Speaking at the Rabobank Engineering Week

This week was somewhat really exciting. A few weeks ago I opted for doing a session at the Rabobanks Internal Engineering Week conference.

I had the idea to talk about how we help protecting our customers against all threads towards their databases. Initially I thought, I will do it big. Will tell everything what we know about it. Going through my documents, emails and code we have created.. I can of course find some ransomware which i can deploy to a VM running SQL… and then wait until Security comes and get me. It looks like more than enough for a half day session. Let me think… that is not a good option. I only have half an hour…

That ransomware… that is a risk for us. Loosing jobs is not nice. Although not afraid to get a new one, but still. Lets not do it this way.

What else can we show… We build a lot of automation around the deployment. It is somehow a bit complex. But why?

We did some special configuration in Azure also. This is configuration based on workspaces. That is interesting for anyone who wants to enable it, but it is useless for all people already forced to use it. Lets skip this very special part for this conference.

Looking further….

In the mean time

In the mean time a mail from Hugo Kornelis arrives. He is a guy I know well. I love the way how he writes. At this moment he is in recovery mode of Leukemia, but he is almost Always On (😊) You can read his pages and blogs here. At Pass 2022 we as a SQL Community collected money for a charity, but we also looked for stem cell donors in the community and beyond. I encourage you to read his blogs about his personal battle with Leukemia.

Continue

Sorry.. lost track there. I went for a presentation on how Defender for SQL is working, is useful and helpful and what other things the benefits of cloud integration in your on premise workloads can bring. I prepared my slides a bit more, recorded a video for it, because doing a demo which involves security and Security Operation Centers can be harmful and plugged it in the presentations. Last week I had some try-outs. Once for the community of speakers with the bank, and a few for the security teams and my own team. That meant that i needed to do some sheet shuffling. The opion of all the ones who looked at it were greatly appreciated and taken into consideration.

The day that I spoke

That was yesteday. I prepped the room in my house very well. Made sure there were no distractions. An hour before, i filled the washingmachine and turned it on because the sun was shining and the Solar panels produced too much energy. I raised the desk to be at a meter or something like that. Moved the camera to the right position, made sure to use all three connected screens (one with Teams open, sharing the second screen with the presentation, and an almost empty third screen), hided the taskbars, closed all open apps like outlook etc.

And then… I started the meeting. Immediately people dived into the meeting, had some nice chats before which calmed me a bit more down (yes.. there were nerves available). I started recording the meeting and of we go…

I do need to wait to find out how many people actually joined the meeting. It must be between 70 and 155. (First is a figure given from the organizing committee, the second one is in the teams session not the attendee list).

I really like to thank Chris Stapper (L), Marjolein Humme (L) and Britt Staal (L) for their support and valuable feed forward. Next to that, I had really good conversations with other people from the community who said that I COULD do these kinds of presentations .. So I would also like to thank Gethyn Ellis (L), Deepthi (L) and Kevin Chant (L).

Future

I am going to do this presentation via Teams also for a SQL User Group in York. The version there will not show any data or recognition of the place where I am working. It will contain a lot more of what I have skipped above. I hope to see you all during my session for the York User group.