Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending SQL Saturday 375 in Mountain View, California. This was my second time attending this particular event, which is just wonderfully well run and, like all SQL Saturdays, a real joy to attend.
I presented my topic Care and Feeding of Your System Databases to a packed and enthusiastic room. In my presentation I covered some of the basic maintenance and performance/configuration gotchas for master, model, msdb, tempdb, distribution, and resource_db. As usual, the topic of tempdb brought many questions – something which comes up so often that I’ve actually developed an entirely separate presentation simply focused on tempdb. You can see both the Care and Feeding presentation and the new Tempdb presentation via the SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2015, and I’ll be presenting the Tempdb topic again on June 3 for an Idera Geek Sync webcast.
I was also fortunate to attend the keynote fireside chat with Microsoft Data Platform CVP T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan and Microsoft Technology Center Director Ross Mistry. T.K. presented a compelling story about Microsoft’s SQL Server, cloud, IoT, and machine learning efforts and how they fit into the larger story of “fulfilling your data dream.” Microsoft is putting forward a clear message that they want to embrace new technology and to support the technologists in their space. I was impressed by the demonstration of the new Querystore feature for the next version of SQL Server and look forward to seeing what new performance data will become available as they expand the availability of DMVs in both SQL Server on-prem and in Azure. And I particularly liked T.K.’s parting advice, which was that each of us as data professionals choose a part of this new data world (be it privacy, compliance, storage, etc) and become an expert at it, because our community and our field needs that expertise and that passion. I found it quite inspiring.
If you’ve not attended a SQL Saturday, they are well worth checking out. Take a look at the SQL Saturday site and see when the next one is happening near you!