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1. Why are small / medium / large enterprises moving to the cloud?

Cloud computing is continuing across a host of industry sectors as more and more organizations recognize the benefit, this movement can offer.  

Main benefits of cloud technologies are

1.1 Fully utilized hardware

Cloud computing brings natural economies of scale. The practicalities of cloud computing mean high utilization and smoothing of the inevitable peaks and troughs in
workloads. Your workloads will share server infrastructure with other organizations' computing needs. This allows the cloud-computing provider to optimize the hardware needs of its data centres,  which means lower costs for you.

1.2 Lower power costs

Cloud computing uses less electricity. That's an inevitable result of the economies of scale.  Better hardware utilization means more efficient power use. When you run your own data center, your servers
won't be fully-utilized (as you would be catering to peak traffic when that occurs). Idle servers waste energy. So a cloud service provider can charge you less for energy used than what you're spending in your own data center.

1.3 Lower people costs

Staffing budge often attribute a significant chunk to the computing costs as good human resources are expensive. When you move to the cloud, some of the money you pay for the service goes to the provider's staffing costs. But it's typically a
much smaller amount than if you did all that work in-house. Yet again, we have to thank: economies of scale. Redeploy your scare valuable IT resources to areas that can make more money for the business.

1.4 Zero capital costs

Buying servers, provisioning and configuration is a lot of effort and money. Though the costs are distributed through the expected years, upfront costs are sizable. With cloud infrastructure, you could start off with only a fraction of
the upfront costs

1.5 Resilience without redundancy

It is impossible to buy just the required hardware. It is quite a cumbersome processes to procure and add additional compute and storage. So IT departments usually start with spare hardware which would last for a year or two. This is
an expensive way to maximize uptime. Letting the cloud computing service to deal with redundancy, High Availability is an easy and comparatively inexpensive solution.

1.6 Bonus benefit: climate change

Many organizations want a greener foot print and include measures to offset their carbon foot print.  First, you are saving on energy with the economies of scale and secondly the service provider would
find it easier to put measures in place for greener planet.

Business Analysts have evolved in a big way in the past decade.  This profession has taken on paramount importance in the entire life cycle of a project and is being responsible for scope creep and quality deliverables. With this responsibility BAs don multiple hats and is expected to be domain aware, technically aware and have time and budget management skills.  Processes have been laid, refined
and widely accepted in the industry. The BA Community has a bible in BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) owned by IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis)

The participants were Aziz Abdul Seyid, who spear heads the learning and capability development of Business Analysis at HCL; Lalitha Ravindra, Head of Business Analysis Research
and Innovation at Syntel; Nizam who represents Spark system and me. We were moderated by Kannan S who is the driving force of the IIBA, Chennai Chapter.

Lalitha started with her experiences and highlighted that BA could no longer be one-dimensional. She stressed on processes, skill development and the benefits of certifications of CBAP.

Aziz stressed on the career path of a BA and the industry giving the community a place that it trulydeserved.  His experiences of setting up a COE for Business Analysis and how it has brought in the demand for active participants of COE.

Nizam had conducted a survey of participants in the previous BA conference which was the also the inception year for BA Convention.  It was suggested that people layemphasis on events, education, facilitate BAs with the right tools and raise awareness that there were 4 maturity levels for evaluating an organization’s BA practice.

I started speaking about my experiences starting with the Banking Industry.  A structured analysis and technical implementation helped a bank reduce its risk portfolio resulting in millions of pounds of saving. Now defaulters are spotted on the social media, which is a big data solution. Retail industry has always debated if they needed data scientist or data artists.  Planning the right mix of products on shelf to its placement has always been a challenge.  These solutions use the most sophisticated modelling tools and rely on self-service Business intelligence, the targeted users of which are Business analysts and C level

Though we all speak of using cutting edge technologies and being aware of the latest, some of the legacy problems still exist like getting the electoral role right. We could use Unicode to support all official Indian languages (we have 23 official languages) and are helped by complex de-duping algorithms to prevent registrations many times; providing a search facility for proper nouns on Sound “x” ; Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud is the future. However we need to deal with what has been in existence since 1951 and mine them to the future.

We concluded that action items on the community should be

• Empowering Academic institutions with BA skills
• Empowering practitioners with right tools
• Facilitate knowledge groups, chapters in various states
• Improve BA maturity level of Corporates
• Be socially responsible BAs– worry about carbon footprint, usage of alternate sources of energy such as solar where applicable, water recycling especially in turn key project implementations
• Not every project can be started afresh; dealing with legacy problems when modern technology was not available is important, even if it is not in a format that is conducive to current trends.

