Upcoming MVP Summit in Seattle.

Among the topics, that I have particular interest to, is Data Privacy. I know there’s something fishy whenever I have requirements to store Personal Information. Usually I only store these whenever they are a prerequisite on other system features. Now I have to be more careful since there are legal implications when storing these types of information.

I wonder if the data privacy act includes Facebook groups and user groups.

Recollection: PHISSUG S01E06 – Stretch Database

This was my first-time demonstrating a technology that required Azure credits, I felt a bit pressured in getting it right before my azure credits run out. The demonstration turned out to be good from a technical perspective, but I am not quite sure on the business perspective.

The session started with a quick review of the problem that StretchDb is trying to solve, and then we went on with the demonstrations. There are a lot of screenshots on the presentation above that should get you through the whole process including examining the query execution plan when retrieving on-premise data and archived data.

Here is a quick summary of the presentation:

Slides 1-10: Business Case
Slides 11-20: Enabling StretchDb on Database
Slides 21-28: Configuring tables for stretching
Slides 29-43: Data movement from on-premise to cloud vice versa
Slides 44-49: Backup and Restore
Slides 50-51: Scaling on Cloud
Slides 52-56: Stretching Temporal Tables
Slides 57-68: Stretching of tables with always encrypted enabled
Slide 69: Pricing
Slides 70-77: Pausing and Disabling StretchDb

Retrospection: PHISSUG S01E02, 99 way your data could die.

It was Valentine’s season back then and my talk provides an antithesis to the theme (Yes, Mejo bitter ako nung mga nakaraang taon kaya ang motto ko ay “Walang Poreber” hanggang sa Valentines special namin dala dala ko yung motto na yun). I talked about how data loss could occur (99 ways is more of an exaggeration since we don’t have time to go through that exhaustive list), how to mitigate them, and how to prevent them. The other speaker talked about Data Replication (Ang motto naman niya eh “Go forth and multiply” which is swak na swak sa season).

Some of the topics that I’ve discussed are the factors to consider when planning for data loss (Hardware and Software). For hardware problems, the usual mitigation is redundancy/high availability and a good material that should be included in my presentation is Brent Ozar’s blog post about the costs of high availability. I can see that it’s a good way to communicate with managers since it roughly translates technical stuff to their [money] language.

On the other hand, software problems largely depend on the people who are managing the server. In my presentation, my assumption is that the server has the sole role of a database server. It would be more problematic if the server has multiple roles since problems that could crash the server may arise from those other moving parts. The focus of the software part is on the destructive TSQL Statements (kinda like that Db Oops thing, you know… that awkward moment when you accidentally executed an update statement without the WHERE Clause).

The mitigations for software problems is a good backup plan. In dire times where the backup is not available, you have to resort to the dark arts of data recovery. My presentation did not talk about resurrecting a dropped database from the dead, but legends say that recovery of the deleted mdf file is possible (using file recovery tools like EaseUS or Recuva) I haven’t heard of a success story about this though (Even my friend who had the exact same problem failed to bring his database back to life. May the lord have mercy on his soul).

I demonstrated recovering deleted data using ApexSQL Recovery, and SSMS Boost‘s capability to stop you from committing Db Oopsies. By the way, Ssms Boost’s beta release is compatible with the newest Ssms version.

With the mitigation and prevention of data loss, we concluded: “Sa Data may Forever”

Recollection: PHISSUG S01E01

It’s been one and a half year since that fateful day (Jan 25, 2016), my first talk at Philippine SQL Server Users Group (at Microsoft PH, Makati). I can still feel the excitement of presenting to a group of people who are older than me, people who have much more experience than me, people who also knows the craft. Even my senior attended and was surprised to see me preparing my presentation in front.

the talk was about Temporal Tables, back then it was still SQL Server 2016 CTP3 and this is the most promising feature I’ve encountered since after all I’m also developer. so I know that the Temporal Tables will make my life easier when handling different versions of data overtime.

The presentation was smooth, and the audience seems to have grasped the topic. we talked about:

• Concept of Temporal Tables along with its use cases.
• Setting up the system versioned tables on the database.
• Querying the system versioned tables.
• Considerations and limitations when implementing temporal tables.

There is one question that stomped me: “Can we use this as a launch pad for our website?” Until now I still haven’t known the answer to his question, it seems that this will remain a mystery of life.