Showing posts with label SQLPass2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SQLPass2016. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Didn't go to PASS but want to watch the sessions?


You didn't go to the PASS summit this year, but you would still want to watch the sessions?  There is a way now, you can buy the USB stick with all the sessions, you can also download the sessions you are interested in. The passboutique site has the details, They also have a sale going on at the moment.

So if you got a bunch of money over the holidays, this would be a great investment.....

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

The best thing about the PASS summit for me is...


This past week I attended the PASS Summit 2016. I went there with 6 co-workers and I had a terrific time. This time the weather wasn't that bad, when I left Princeton, NJ, it looked like it was going to rain for 5 days straight. It was actually sunny on a couple of occasions  :-)

One thing I really liked were the chalk talk sessions they had with the program managers of SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. People attending these sessions could ask questions and the team then answered these questions. There were also some cool announcements, I documented those here: Some cool SQL Server announcements SQL Graph, Adaptive Query Plan, CTP1 of SQL vNext, SQL Injection detection

Another thing I really liked, and this is not specific to this PASS summit, is that I got to see some of the people I befriended over the years. I chatted and hung out with some of them.

I liked all the sessions I attended, the one negative feedback I have is that there were a couple of sessions at the same time, so I had to pick one of them. This is not such a big deal because once the sessions are made available online, I will just watch the ones I really wanted to attend first.


So now back to the title of this post..... what was the best thing about this PASS summit for me? It is the fact that going to this summit reignited my love for SQL Server, and the passion for learning about SQL Server. I have laid low for the last couple of years but now I feel like a spark has been lit again,  I have so much to learn.

One of the best ways for me to learn is to blog about it. So here is what I am thinking I will do:

For December I will do a SQL advent series, this series will be about windowing functions. Everyone knows about the basic ones that were introduced in 2005, but very few people are using the stuff introduced later.

After that I will do a  series about r and SQL Server, it will take me around 3 months,  and I will probably do two posts per week.

After the r series, I want to do a series about the QueryStore.

I will also do a series about new stuff in SQL Server 2016, but that will be in between all the other posts. Whenever someone asked during a session how many people were already on SQL Server 2016, very few hands went up, this is the reason, I want to blog about this as well.


For all these series of posts, I plan to have a repo on github with a yet to be determined name. Then I will have all the SQL code for all the series organized there


So that is my plan


P.S.

If you want to read about my time at SQL Pass 2016, read these posts


SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 2
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 3
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 4
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 5


You might be thinking, where is day 1?  The day 1 posts is mostly about Seattle, if you are interested in that one, here it is:  SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 1.... just looking around

Friday, October 28, 2016

SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 5



Sadly this was the last day of the Pass Summit, but I think I was my most favorite day. First of all it didn't rain, it turned out to be a nice day.



08:00 AM - 09:15 AM
Data Partitioning for Database Architects and Mere Mortals [AD-303]
Speaker(s):  Dmitri Korotkevitch

Data partitioning is an essential technique that simplifies database administration tasks, improves system availability and reduces the cost of the solution. Contrary to popular belief, data partitioning is not limited to partitioned tables and the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server.

This session demonstrates the data partitioning techniques available in the various editions of SQL Server. It discusses benefits, downsides and the best use-cases for partition tables, local and distributed partitioned views and stretch databases. The session will also demonstrate how data partitioning helps boost performance of systems handling a mixed workload, improves cardinality estimations with large tables, and reduces the system’s storage cost. 

