Day 2, Thursday, started off with a keynote from David DeWitt on cloud data warehousing, scalable storage and scalable compute. This set my theme for the majority of the day – which turned out to be big data tech.
My first session was with James Rowland-Jones and Kevin Ngo on sizing Azure SQL Data Warehouse for proposals – essentially answering “how much is this going to cost me?”. There are various factors to consider, which I will blog on separately. I’ve already briefly fed back to members of the team and they’re excited to know what I learnt in more detail.
My second session was about best practices for Big BI which, unfortunately, ended up being a sales pitch and I came away having felt that I’ve didn’t learn anything. There’s a lot of promise for BI in the big data space, so watch this space as we explore Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake (Store and Analytics), and other big data technology for BI.
The third session was with Michael Rys on Tuning and Optimising U-SQL Queries for Maximum Performance. It was a full on session, learnt loads and took loads of notes. I need time to digest this information as Michael covered off a very complex topic, very quickly. I will, however, be blogging on it in due course.
After an intense third session, I chose a less intense session for the last session of the day: a Q&A with the SQL Engineering team. This was a great opportunity to learn from other users how they’re using SQL. Most users who asked questions were wanting to know about indexing, backups and High Availability.
Tonight – packing, and networking before the last day of PASS tomorrow!
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