 Tweeting in the modern world does not hold the same meaning. The new form of tweets are opinions expressed by humans and followed by interested parties. A film celebrity could be followed by all in general; whereas most of us would follow friends and family to understand what their opinions are and stay connected in our thoughts.

This popular medium is being put to use to have a conversations with “#” tags. Recently, we did a similar tweet session and invited questions from SQL developer community. The hash tag of interest for future such sessions is “askmsdevs”.  With a word limit set of 140 characters, not all questions could get a detailed answer. Below are some excerpts from the chat

 @harikichan, a novice wanted to know the difference between Azure and SQL Server.

SQL Server is an on premise database for holding all relational objects. Generally tables are designed with required relationship to efficiently store and retrieve data.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform on which we can run a number of different applications including SQL Server.

Database applications can be taken to cloud using 3 different techniques

1. Move your entire Virtual machine to the cloud using Infrastructure as a Service (Hardware as a Service).
2. Move only your data to the cloud by using SQL Azure i.e. using SQL Azure as “Platform as a Service”.
3. Subscribe to an available service using Software as a Service model.

Evaluate Azure trials and subscriptions available with msdn to explore. Azure is the next big thing and
we would encourage you to deeply get hands on with it.

For a basic introduction read here - https://blogs.msdn.com/b/data__knowledge__intelligence/archive/2013/05/10/sql-azure-an-introduction.aspx

Follow up from @harikichan was the absence of SQL Server jobs on Azure.

Inside a Virtual Machine on the cloud we could install and use SQL agents .i.e. IaaS. All work loads of BI such as SSIS, SSAS and SSRS can be used within VM on the cloud. In platform service SQL Azure, we have these restrictions. However you can move and sync data between cloud and on premise servers.

@Varinder_Sandhu, an IT professional had quite a few questions on DBA activities. His questions were all around the backup, high availability and disaster recovery.

Starting with SQL 2012, ALWAYS ON was introduced. Before that there were a number of options available such as log shipping, replication, clustering and mirroring. Most of these scenarios could not fail over automatically. Example: If log shipping was being used, DBA would have to backup the tail log and apply it and then bring up the secondary, it would not come up automatically

Snap shot replication was a very heavy resource consumer. In all these scenarios the secondary would act only as an insurance and would come up only when the primary was unavailable.

ALWAYS ON introduced in SQL 2012 allowed up to 4 backups, which has now been enhanced to support 8 ACTIVE secondary servers, which means that secondary servers remain availablefor reporting, back up and such other activities as a read only database. Latency between 2 servers which are less than 40 kms apart is 0. If they are in different geographic locations, network speed and setup results in almost zero
latency.

The other advantage of ALWAYS ON is “Availability group”. If multiple databases are involved in an application and if one of them fail, all in that group will fail and secondary server takes over and this happens automatically.

We would recommend that you read more about it and try implementing the same. If any questions do reach out to us and we will help you

@karthikbv402 wanted to know about the differences between SQL 2012 and SQL 2014.

Perfect, gave the chat time a good question to discuss at length. Trying to provide a few highlights of the new release below:

• New In-Memory OLTP Engine
• ALWAYS ON – 8 secondary servers – Secondary is read able even when it is not connected to primary
• Back up directly to Azure
• Column store indexes can be updated

 You can download and install from here:

 https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/server-cloud/products/sql-server/Try.aspx#fbid=_EPk3c8OHRx

Follow blogs below for details of new features available:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/saponsqlserver/archive/2014/01/16/new-functionality-in-sql-server-2014-part-2-new-cardinality-estimation.aspx

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2013/06/almost-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-next-version-of-sql-server/

 @siddarthpaim wanted to discuss the support offered by databases to build apps.

Windows Store is the fastest growing platform and supports both Phone and tabs / laptops.  There are many data apps in store and almost all apps need some kind of support for data. In order to build store apps, SQLite is now being supported by Windows Store.

 @Aakash006sharma discussed data explorer. Glad to talk about Power BI. In Excel 2013, we can bring in additional data from different sources using Power Query previously called data explorer; build a model with data in excel i.e relationships between different tabs, hierarchy using PowerPivot. We can build powerful visualizations such as interactive dashboard using PowerView and add geographic
visualization using PowerMap.

