SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 4

I got to the conference center, nice an early, as you can see if was still not completely light after I finished my breakfast.

This is day four for me, but it's day two of the regular conference. Today started with the the second day keynote.




8:15 AM - 10 AM

Keynote

The first thing we learned about was some stuff about financials as well as the member growth. A BA day in Chicago was announced as well. 

The main keynote presenter was David DeWitt. David talked about data warehouse technologies, The three products discussed were Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and SQL DW.

I took some pictures, I will only post 6 of those so that you get an overall idea of what was discussed

Hash Key Partitioning

Round Robin Partitioning

Table Replication

Here are the summary slides for each product

Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Redshift

Snowflake

10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
SQL Server 2016 R Services - How Can You Make Your Apps Intelligent Today? [AD-310-M]
Speaker(s):  Umachandar Jayachandran  Nellie Gustafsson  Jarupat Jisarojito

Attend this session to get an overview of SQL Server 2016 R Services and how you can use R in T-SQL today to make your applications more intelligent and build predictive logic.

This was an introductory session to R services and how you can call R from within SQL Server. I took a picture of Nellie and UC

01:30 PM - 02:45 PM
Lightning Talks 101
Speaker(s):  Hugo Kornelis  Wayne Sheffield  Russ Thomas  Rob Volk  Jeff Renz

This session is one of four Lightning Talks sessions, each featuring five 10-minute talks on a variety of topics.

Lightning Talks 101 focuses on the AppDev track, featuring:

1. Hugo Kornelis - "Managing Execution Plans"

2. Wayne Sheffield - "How Referential Integrity Helps SQL Server Optimize Queries"

3. Russ Thomas - "GIT Your Scripts"

4. Rob Volk - "Variations on SQL_VARIANT"

5. Jeff Renz - "Do This... NOT This!"

So this was kind of an interesting idea, 5 really short sessions. The sessions were interesting, however some of them were running out of time



Somewhere around lunch time I snapped this pic

My ex boss is Scottish, so of course I had to send this to him.....



03:15 PM - 04:30 PM
Focus Group

I was invited with 9 other people to be part of a PASS focus group, this was an interesting session, we basically were giving feedback about PASS, the PASS sessions, as well about the changing roles in the IT industry

04:45 PM - 06:00 PM

UNPLUGGED: SQL Server 2016 [AD-404-M]

Speaker(s):  Scott Klein  Rohan Kumar  Lindsey Allen 

SQL Server Unplugged is your opportunity to meet Rohan Kumar and the SQL Engineering Team – the individuals who own the relational database at Microsoft. The session is hosted by Scott Klein and the show is your avenue to ask questions and talk directly to Rohan and Engineering PMs about anything and everything related to SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, and get “unplugged” scoop and insights into the inner workings of the SQL Server engineering team. No NDA material will be discussed during this session.

A picture of Mark Souza, Rohan Kumar and Lindsey Allen

This sessions was very interesting, I even asked a question. The question I asked was if in the future they can make an option so that a temporary table could be hekatonized (created as a In Memory OLTP table), The answer was that they are looking into it.

There was also something funny that happened

Person: "Will you add sharding to SQL Server?"
Rohan: "No"
Person: " Oracle just announced this yesterday"
Rohan "Ok, it's more real now"

The room erupts in laughter  :-)

They also announced that Python will come to SQL Server, right now we have R, but it looks like Python will be coming down the road as well

One more interesting  thing announced was resumable index rebuild. I am not even sure how this would work... maybe like how you can stop and resume index defragmentation??

There was also the raffle, but in my case it might as well not have been.