This post comes a bit late as our last day in Seattle went on bit longer than expected, but for very positive reasons. We had an ad hoc gathering of Finnish PASS Summit attendees and despite the fact that it was very last minute setup, we got pretty much everyone there. The evening itself was hosted by Marko Hotti, one of the Senior Product Managers at Microsoft who moved to Seattle a while back and is now working on the SQL Server 2016 release. And while there was some (or a lot) talk about SQL Server and the PASS community, we did also get to relax bit after a long week.
As for the conference, the main topic for this day was one of the less known features of SQL Server called Service Broker. I had very basic knowledge about it myself, but after two different sessions I was positively surprised by the possibilities it could offer in terms of real-time data integration and application scaling. One of these possibilities was to use certificates as authentication method, making it capable of connecting to Azure or any other SQL Server even in different domains with no trust relationships. If there’s a one downside to Service Broker, it’s the need to use XML for messages.
I also participated in a Transactional Replication session and one about Change Data Capture. I’ve looked into combining these two to optimize some ETL processes and having better understanding on how to optimize and properly configure them was very helpful. I’m looking forward to putting these lessons to good use in a coming weeks.
The 8000 kilometer and 16 hour journey to home was somewhat uneventful, the highlight was when leaving the Reykjavik airport the captain announced that he was going to piggyback on some current or another to get us home bit faster and to save some fuel. It was a first time I’ve ever been in a passenger plane having ground speed over 1000 km/h!
Once again PASS Summit turned out to be a superb quality event when it comes to training. We also did some brainstorming within our small group and came up with few interesting ideas we’ll be looking into making actual solutions in the near future.
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