Today started with a keynote held together by boths David DeWitt and Rimma Nehme from the Microsoft Jim Gray Labs they’re both excellent speakers and fun to listen to. The topic of the keynote is the Internet of Things (IoT). While I was aware that the number of systems that are connected to Internet was high, I wasn’t aware that it had also surpassed the number of people living on Earth back in 2008. And the estimated number for devices for year 2020 was something along the lines of 50 billion! That is a lot of devices.
One of the keypoints that is brought up often is the security and the challenges of pushing so much data into the cloud. They also mention another new concept around the IoT called the fog, yes, the fog. The fog is the area between the devices and the cloud, sort of a staging area where some of the computing can be done and where data can be prepared to be send to the cloud.
On a more sad note, this was apparently the last year we’ll be having keynotes by either David DeWitt or Rimma Nehme. David is apparently retiring and Rimma is apparently looking into moving to something else.
As for the actual sessions for the day I started out with NoSQL of all things. I wasn’t very familiar with the Azure DocumentDB outside the most basic concepts, so it was a great intro to subject coupled with some excellent real life use cases. While I’m not still huge fan of the JSON (it’s better than XML though!) I have to say that Microsoft has put some work into it to make it feel familiar to us SQL guys, starting with the query language. Seeing how simple it was to pull data out of the DocumentDB made me remember the times I’ve tried to get XML out of SQL Server database and I felt sad.
I also took a session on Kerberos and how to troubleshoot the possible issues with it. In past year I’ve had few cases where it has been an issue and they’ve taken quite awhile to figure out how to fix them. There’s also not a lot of good information on Kerberos issues and how to fix them online so this was a much needed information.
As we’re also moving to newer version of SQL Server I’ve tried to include some BI sessions to each day. The session I had today was about reducing the performance impact of BI workloads on production servers. They did pretty good job covering a wide variety of subjects from SSIS and ETL workloads to Analysis Services, ColumnStore Indexes and also to good old Reporting Services.
And at the evening, there was the..
I was feeling bit worn out after the day so I left back to hotel pretty soon, good thing I did the big tour of the museum last year already 🙂
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