MVP Virtual Summit

The COVID-19 virus has resulted in Microsoft converting this year’s MVP/ Regional Director Summit to an online-only / virtual event. It was scheduled for the same week (Mar 16-19). Microsoft have worked hard to plan and prepare an alternate experience that still provides the exclusive in-depth technical sessions in an online-only format and is inclusive to our globally distributed community.

After day 2 of the summit it is still an amazing event. Using Microsoft Teams has been brilliant and the team have done an amazing job bringing it all together in such short notice.

Data Relay postpones to help SQLBits, a united community

It is a difficult time for conferences with the COVID-19 virus outbreak. As a conference owner we we have to think about the #SQLFamily and how to help keep everyone as safe as possible. It is with regret that we, Data Relay had to postpone our event in September, however I was proud to be part of a team that worked with a united community front. We have enabled SQLBits to move dates to 29th September - 3rd October, the original Data Relay dates. We now have to plan for a new set of Data Relay events and will share these once we have sorted this out.

.

International Women's Day 2020.

I am proud to be running an event for international women's day #IWD2020  this week. It is very important to have Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace. International Women's Day is on 8 March across the globe. Every year it is celebrated with a particular theme. The theme for this years international women's day is an equal world is an enabled world.

SQL Bits 2020 Microsoft sessions

Here is a quick guide to a few of the Data and AI sessions from Microsoft at SQLBits.
Keynote: Join Gayle Sheppard, CVP, Azure Data for a keynote presentation on the journey of SQL Server from edge to cloud, packed with exciting demos and customer stories.
SQL Server 2019: The modern data platform: Bob Ward will give you the highlights, including the most exciting new features in SQL Server 2019 like Data virtualization, Big Data Clusters, Accelerated Database recovery, and more.
Sandboxing SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters: James Rowland Jones Big Data Clusters combine the power of SQL Server, Apache Spark, and HDFS to gain intelligence over all your data.
Modern Database design: Connor Cunningham will talk about improving the performance and scale of the databases in real-world scenarios using technologies including columnstore, in-memory tables, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, Always On Availability Groups, and readable secondaries.
Azure Data Services on Azure Arc: Vin Yu talks about the newly launched hybrid service Azure Arc, which lets your run Azure Data Services anywhere. He will show you some of the management capabilities of Azure Arc such as elastic scale and automatic patching.
Azure Synapse Analytics:   Michael Rys brings together big data and data warehousing through new technology and a unified development experience.
Azure Data Studio features in 20 minutes: Vicky Harp will provide a quick refresher on the new features in Azure Data Studio.
10 DBA tasks for Azure SQL: Alain Dormehl and Rie Irish talk on the 10 most common DBA tasks for Azure SQL and how they differ from on prem DBA tasks.
Azure SQL Hyperscale Deep Dive: Alain Dormehl, Davide Mauri, and Denzil Ribeiro discuss how Hyperscale can enable you to innovate with nearly limitless storage in a future-proof, world class, fully managed database.
Microsoft Learn will showcase the complete offering of training and certifications available to the Data & AI professionals. 

Data Relay 2020

I am excited to share the 2020 Data Relay tour details. We will be returning to Reading this year following a break last year. The dates and venues are:

Leeds Monday 28 September
Nottingham Tuesday 29 September
Birmingham Wednesday 30 September
Reading Thursday 1 October
Bristol Friday 2 October

Free Azure certification Self Assessment Tool

Studying for Microsoft exams always begins with reviewing the exam syllabus. I then start mapping out my learning path, finding tools such as courses, ebooks, Microsoft learn training and online conference or Microsoft videos.

To help getting started there is a certification 'Self Assessment Tool'. This tool will help you prepare for your next certification exam, by ensuring you study for each of the objective domains and skills covered on the certification exam.

What is a Lakehouse?

A new management paradigm has emerged that combines data lakes and data warehouses. Lakehouses are similar to data warehouses with structures and data management features. This is backed with the low cost storage that is used for data lakes.

A lakehouse has some key attributes:

• Transaction support
• Schema enforcement and governance
• BI support
• Storage is decoupled from compute
• Openness
• Support for diverse data types ranging from unstructured to structured data
• Support for diverse workloads
• End-to-end streamingThere is a great article to read which covers this in more depth The Data Lakehouse – Dismantling the Hype