SQL Relay

I attended SQL Relay 2012 in Clifton, Bristol yesterday which brought together  SQL experts from the southwest. The location was fantastic at the Avon Gorge Hotel which overlooks Brunel’s suspension bridge. The al fresco dining for lunch in the glorious Sun added to the interesting SQL discussions.

There were overview sessions from Microsoft in the morning on SQL Server 2012 and Deep Dive sessions in the afternoon from SQL Server MVP's.

The morning sessions delivered by Microsoft by Morris Novello, SQL Server Product Manager and Andrew Fryer, Technical Evangelist discussed the explosion of data volumes, new innovations in the cloud and new development features within SQL Server 2012. The practical overview of SQL Server 2012 new features showed the breadth and depth of the changes to the product which will take SQL Server to a new level.

The afternoon MVP’s Tony Rogerson covered SANless high availability with Always On and Martin Bell covered Distributed Replay. Considering disk geometry added an interesting dimension to Always On and being able to mitigate risk against hardware consolidation and changes using distributed replay was insightful.