January 8, 2025

Project "VanAssistant" - Setting up your RPI

Lets make a first start of the VanAssistant today. What are going to do? We are going to prepare a Raspberry Pi (4 or 5) to become a VanAssistant server. I call it VanAssistant now because we will adapt some settings on the hardware to make sure that we can control a lot of stuff in our CamperVan/Mobile home or RV or whatever we call them. This setup will also work in various other situations where your Home Assistant must run independent of where it is.

January 8, 2025

New Project "VanAssistant"

A short one today. I have had a non humourous last year. My family and me went through some deep holes as we call them. Real friends know what all happened and I would like to keep it that way. Time to leave that behind. I want to start something new. Last year I switched teams. Now I am in team that does a lot of Azure related services around Data and Analytics.

October 16, 2024

Switching Jobs and my first experiences at GDP

As some of you know I decided to move teams within Rabobank. This is something I have been working on for a long time. In my life as a SQL Platform engineer (automating the full stack of SQL Server deployments in the bank), I started to gain interest in the vision of their product Trident (yes.. Back in those days). The product is now named Fabric. For Rabobank I went to Seattle to attend SQL PASS Community.

June 12, 2024

Sources from Data Saturday Croatia 2024

A short one today. In my previous post about Data Saturday Croatia I promised to publish the sources I used for preparing my presentation. Yesterday I published them to my Github account, so it is time to do a litle round of explanation again. I have revised the files a bit by adding probably valuable comments. The link to all my presentations can be found here, despite this is the first one that I really publish on my github presenentations page.

June 8, 2024

Data Saturday Croatia 2024

It is a wrap. Data Saturday Croatia is done. After a few weeks of preparations and a lot of frustration it is done. My session is finished. The session was about how you could aggregate your Audits or Extended Events together with Defender in one place and how you can find it back. I showed the audience how to configure your on prem servers, and also Azure SQL components, for sending additional data to the Log Analytics workspace.

May 28, 2024

Changes in Azure MI Policies - Are we affected?

One of my friends created a post on changes in the Azure Managed Instance (later: MI) policies today. Reading his post covered some drawbacks why he was not that happy with them. Even me, when reading his post. And only reading that post it made sense to me as well. It was a reason for me to open a discussion in the LinkedIn. My first opinion was that he was right and I still think his explanation fits.

January 9, 2024

T-SQL Tuesday 170 – Learn Fast, fix over time

This months invitation for T-SQL tuesday came from Reitse Eskens (B | L | T). The original invite can be found here. I know Reitse quite well. He lives in the same in country, I visited one of his user groups, congratulated him on getting an MVP award, volunteerd together with him on two activities this year. I hope to continue this also this (2024) year. His invite Reitse’s question to the SQL Family is to share what we have learned from failed projects.

December 12, 2023

T-SQL Tuesday 169 – Thank you all!

This months invitation for T-SQL tuesday came from Kay Sauter (B | L | T) . The original invite can be found here. Kay knows a lot of all data related stuff. So he wondered to whom I would be gratefull about last year. Despite the knowledge on Data, his invitation is about who we should thank… Wow.. That is a lot, only looking back one year… Last year My year is a turbulent year.

December 2, 2023

The defender tales Part two: Granular deployment

For me, this year was an awesome year. I have done many new things. I found, that after all the Corana stuff I had to change a bit of the things I am doing. Just before Corona I tried getting into the world of the speaking. It is difficult to get involved. I have reached out to some people and together we made a first attempt to get into it. Few good fellows have helped me with this.

November 24, 2023

You cannot install data API Builder on Raspberry or can you?

For a specific home project at my fathers place I needed to add data to a database which was in the cloud. The only thing was that that project could only do restfull requests. Because I played with data API Builder (DAB) quite intensive I thought about pulling up a dab server on a raspberry Pi. Of course my first attempts failed. I first wanted to run the package from the cloud straight by downloading binaries and see if that would work.