Summit 2019 Post Mortem
Last week was a very excellent PASS Summit (made somewhat bittersweet by the fact that we don’t know exactly when we’ll return to Seattle) and I wanted to captures some of the things I brought back from a high level.
Big SQL News
A couple of announcements of note were made the first of which being the promotion of SQL 2019 to GA. 2019 includes such fancy features as the ability to perform data classification via metadata tables (as opposed to attaching that information to a columns extended properties). This feature will inter-operate with auditing to allow you to target the info that needs the most attention in your database. Accelerated Database Recovery to speed up rollbacks and make transaction log work more efficient. The ability to run R natively in SQL Server has been expanded to much larger collection of languages via sp_execute_externalscript. Better support for Docker and Kubernetes and more.
Azure Arc (currently in preview): This is crazy to me (in a fantastic way) but we can now run Azure services on prem! This makes infrastructure as code or the ability to allow teams to self-service their server needs that much easier. Plus you get the benefit of Azure threat analysis for those locally running services too. Currently it’s limited to Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgresSQL Hyperscale. (More here.)
Azure Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics: Microsoft is working to extend the data warehouse by connecting it more to our data lakes and analytics to provide more bang for the buck. Deep integration with AI and BI allow that workload to sit immediately next to the data in a unified environment.
On the Classroom Side
I believe the learning pathways they tried out this year were a success and overall at every time slot I was forced to make hard choices about what session to attend. The new MS certifications for Azure Data Engineer are an excellent area for career growth that brings together varied data wrangling skills into a new discipline to provide data for reporting and analysis in our organizations. The learning pathways started with a general understanding of this new role before spreading out to cover the various tools and Azure areas where Data Engineers will be spending their time. Similarly the AI learning pathways had a number of good sessions ranging from an introduction to AI, an overview of the process behind machine learning and how DBAs can better support their data scientists within the SQL Server stack.
I’m a privacy/data ethics nerd so I attended a couple of sessions on data masking and data cataloging that were interested and really drove home that very few of us are ready for GDPR (or GDPR-like legislation) even now that the GDPR is here and in effect. (Up to 50% of UK companies are still not GDPR compliant!) There were also a number of excellent professional development sessions on technical leadership or helping drive organizational change as part of IT.
My favorite part was how much certain things came up over and over again no matter what session I was in: things like PowerShell (and specifically dbatools) as well as Azure Data Studio (the ability to direct folks internally to a tool that isn’t SSMS for data exploration has been a big driver at my org) especially the further development/integration of Jupyter Notebooks.
But my truly favorite part (as always) was the ability to connect up with other data professionals, face-to-face. To be able to shake the hand of the people that work so hard on dbatools, give feedback to the Azure Data Studio team or even just find another DBA facing similar challenges so we can cry in our beers together. PASS Summit has definitely been the biggest driver of my career learning since I started attending in 2014. The good news is you can register now for Summit 2020 in Houston: I hope to see you there!