Last week, we had SQL Saturday in my home town Copenhagen. It was a great event with great stats:
335 registered attendees
32 Sessions
4 Precon sessions
15 Sponsors
36 volunteers
400 SQLBrew
350 Sausages
300 Cupcakes
The conference venue this year was the Microsoft building in Lyngby, where I also happen to work. So everything felt safe and familiar… :) The first SQL Saturday Denmark event back in 2013 was also my first ever, both as an attendee and speaker, and the event therefore means something special to me. I have been selected as a speaker every year since, with talks on SQL Anti Patterns, Process data warehousing, WTF with SQL, and this year All things time-related.
My conference day started in Andre Kammen’s (b|l|t) session on Powershell (Desired State Configuration) DSC, a declarative configuration management system written in Powershell 4.0/5.0. As SQL developers, we like declarative languages, and it was interesting to hear about an approach to IT operations (including database administration), which takes this approach instead of the normal way of wanting control over every detail.
Read more about Powershell DSC here:
In the second session slot, I gave the talk All things time-related, with topics from temporal relational algebra, SQL2016 temporal, processes, Six Sigma, process data warehousing and process mining. The room was packed, people were standing along the walls, and I even had participants giving up attending because the room was full. Wow. A handful participants were inspired by the talk to investigate topics more on their own hand, and that’s all I need to declare instant success… :)
Read more on these topics here on my blog:
Handouts for the talk are available from the conference website here:
After my speaker duty, I went to Karol Papaj’s (b|l|t) session “SQL Server 2016 Availability Group Enhancements.” High Availability is not my area at all, and I wanted both to learn a little more about it in general, and also see if I could pick up some information on SQL2016 new features. In particular, I noted that AlwaysOn is now available in standard edition branded as Always On Basic Availability Groups.
Get his slides and demos here:
Read more about Always On Basic Availability Groups here:
A quick lunch, and then I continued my search for knowledge outside my comfort zone. Michael Frandsen's (b|l|t) session “Windows Server 2016 Infrastructure for SQL Server” promised to ”briefly cover the Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2012/2014/2016 setups <...>, but the main part will show how new Windows Server 2016 features for the first time can overcome SQL Server limitations, all the way up to and including SQL Server 2014.” Unfortunately, the speaker spent most of the time in the session on the former and didn’t have time enough for the latter. But it was interesting to hear about ultra-fast and reliable replication on the OS side in Windows Server 2016 as an alternative for AlwaysOn.
Get his slides here:
Time for a #SQLcake
and then on to Remus Rusanu’s (b|l|t) excellent session “How to monitor efficiently your SQL Server instances” on measuring SQL Server metrics in many ways. Remus Rusanu has worked on the SQL Server team and has built some of the things, he demoed. How cool is that. One takeaway for me was that DMV’s should not be used for monitoring purposes.
Get his slides here:
For the last session of the day, I spent some quality time with Chris Adkin (b|l|t) in a level 500 brain-frying session called “Super Scaling the LMax Queuing Pattern With SQL Server.” Here Chris Adkin took ideas and work originally started by Thomas Kejser back in 2012, and took it even further using the in-memory OLTP feature introduced in SQL Server 2014. Along the way, we saw SQL Server call stacks and got a little internals along the way. Very nice presentation.
See Chris Adkins post on how to peek into stack traces using Windows Performance Toolkit here:
At 5pm the famous raffle started, where sponsors give away cool stuff for the participants. I got lucky and won a license for the tool “DLM Automation” from Redgate. Nice. And then we had #SQLBrew…
That was it. Meeting old and getting new friends from the #SQLFamily, talking to sponsors, networking with speakers, learning new things, and having fun. Kudos to the organizers for a great job done!
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