PASS Summit 2015: Day 1

Well friends, here I sit again, at the blogger’s table, ready to kick of Day 1 of the PASS Summit here in Seattle, Washington.  My trusty side-kick, Perry, is with me as usual, and we’re joined by Bunny this year as my 8 year old insisted I am bring them both. Who I am to argue with her?

Some notes about today

It’s National Chocolate Day!  I plan to celebrate all day 🙂

I present twice today!  My first session is right after the keynote: Kicking and Screaming: Replacing Profiler with Extended Events in Room 6A from 10:15 to 11:30 AM.  Note that this session was a little later in a different room than originally scheduled.  My second session, Statistics and Query Plans, is from 3:15 PM to 4:30 in 6B.  I hope to see you at one of my sessions, feel free to come up and say if we haven’t met before (or if we have!).

Today’s keynote, Accelerating Your Business With a Modern Data Strategy, is headlined by Joseph Sirosh who is a Corporate Vice President in the Data Group at Microsoft.  And we’re off…

8:21 AM

Up first today is PASS President Tom LaRock.  This is Tom’s last year as President, he’ll next step into the role of Immediate Past President.  He mentions #SQLFamily and says that everyone is free to give him a hug.  That could be a lot of hugs.

Attendees from over 58 countries…over 2000 companies are represented, and the Microsoft team will be everywhere this week – stop by the SQLClinic if you have any questions you need help with.

For those of you not here, please follow along on  PASS TV, just head over to the main page for Live Streaming.

Tom introduced the PASS Board of Directors and encouraged members of the community to talk to the board this week to help them understand how to serve the community better.  Tom mentions the Board Q&A on Thursday at 3:30 PM in 307-308.

There are 5,500 total registrations this year for Summit (note: that’s not individuals…if you register for a pre-con and the conference, I think that’s 2 registrations, not 1).  Tom asks for a show of hands from newcomers…there are a lot.  ELS: Those of you who are here for the first time, try to meet people!  If you’re an introvert, I know that’s hard, but take a risk!  Say hi, find something in common!

The SQL community is the gold standard for technical communities.  ELS: I don’t disagree, I have friends in other technical disciplines, and they have nothing like what we have.

There are over 200 sessions and workshops this week.  Use the mobile app Guidebook to stay on top of any schedule changes.  On Twitter follow along with hashtags #sqlpass and #summit15.

The Birds of a Feather lunch will take place during lunch on Friday where you can talk to people with an interest in a specific feature/area.

Don’t forget out Sponsors who make this entire event possible.  There are some fantastic companies that support the SQL Server community.  PLEASE make time to go talk to them this week.  The Exhibitor Reception is tonight, after regular sessions end.

Tom closes by saying how proud he is to be a member of the #SQLFamily community.  He’s been a member since 2004.  I think he’s getting a little choked up.  Oh.  HUGS TOM!

 8:37 AM

Joseph Sirosh takes the stage.

We live in an age of data.  The ability to extract that data and use it is changing our daily lives.  All of the worlds data was analog 30+ years.  Then we got DVDs and such which started to digitize data.  When the internet came along, data suddenly had an IP address.  Connected data can be moved around and joined with other connected data.  Which means you extract intelligence from it.  The vast majority of today’s data is digital.  Much of that in the cloud.  Fast forward to 2020, there will be 50 million petabytes of data, mostly in the cloud.  Fifty years ago, hardware drove new customer experiences.  Then came the age of software.  Digitizing everything.

In the new world, data will predict everything.  We can use this data to develop models so that when, for example, people come in to the ER with a problem, you can put in data collected and use a model to determine a path of care.

Joseph brings up Eric Fleischman who is the Chief Architect and VP of Platform Engineering at DocuSign (we use their site!), they chose to use SQL Server because they believed Microsoft would be there for them (and they have been).  They made an investment into the telemetry of the system that process millions of data points about the performance of the actual system.  That system is scaling literally to the OLTP system.  There are some improvements in the HA/DR stack for them in 2016, along with the encrypted features.

SQL Server 2016 is meant to be the all engines of data that you can build your data on – both in house and in the cloud.  Innovate first in the cloud with an accelerated speed (push new code once a week).  The pain in this system translates into changes in software very quickly.  When you build and operate in the cloud, you take innovation and bring it back to packaged software (SQL Server 2016).  Companies like Oracle cannot claim that…who build locally and then ship to the cloud.  Amazon will state they are only in the cloud, it’s a cloud-only feature. But “we” know better.  Feet on the ground and head in the cloud.  You have to build products to operate both in the sky and the ground.  Microsoft is the only company to do that.  This community is making Microsoft number 1 in the age of data.

HUGE STATEMENT from Joseph.

There’s a video with some feedback from fellow MVPs about SQL Server 2016…  Joseph turns the stage over to Shawn Bice (General Manager, Database Systems Group).  Haven’t shipped 2016 yet, but it powers everything in the cloud.

Seven big bets…all of these are built-in.

From OLTP perspective – SQL Server is recognized as a leader.

SQL Server is the most secure database.  SQL runs some of the most scalable data warehouses in the world.  Mobile BI is built into SQL Server, it’s about that mobile workforce and getting visualizations to them.

First big bet: HA/DR.  Have learned a lot from partnership with DocuSign.  DocuSign is using some of the fastest IO subsystems with FusionIO.  Have A LOT of data moving across the wire to secondaries.  Have done a ton of work with algorithms to improve updates.  Have customers that use Azure along with on premise all the time.  You can enroll an Azure DB with an on-prem system to create a DR site.  For all of you that have used DB Mirroring: want to use an AG but can’t domain join it.  In SQL 16, can stand up HA environment, don’t have to domain join anything.  Woohoo!  Introduce load balancing around read scale, so don’t have to point clients to every secondary.  The stack for on prem is the same that’s in Azure, and they do failovers every day.  They had a data center that was on fire and failed over every customer in China in about 5 hours.

Ok, I need to get to my first session, I’ll be back tomorrow!  Have a great day!

 

4 thoughts on “PASS Summit 2015: Day 1

  1. I do not know whether it’s just me or if everybody else experiencing issues with your blog. It looks like some of the written text in your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please comment and let me know if this is happening to them as well? This might be a issue with my web browser because I’ve had this happen before. Thanks

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