Finally, the session provides a set of guidelines on how to split the data between relational and non-relational storages in OLTP and IoT systems hosted in the Cloud.
The room was packed and I had to stand in the back...it also didn't help that this ession was on level 2, it took me a while to find this room

This session was okay, I knew most of the stuff covered, below are two slides that give a summary between native partitioning and partitionmed view





09:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Chalk Talk with Azure SQL Database PM Team [AD-501-M]
Speaker(s):  Tomas Talius  Lindsey Allen

Join us in an open dialog with Microsoft Partner Architect Tomas Talius and members of the Azure SQL Database team. Don't miss this unique opportunity to ask the hard questions. Seating is limited to 50 attendees so arrive early. Chalk Talk sessions are not recorded.
This and the session after this one were my two favorite sessions. A couple of big announcement.. First CTP of the next version of SQL Server will drop next month, this includes both the Linux as well as the Windows version
SQL Injection detection
SQL Server optimizer has machine learning built in
SQL Graph (Think Neo4J) SQL Graph adds graph processing capabilities to SQL Server
Adaptive Query Plan
There will be a big announcement about SQL Server Standard Edition on November 15th....  mmmm maybe the ability to use more memory? We will have to wait and see what will be announced

I will go into some of these announcements into more details in a separate blog post. That post can be found here: Some cool SQL Server announcements SQL Graph, Adaptive Query Plan, CTP1 of SQL vNext, SQL Injection detection

Here is a picture of the team... after I posted this I got a funny comment from Adam Machanic (see below picture)




11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Chalk Talk with the SQL Server Team [DBA-501-M]
Speaker(s):  Lindsey Allen  Jakub Szymaszek  Jovan Popovic  Kevin Farlee  Tomas Talius  Sunil Agarwal  Joseph Sack

More or less the same concept as the session before it.

02:00 PM - 03:15 PM
Go, Go, QueryStore! [DBA-210]
Speaker(s):  Gail Shaw
One of the hardest things to do in SQL is to identify the cause of a sudden degradation in performance. The DMVs don’t persist information over a restart of the instance and, unless there was already some query benchmarking (and there almost never is), answering the question of how the queries behaved last week needs a time machine. Up until now, that is. The addition of the QueryStore to SQL Server 2016 makes identifying and resolving performance regressions a breeze.

In this session we’ll take a look at what the QueryStore is and how it works, before diving into a scenario where overall performance suddenly degraded, and we’ll see why QueryStore is the best new feature in SQL Server 2016, bar none.


Gail Shaw did a good job giving an overview of the Querystore and how one might use it

03:30 PM - 04:45 PM
Microsoft R for the Architect [BIA-323-M]
Speaker(s):  Buck Woody

This was the last session, if you have never been to a Buck Woody presentation..you are missing something


In this hands-on workshop you’ll cover a series of modules that guide you from a review of the R programming environment, the Cortana Intelligence Suite Process, the Cortana Intelligence Suite Platform, to the Microsoft R platforms including: Microsoft Open R, the Microsoft R Client, Microsoft R Server, SQL Server with R Services, R in Azure ML, and HDInsight with R. Final lab is an SQL Server R Services solution.
Buck gave a nice overview of R Services and data science on the Microsoft stack




And this was taken on my way to the hotel after all the sessions were done  :-(


Thursday, October 27, 2016

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
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.





Wednesday, October 26, 2016

SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 3


Just like the other two days, day three in Seattle started early....very early. This is day three for me, but this is the first day of the general sessions. This year over 6000 people came to attend the Pass Summit.

My day started with a 6:50 AM session

6:50 AM -  8 AM

Why Use AWS for Running Your Databases
A session explaining how you can run databases on Amazon Web Services, they explained the difference between running RDS and EC2. Overall the presenter gave a nice overview of what is all available within the Amazon cloud

8:15 AM - 10 AM

Keynote

Keynote was well attended, Joseph Sirosh Corporate Vice President for the Data Group, Microsoft started the keynote (he is not pictured here)

Below are some pictures I took of the keynote, I have mostly one liners below the images. The keynote was not bad, it wasn't the best ever but I think it was better than the last couple of years.


ACID doesn't mean what you think it means

You can run queries against a variety of data source straight from SSMS

Intelligent Database Service...this means taking the intelligence out of the apps and moving it into the database, think of running R service inside the database.

