A few memories from me. First, a beautiful late arrival view.
My first session feels a little lonely
It started to fill a bit later
A few selfies, Angela
Mala
Bert
David
Brent
TJ
and my view during a break after Thursday’s sessions.
Where’s my room?
It’s a wrap
After Friday, a nice walk out the convention center and outside
Until next year.
This past week was the PASS Summit in Seattle. It’s an annual conference that attracts thousands of SQL Server and data platform professionals. I am lucky in that I usually get to attend, and this year was no different, although it was a short summit for me. There are some live blogs of the keynotes from Kendra for Day 1, 2, and 3 if you want to catch up.
Microsoft was there with a large presence, and as always, they delivered a keynote and had plenty of demos that showcase new changes and enhancements for the data platform. In this case, center stage is really SQL Server 2019, though there were plenty of other items shown as well. I was surprised to see the Azure Managed Instance get so many mentions. I suspect this is an easy for for many companies to transition away from an expensive local data center, or to find ways to use less staff and continue to run a SQL Server outside of their existing infrastructure. I don’t know if this is a good fit for most customers, but Microsoft certainly wants you to try it. The Business Critical edition (with business critical pricing) will release as generally available on December 1.
There were a few releases as well, which you might want to play around with in your lab. First, Azure Data Studio (ADS) got it’s November release. I’m still not certain I love the tool, but Microsoft is working hard to improve it and add features. There aren’t a lot of changes this month, but there are a few more extensions and a number of bug fixes. The paradigm for ADS is just a little off for me, and I’m not quite sure why. I find VS Code to work well for C#, Python, and PowerShell, so why is ADS off for me? Not sure, but let me know in the discussion if you like the tool.
We also have our second release of SQL Server 2019 with CTP 2.1 being announced. It’s supposed to be available Friday for download, at least as a container, but we’ll see. There aren’t a lot of changes, but there are some. What’s more impressive is Microsoft being able to release a second version a month after the first one. They hope to get to a monthly cadence, which I think is amazing for a large product like SQL Server, especially as Windows struggles with their cadence.
There is one amazing new feature, which I think will really improve SQL Server performance for many systems: Scalar UDF Inlining. It’s not a panacea, but it should dramatically improve the use of functions in many workloads. There are restrictions, and it’s only SQL 2019, but I look forward to testing a few demos to see how well things perform with this enhancement to the query processor. You should give it a try as well, testing workloads before and enabling compatibility level 150. If you see improvement, maybe there’s a good case to upgrade your instances that might be using lots of functions.
There are more announcements, especially in the BI area. We get some cool SSRS enhancements, and you might want to watch my friend, Patrick LeBlanc, demo the changes in Power BI. I love Power BI and I think this is going to be the de facto reporting tool for most organizations moving forward. Maybe it will even displace Excel for visuals.
There are a lot of moving parts in the Microsoft Data Platform right now, which may feel overwhelming to many of us. That’s fine. We don’t have to learn everything, but we can pick something that looks interesting and spend a few hours playing. You never know what you might get inspired to learn more about.
Steve Jones
Voting is open for the PASS Board of Directors. It’s a non-event this year, with three open positions and three candidates. That’s disappointing, as I would hope to see new candidates, new blood, and some change in the organization. I’m not complaining, since I didn’t run, but I hope that more people will run in the future.
You might think there’s no reason to vote, but one of the people voting will win a free registration to the 2019 Summit. That alone is worth a few clicks and a moment of your time.
Log into your MyPASS account and you can vote. Good luck in the contest.
I’m only at the PASS Summit for two days, but they will be busy. If you’re at the event and want to find me, here’s my schedule. If you do see me, please feel free to say hi. If I can’t stop to chat for long, it’s because I’m likely late for something, but I do want to shake hands.
Lunch: I’ll arrive mid morning and get myself checked in. I don’t know if I’ll be in the lunch area, but I’ll likely stop by the Redgate booth.
1:30-3:00 – Branding Yourself for a Dream Job, Rm 612. I’ve done this at the Summit before, and a number of other events, but people like it, so I got picked to do it again. I’ll talk about some practical ways to brand yourself and take control of your career.
3:00-6:00 – I’ll likely go to a few sessions or meet friends, but I should be around the expo area part of the time.
Dinner with friends later and an early night for me.
Friday
Early morning will be final rehearsal and prep for me. I’ll do some early in the week, but I like to practice my timing again, especially for my second session.
11:00-12:30 – Adopting a Compliant Database DevOps Process, Room 606. I did a version of this last year and people really liked it, so I’m back again. I’ll talk process and how you can do DevOps in the database, and will show demos, but really this is a process talk. The details of the demos don’t matter, but you get to see changes flowing through the system with a few taps of a finger.
Lunch – Expo hall for me.
15:30-17:00 – Minimizing the Impact of Data Breaches in Dev and Test Databases, Room 604. A higher level talk, mostly aimed at convincing you to be more careful with data. No real demos here, mostly just a talk that looks at how and why you need to protect data.
17:15 – I’m off, heading to the airport. As I mentioned, a short summit for me.
Voice of the DBA 