Dr Victoria Holt: life, the universe and everything: November 2015

SQL Server 2016 will support JSON. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is used for exchanging data in modern web and mobile applications and used for storing unstructured data in NoSQL databases like Microsoft Azure DocumentDB and MongoDB.

JSON Data looks like

Transact SQL

SELECT name, surname
FROM emp
FOR JSON AUTO

JSON Output

[ 
   { "name": "John" },
   { "name": "Jane", "surname": "Doe" }
]

JSON text is typically stored in varchar or nvarchar columns.

You can Convert SQL Server data to JSON or export JSON and Convert JSON to rows and columns or import JSON.

JSON is explained https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4015/introducing-json-for-sql-server-2016/

JSON in SQL Server 2016: Part 1 of 4

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2016/01/05/json-in-sql-server-2016-part-1-of-4.aspx?wt.mc_id=WW_CE_DM_OO_SCL_TW

Friday, 6 November 2015

SQL Pass 2015 Day 2 Keynote

The SQL Pass 2015 day 2 keynote by David DeWitt and Rimma Nehme of Microsoft was on IoT.

There are various technical challenge to consider about IoT:

variety of sensors
number of devices
dirty sensor readings
data volume / scale
device / sensor security
cloud to device messaging
set up deployment and maintenance of large sensor networks

The Azure IOT Services that currently exist are

Azure Stream Analytics can be used for streaming the real time IoT

The Metadata for this is not currently stored in a DBMS so querying of the data is not possible. IoT is a database problem not just a networking problem.

Rimma explained about the Fog. It is the cloud plus the fog. This in database terms is predicate pushdown. Database 101 is to never move the data to the computation always move the computation to the data.

An interesting set of ideas about Polybase for IoT where discussed covering the declarative language, complex object modeling, scalable metadata management, discrete & continuous queries, multi purpose querying and computation pushdown.

The final picture about the future.