I was lucky enough to be accepted to speak at SQL Nexus in Copenhagen and I attended the event a few weeks ago. This is the new Nordic SQL conference that seems to be replacing the SQL Rally. I’d never been to Denmark, but the trip was easy, and I had no problem getting from the airport to the area downtown where the event was held. Surprisingly (for me) everyone I met spoke English, which was nice, considering I didn’t even know how to pronounce many words, including the train station I was trying to get to.
Being on the water, the speaker dinner was appropriate and quite enjoyable. I’ve had some good ones, but I think this was the best of them all.
The event was held in a movie theater, which I think is very interesting. The spaces were large, theater style room with big screens. Our computers were hooked to the projectors, which worked well. You can see the keynote in the IMAX room below.
The keynote was interesting, from Joseph Sirosh (Microsoft) and Troels Peterson (physicist at the Neils Bohr Institute). The same keynote from Joseph was at SQL Bits, but I don’t think Dr. Peterson went over to the UK. I want to write on Joseph’s a little later, so I’ll just take a few moments and show some highlights of how data is managed at the Cern Hadron collider.
Dr. Peterson works with the ATLAS detector. He had a few nice stats on the hardware.
If you do some math here, you’ll see that when they run the detector and conduct an experiment they produce a lot of data. In fact, this was the next slide:
That’s serious data. It was interesting that he said that’s an unmanageable amount of data. In fact, they need sensors to make decisions on the raw data because they can’t even use computers to analyze this level of information. However, they do have computers. In fact, they have:
- 1127 racks
- 10,070 servers
- 17, 259 processors
- 90, 948 cores
- 75,718 disks
- 113, 852 TiB raw disk
- 312 TiB of memory capacity.
- 120 tape drives
- 52000 tape catridges
- 75 PiB data on tape.
In all their analysis, searching for the secrets of the universe, they’ve learned a lot and gotten better at finding anomalies and problems with data. They know all their data is flawed, so they must use algorithms to try and find the data they can rely on in the entire lake of bits that is captured and stored. They use a lot of machine learning to comb through data.
In fact, he said their research actually showed that there was a reason certain data was altered in line with the phase of the moon. In fact, Dr. Peterson said that they determined that the length of the collider tunnel actually lengthened by 1mm because of the moon.
There were lots of other interesting SQL Server 2016 talks, including the ones you’d expect on machine learning, R, one on IoT (a bit of a wreck of a talk) and a great one showing MitM and other attacks against a SQL Server from a Linux machine.
The event was two days long. I spoke on encryption and security changes in SQL Server 2016 that went well. I’ll do some writing on my demos, showing more Always Encrypted, RLS, Dynamic Data Masking, and more.
The theater was right next to the river, with a nice walkway. A few of us were able to run alongside in the morning. Plenty of people walked or biked along the river each day, and the weather was amazing.
I think this was a really nice conference, at a good cost for those of you in Europe. If you can get to Copenhagen, it might be worth the two (or three days with a pre-con) to try SQL Nexus next year. I’m hoping they do the event again next year and I’d certainly like to go if I can.
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