While I normally blog about SQL Server or topics that closely relate to it in some way, I decided to make a small exception this time. Today, I will be writing about blockchain. Granted it’s not a huge jump outside my usual themes, as we’re still talking about database technology. So why I am writing about the blockchain, is it because it’s new and cool technology that everyone else is talking about? Admittedly that is part of, but I also wanted to have some of my thoughts and questions about the blockchain in an easy to find place.
This year I didn’t write my usual daily blog posts during the PASS Summit 2016 as I felt it to be bit too much work with the long days and bit of a jet lag with the 10 hour time difference. Instead I decided to write a post summarizing my experience of the event. Every year, when deciding on what pre-con sessions to take and what regular sessions to attend to I try to think of a theme. This year I decided to go with Big Data and Analytics, as that’s an area of Microsoft Data Platform I’m not terribly familiar with. It was also a good choice because with SQL Server 2016 we’re seeing a huge number of improvements on technologies involved with these topics and there were quite a few sessions regarding these.
One of the new interesting features in SQL Server 2016 is the system-versioning with a catchy name, Temporal Tables. The name of the feature offers a hint to its purpose, to collect and to keep historical information about the data changes inside the database over a period of time. Instead of having just the latest data, we now have a way to know what it has been in any previous point in time. The most obvious use case for Temporal Tables is auditing, or at least it is to me, but they can be used for other purposes as well. Some examples are going back in time in case you need to perform a data recovery from an error or a data change operation gone bad, or you might want to use it for reporting purposes.