How do I get my PeopleCert certificate?

Congrats on your exam pass!

Now its time to get your certificate on the wall.

Certificate

Sign in to PeopleCert.org.

Click on My Certificates then Certifications.

Scroll down if necessary to find your certifications. 

Click on the View Certificate link.

The certificate will be downloaded to your default downloads folder. It will probably be called e-cert.pdf.

The pdfs are not locked, so you can print them on a nice colour printer and then frame them and put them on your wall.

As you can see on PoepleCert's site, there is an option to order a hard copy. These come on nice patterened paper, but are quite pricy. I've found that if you are putting it behind glass in a frame, nice patterned paper doesn't show.

Statement of Result

You get your SoRs much the same way, except that you choose My Exams, Certificate Exams, and the link is just labelled View.

Synapse Pools

Dedicated SQL Pool

Designed for Kimball style star/snowflake schema data warehouses.

Billed for storage and compute. Can be paused.

Contains tables (internal, external, temp), views, procedures - it is a database.

Internal tables are columnstore.

Does not support OPENROWSET, external tables must be explicity created.

Query language is TSQL.

Serverless SQL Pool

Designed for data processing, not data storage.

Billed per-use for compute only. Has cost budgets and limits.

Does not contain internal tables, just external and temporary.

Query language is TSQL.

Links

https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/synapse-serverless-and-dedicated-pool-the-differences-no-one-told-you-about/#:~:text=The%20basic%20differences%20between%20Synapse,we%20choose%20and%20a%20constant

Windows Admin Center setup

 

The Rise and Fall of Microsoft Certificates

 

Why did Don Jones say that using Write Host kills a puppy?

Don Jones, a highly experienced author, MVP, and PowerShell expert, famously once said that every time you use Write-Host, you kill a puppy. See Jeffrey Snover's blog for more information.

So, why is it considered so bad? Because it messes with the output streams.

Consider a PowerShell script file with the following two lines.

"This is a test message."
"This is a test message written to Write-Host." | Write-Host

When you run this and redirect the output to a text file, the second message is written to the screen and not written to the text file.

This means that if you run the script from inside some other system, for example a SQL Server Agent job, then you won't be able to capture the output, which is bad.

There are a lot of articles on the web discussing the issue in more detail. Here are a couple that I like.
Write-Host – The gremlin of PowerShell, by Jeff Wouters
Puppycide done right - output versus messages

Microsoft products in the Defender family

Microsoft describe Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Defender for Cloud as their XDR products, with Microsoft Sentinel as their SIEM and SOAR product.

They are, however, very lax with these names. Sometimes they will use "Microsoft Defender for Endpoint", sometimes "Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint". There are also plenty of learn.microsoft.com pages using one or more of the old names.

 

Exchange Server Recipients

There are a number of types of Exchange Server recipients, differentiated by the RecipientType and RecipientTypeDetails properties. The following are the common mailbox-enabled recipients.