This Data Warehouse on Azure will be general available in a couple of weeks

A lot of people are already looking at SQL Server running on Linux

Installing SQL Server on Linux. And just like that, by being available on Linux, Microsoft just doubled the number of platforms that SQL Server runs on :-)


The Planet of the Apps. Apps completely dominate how much data they use and also how much data they generate

Some stuff about DocumentDB

DocumentDB is Rick Grimes favorite weapon to kill walkers, 43 million walker eliminated each day....

Here is what the explosion of data looks like when you look at it as rice

A look from the back of the room...


10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

Powershell Jumpstart for SQL Server DBAs [DBA-102] presented by Michael Fal



Powershell can be intimidating. There are many challenges to using it, especially for those not familiar with its nuances. Once understood, the language can be used for effective and robust automation that brings together SQL Server with other Windows components, such as the file system or Active Directory. 

In this session, we will cover the Powershell fundamentals, how you can use Powershell itself to learn about concepts and syntax, and techniques for using Powershell with SQL Server. We will focus on core language patterns that you can use immediately, take the mystery out of the code, and help you get started writing your own PowerShell scripts. Attendees will not only acquire an understanding of Powershell, but see practical examples of how it can be used with SQL Server, along with a set of resources they can use to learn more about the language.
I attended this session with 3 of my co-workers, I saw some interesting stuff, I only played around a little with powershell and I will spend more time with it for sure.


01:30 PM - 02:45 PM
03:15 PM - 04:30 PM
Inside SQL Server In-Memory OLTP [DBA-500-HD] presented by Bob Ward

Hekaton is the original project name for In-Memory OLTP and just sounds cooler for a title name. Keeping up the tradition of deep technical “Inside” sessions at PASS, this half-day talk will take you behind the scenes and under the covers on how the In-Memory OLTP functionality works with SQL Server. 

We will cover “everything Hekaton”, including how it is integrated with the SQL Server Engine Architecture. We will explore how data is stored in memory and on disk, how I/O works, how native complied procedures are built and executed. We will also look at how Hekaton integrates with the rest of the engine, including Backup, Restore, Recovery, High-Availability, Transaction Logging, and Troubleshooting. 

Demos are a must for a half-day session like this and what would an inside session be if we didn’t bring out the Windows Debugger. As with previous “Inside…” talks I’ve presented at PASS, this session is level 500 and not for the faint of heart. So read through the docs on In-Memory OLTP and bring some extra pain reliever as we move fast and go deep. 

This session will appear as two sessions in the program guide but is not a Part I and II. It is one complete session with a small break so you should plan to attend it all to get the maximum benefit.
This was a 3 hour session and Bob also cut the break down to 15 minutes...30 minute breaks are for wimps he said  :-)


This was a very good and very fast sessions, the way you attend these sessions is that you attend it in person and then you watch the recorded session at least two more times...and only then will you be able to understand everything.


Of course Bob was very cruel, he had the Cowboys use In Memory OLTP tables and the Eagles were stuck with regular disk based tables....  Kidding aside, if you ever have a chance to attend one of Bob's session, make sure you do... who else would run the debugger against SQL Server and step through a Hekaton Stored Procedure



04:45 PM - 06:00 PM

This Batch-Mode Window Aggregate Operator Will Change Your Life! [AD-400] presented by Itzik Ben-Gan

Window functions introduced a paradigm shift in solving T-SQL querying tasks. They allow more elegant, and often more efficient, solutions compared to traditional predicate-based solutions. Still, prior to SQL Server 2016, there were a number of inefficiencies in their optimization. SQL Server 2016 introduces the new batch-mode Window Aggregate operator, which changes everything as far as performance is concerned. This session describes and demonstrates this new operator, and also provides tips and tricks to enable its use in cases you might not have expected.
Itzik is a very good presenter and he always shows cool stuff


In this session he showed how you can make SQL Server run in batch mode instead of row mode by having a dummy columnstore index. You create a dummy table by adding a where clause and you do for example  WHERE Col1 =2 AND Col1 = 1, this is a filtered index with a filter that can never be true. This session was very good


06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Exhibitor Reception

This was the time to go see the vendors, learn about the products, meet and greet with your peers, there was also food.

