PASS SQL Saturday #194 Exeter

The second SQL Saturday in the UK was held in Exeter at the weekend. This was an excellent event for SQL professionals to learn new skills and network.  This event helped extend the breadth and depth of my knowledge on the data platform.

I attended a precon on High Availability Data Platforms for SQL Server 2012 with Windows 2012. This day was packed full of technical details and architectural design patterns for failover clustering and availability groups  including the current state of Windows 2012 features not yet supported on SQL Server 2012.  The new windows 2012 features, Resilient File Systems (Refs) and Data Deduplication are 2 features are not fully supported. Refs doesn’t support instance file initialisation or CHECKDB. 

On the SQL Saturday I attended sessions such as layered partitioning management of large data sets, a session on Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW ) and Polybase.  Polybase sits between the relational and non-relational engine and allows data to be queried using T-SQL.  Then I also attended a couple of sessions within the BI landscape on PowerView and MDX .

On a non technical track I attended a couple of sessions on professional development. These sessions covered the importance of having a learning plan for the year and the other on how to be a successful architect.  A few architecture models were mentioned such as ITIL service Management Application Lifecycle, TOGAF and Perspective Based Architecture (PBA). A few of the resources mentioned were

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ff650706.aspx
Microsoft Patterns and Practices, proven practices for predicable results
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345.aspx

This was a great SQL event to start the year with.