 @simplymaanasJ is an active member of the Bangalore SQL user group. This is a very active group and meets at least once a month sometimes for a few hours and on other occasions a complete day of prominent speakers. It also discusses and helps SQL community by actively discussing questions, solutions and best practices.

Manas spoke of Bigdata and Microsoft’s offerings in the arena in the form of HDInsight.  @VinodKumar answered all his questions referring to the latest “Analytics Platform Services”. Refer
to link here for details - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/analytics-platform-system/#fbid=_EPk3c8OHRx

Thank you all once again for your valuable time and participation. We would look forward to more interactions next time.  We enjoyed answering your questions too.

Download now from Windows Store at - Windows
Store

Highlights in this release are

1. Report Builder and Power Pivot  is now available in different languages

2. .Differential backup on a database with in-memory tables backs up all data/delta files ie.data is not just differential. This means if in-memory tables are comprised of a significant portion of database size, differential backup will not be that useful

In this new generation of applications (apps), developer community is looking at easy to use, no overhead to deal with small quantity of data and zero over head or administrative tasks.

Let us take a look at SQLite, which is an embedded database.

•          SQLite does not need to be configured before it is used
•          There is no set up required
•          No services need to be stopped, started or configured
•          SQLite reads data and writes back data to the file. There is no server in between like a TCP/IP
•          A SQLite data files can be emailed or copied in a USB for sharing
•          SQLite file is cross platform. It can be easily copied from a 32 bit machine to a 64 bit machine and vice-versa
•          Newer versions of SQLite can read older versions of the file.
•          It has negligible foot print. (approx. 400 KB);  In comparison in the same category there is Berkeley DB from Oracle (which does not provide SQL like capabilities, but only key value pairs); CloudScape from IBM is 2        MB  and firebird client alone is 350 MB.

Source code for SQLite is available on Public domain.

You can download SQLite at https://sqlite.org/download.html

Books for references can also be found at https://sqlite.org/books.html

Next time you want to play around with front end code for a POC, try using SQLite. Ofcourse SQL Server 2012 is recommended for stronger client server architecture and dealing with volumes of data. You can also use SQL Server 2012 for Data warehousing, business intelligence and as a base to deal with Parallel data warehousing, analytical and visualization capabilities

New data discovery, Analysis and Visualization are provided in Excel

Powerful Online Search returns results from within your organization and valuable external data sources which you can combine for easier analysis

Continue to add to your data in excel with a powerful modeling environment creating calculations during your analysis. You can analyze a substantial chunk of data in seconds with In memory processing capabilities

Bold visualizations are possible using PowerView and Geoflow for geographic information uncovering new information. PowerView helps in creating dashboards which will help in sharing key  findings with your team.

Further more data is refreshable. You can also track who is using this data. It is also integrated with Natural language query processing where queries return powerful visualization as output.

To find out more register on - https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-fx104080667.aspx

You can also download preview from here

Do share your feedback with us

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/dn205290.aspx

Firstly, Oracle will certify and support customers who already run its software on Windows Server to run that same software on Windows Server Hyper-V
or in Windows Azure. Oracle customers also gain the benefit to run their Oracle software licenses in Windows Azure “with new license mobility.”

Hyper-V and Azure support starts immediately, but the partnership doesn’t end there. Microsoft and Oracle have agreed to work together to “add properly
licensed, and fully supported Java into Windows Azure.”

Microsoft will also add Infrastructure Services instances with preconfigured versions of Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server for customers who do not
have Oracle licenses while Oracle will enable customers to obtain and launch Oracle Linux images on Windows Azure. Details as to when exactly this integration will be available were not shared.

In summary, here’s what the partnership encompasses:

• Effective today, Oracle customers can run supported Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure.
• Effective today, Oracle provides license mobility for customers who want to run Oracle software on Windows Azure.
• Microsoft will add Infrastructure Services instances with popular configurations of Oracle software including Java, Oracle Database, and Oracle WebLogic Server to the Windows Azure image gallery.
• Microsoft will offer fully licensed and supported Java in Windows Azure.
• Oracle will offer Oracle Linux, with a variety of Oracle software, as preconfigured instances on Windows Azure.

During a conference call today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked of a “tipping point” in regards to the partnership. “A lot has happened and we’re
going to continue to compete in areas,” he said. “I think both companies have always, at least many many years, have had respect for one another.”

Oracle President Mark Hurd agreed: “I think it just makes sense for us to continue to improve our own capabilities but also allow customers to leverage
both of our capabilities together,” he said on the same call. “I think this makes a lot of sense for both of us…because it makes a lot of sense for our customers.”