 A view of the hall

 Another view of the hall

 We are sooo tired from sitting whole day long, we need a massage


Some swag I managed to grab, these shirts will be mostly to work out in.

That's all for today, tomorrow is another jam-packed day....

Saturday, October 22, 2016

PASS Summit 2016 sessions I am attending



I will be at the PASS Summit this year. After a long and hard look at the available sessions, I decided to attend the following sessions. It was hard at times to decide what sessions to go to because sometimes there were two sessions that were at the same time that I really wanted to see. I guess, I will watch those later since most of the sessions are recorded anyway

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
6B 
 [DBA-331-PC] Locking, Blocking, Versions: Concurrency for Maximum Performance

This is a pre-conference full day session, myself and a couple of co-workers will attend this sessions

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
TCC Tahoma 3-4 
 [DBA-102] Powershell Jumpstart for SQL Server DBAs
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
606-609 
 [DBA-500-HD] Inside SQL Server In-Memory OLTP
4:45 PM - 6:00 PM
6E 
 [AD-400] This Batch-Mode Window Aggregate Operator Will Change Your Life!

Here is what day one of the regular PASS Summit 2016 sessions looks like for me, the keynote is not displayed here.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
606-609 
 [AD-310-M] SQL Server 2016 R Services - How Can You Make Your Apps Intelligent Today?
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
618-620 
 [LT-101] Lightning Talks 101
3:15 PM - 4:30 PM
611-614 
 [DBA-322-M] SQLCAT : Early Customer Experiences with SQL Server R Services
4:45 PM - 6:00 PM
6E 
 [AD-404-M] UNPLUGGED: SQL Server 2016


Here is what day two of the regular PASS Summit 2016 sessions looks like for me, the second day keynote is not displayed here.

Friday, October 28, 2016

8:00 AM - 9:15 AM
2AB 
 [AD-303] Data Partitioning for Database Architects and Mere Mortals
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
602-604 
 [AD-501-M] Chalk Talk with Azure SQL Database PM Team
11:15 AM - 12:30 PM
6B 
 [AD-403-M] Inside SQL Server 2016 R Services - Architecture, Security, Performance, and Troubleshooting
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
6B 
 [DBA-210] Go, Go, QueryStore!
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
611-614 
 [BIA-323-M] Microsoft R for the Architect

The final day looks like this, I am sure my brain will be mush by the time I get this far.



And here is what the weather looks like for that week...




I guess that is typical Seattle weather.....

[Edit]
Added after I attended the PAss Summit

If you want to read about my time at SQL Pass 2016, read these posts


SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 2
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 3
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 4
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 5


You might be thinking, where is day 1?  The day 1 posts is mostly about Seattle, if you are interested in that one, here it is:  SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 1.... just looking around

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

If you are going to PASS Summit 2016, build your schedule today

If you are going to the SQL Server Pass summit this year, you can start building your schedule already. Don't wait too long because some events seat only a limited number of people. Take the Chalk Talk with the SQL Server Team [DBA-501-M] session for example
Here is what is says on the page for that session

Speaker(s):  Lindsey Allen 
Duration: 75 minutes
Track: Enterprise Database Administration & Deployment
Join us in an open dialog with members of the SQL Server 2016 Program Management team. Don't miss this unique opportunity to ask the hard questions. Seating is limited to 50 so arrive early. Chalk Talk sessions are not recorded. 
As you can see this session sits only 50 people, so make sure to make a note of that, this way you know to get there early

Some other sessions are also going to be either very popular or they might be in a smaller room, so add those sessions to your schedule first.

You can see all the sessions here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2016/Sessions/Schedule.aspx


That's all

See you at the PASS summit in October