SQL PASS Summit 2014 – Day 2

This morning started with a talk from Rimma Nehme a key Microsoft architect. The talk was informative and clearly Azure and the cloud are something which Microsoft are very keen, it was well thought through and there was a fantastic analogy between pizza and different flavours of Azure which is not what I had expected.

Adam Machanic did a presentation covering different methods which could be used in order to force the query optimiser into choosing more efficient query plans. This was not for the feint hearted and included some ingenious methods which he had developed which could be used to ‘fool’ the optimiser into selecting different query plans. The methods tried to push towards parallel queries and ensuring that the right workload was assigned to each of the threads so they finished at roughly the same time. The only drawback to this was that some of the examples produced code which was quite obfuscated and not something which I thought could be used except in the case that there was an exceptional issue which necessitated their use.

Davide Mauri’s session on Unit Testing and Agile development was very interesting, he showed demonstrations of NUnit, BI.Quality and NBI. These are tools which allow users to create unit tests when following an agile approach, whilst we also use similar methods at Adatis to provide unit testing functionality the demonstrations were very effective and I will be doing some further research into these products to realise their full potential.

Connor Cunningham also presented a fantastic talk titled ‘Managing 1M + db’s – How big data is used to run SQL Azure’. This was a very insightful talk which detailed the issues that had arisen when running the SQL Azure service and the methods used in order to identify, quickly resolve and identify the root cause of the problems. Central to this was both the collection of telemetry data from many sourced which could be used to perform diagnostics and the methods used in order to identify problems. Here we saw a very interesting usage of Azure Machine Learning, which had been setup to trigger Alerts on the occurrence of unusual behaviour. Connor is a fantastic speaker and clearly one of the most knowledgeable people on the SQL engine, I really enjoyed this talk.

I’m off to the evening party now at the EMP museum, looking forward to having a few beers and meeting some new people 🙂