Month: March 2023

Categories
Training & Community

T-SQL Tuesday #160: Round-Up

OilPaintingSharkRobotGenieReverseHue

In this post, I write a round-up of the community responses to my March 2023 T-SQL Tuesday #160 invitation: Microsoft OpenAI Wishlist.

tsql tuesday

Table of Contents

Introduction

Earlier this month, I hosted March 2023’s T-SQL Tuesday with an invitation concerning the ongoing Microsoft and OpenAI partnership:

What is on your wishlist for the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI?

What follows is some commentary on, and links to, each of the responses.

Chad Callihan

Chad’s post considers potential PowerShell-OpenAI functionality, which would write scripts in response to user prompts. PowerShell is a mainstay of many data professionals, enabling modules like dbatools, Pester and the AWS, Azure and GCP SDKs. An AI with access to the PowerShell Gallery would be very helpful.

Chad also points out some security concerns linked with ChatGPT use, which are good advice in general:

Chris Johnson

Chris’s post considers an AI model for file ingestion. Data pipelines frequently rely on source data with specific types and layouts. Unfortunately, source data can change between ingestion times.

At best, this breaks pipelines and causes problems and downtime for data teams. At worst, incorrect data is ingested causing potential business and customer detriment.

A no-code AI model would save hours of work if it considered previous source data and could make decisions like “This column is formatted as VARCHAR, but yesterday it was DATETIME2 and has hyphens in the right place, so I’ll CAST it as DATETIME2 today and raise a warning in the log.”

Rob Farley

Rob’s post was partially written by ChatGPT! Rob takes a pragmatic approach to AI’s progress and draws a Clippy analogy. I really want to see this AI family tree now.

ChatGPT suggests that it can help with Excel formulae, SQL Server optimization and PowerPoint visuals. It also wants to democratize technology interaction and remove traditional barriers to entry.

Steve Jones

Steve’s post imagines the next generation of AI personal assistant. One that can:

  • Learn from the user and correct common errors in all applications.
  • Suggest code optimizations in a variety of IDEs and languages.
  • Learn the user’s schedule and create automated calendar events and reminders.
  • Recognise repeat tasks and create related automation.

Summary

In this post, I wrote a round-up of the community responses to my March 2023 T-SQL Tuesday #160 invitation: Microsoft OpenAI Wishlist.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to my first T-SQL Tuesday invitation. It was great to read your responses! Anyone interested in hosting future events should contact Steve Jones.

If this post has been useful, please feel free to follow me on the following platforms for future updates:

Thanks for reading ~~^~~

Categories
Training & Community

T-SQL Tuesday #160: Microsoft OpenAI Wishlist

OilPaintingSharkRobotGenie

In this post, I host March 2023’s T-SQL Tuesday with an invitation concerning the ongoing Microsoft and OpenAI partnership.

tsql tuesday

Table of Contents

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence has been a big deal in recent months. One of the main drivers of this has been OpenAI, whose DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT services have seen extraordinary public interest and participation.

ChatGPT is currently the fastest-growing consumer application in history It reached 100 million users in its first two months, and has been integrated into numerous applications. One such example is the recent version of DBeaver that I tried out in my previous post.

Microsoft has been one of OpenAI’s most prominent supporters. In July 2019 Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and became their exclusive cloud provider.

In January 2023 Microsoft announced the latest phase of its multibillion-dollar investment partnership with OpenAI and the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service. Since then, Microsoft announced that it is building AI technology into Microsoft Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365.

T-SQL Tuesday Invitation

My invitation for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is:

What is on your wishlist for the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI?

This can include all Microsoft products and services, like:

When posting, please remember the T-SQL Tuesday rules:

  1. Publish contributions on Tuesday 14 March 2023.
  2. Include the T-SQL Tuesday Logo and have it link to this post.
  3. Please add your post’s link in this post’s comments.
  4. Use the #tsql2sday hashtag on social media.

My Wishlist

In this section, I’ll get the ball rolling with some things I’d like to see!

Power BI AI Assistant

Microsoft Power BI is a data visualization tool. It can interact with dozens of data sources and integrates with a wide range of applications. Power BI includes numerous visualizations and can produce professional, functional, and feature-rich dashboards.

However, Power BI is reliant on user skill levels. Like all data visualization tools, Power BI can create bad dashboards in the wrong hands. Like, really bad. Dashboards can suffer from several problems that make them useless at best and misleading at worst.

Enter ChatGPT. Power BI already offers AI Insights and AI Visuals. ChatGPT could join this family of tools, using an AI model trained on the works of visual design specialists like Edward Tufte, Stephen Few and Kate Strachnyi.

ChatGPT could offer features like:

  • Creating visuals and reports based on text prompts:
"Show me how my team's sales are performing this month"
>> Here is a bar chart showing team member performance for the current month.
  • Suggesting visuals and reports based on the data sources available.
  • Assessing dashboards for factors like colour blindness and colour symbolism.
  • Optimising existing dashboards:
"Improve my annual sales dashboard"
>> I have changed the pie chart showing 12 team members to a bar chart, as this will improve the visualization's legibility.

Azure IAC AI Assistant

IAC (Infrastructure As Code) has revolutionized the public cloud industry, bringing with it benefits like:

  • Automated, faster deployments.
  • Repeatable and consistent deployments.
  • Self-documenting infrastructure.

But IAC also presents challenges:

  • IAC scripts rely on the skills of the engineer writing them.
  • Configurations can drift or have unintended consequences.
  • It’s not easy to incorporate existing infrastructure.

ChatGPT could resolve many of these problems, turning infrastructure creation into a conversation. It could, for example:

  • Create infrastructure based on non-technical requests:
"Make me what I need to start a blog."
>> I have created a LAMP stack on a virtual machine in your default region.  Your access details are here:

Username: Username
Password: Password
  • Learn current infrastructure usage patterns and create optimisations for busy and quiet periods.
  • Spot potential conflicts and step in to prevent data loss or downtime.
ClippyProduction
Compliments of the IMGFlip Clippy Meme Generator
  • Make existing infrastructure faster, cheaper or more performant without the need for manual refactoring.
  • Resolve problems like high latency, failing connections and unexpected cost increases:
"Why is my web app generating errors?"
>> One of your virtual machines does not allow connection requests from CIDR range 10.01.10.01/28.  Do you want me to fix this?

"Yes please."
>> I have now amended virtual machine MYAPP001's Network Security Group to accept incomming connection requests from CIDR range 10.01.10.01/28.

Summary

In this post, I hosted March 2023’s T-SQL Tuesday with an invitation concerning the ongoing Microsoft and OpenAI partnership. I look forwards to reading everyone’s responses!

If this post has been useful, please feel free to follow me on the following platforms for future updates:

Thanks for reading ~~^~~