Data Intelligence

I had the amazing opportunity to attend PASS Summit 2016, the largest Microsoft SQL Server event I the world. The event provided the opportunity to meet many international experts and engage with Microsoft engineers in every field.

As a first time attendee there was a lot of logistics to understand to get the most from the event.  I was amazed by the number of Europeans who attended the conference, many of whom I know as a helper for many years at SQLBits. PASS Summit is the pinnacle of the year and I can say I gained much from this event which otherwise would not have been possible.

The first summit keynote delivered by Joseph Sirosh who presented types of A.C.I.D. intelligence with various patterns, intelligent DB, intelligent lake and deep intelligence. A.C.I.D. intelligence being Algorithms, Cloud, IoT and Data. Intelligence is now in every piece of software with applications that continually learn from the data and subsequent information.  This pushes intelligence to where the data lives.

The intelligent database incorporates the new functionality of R Services, provides an operating system of choice (Windows or Linux) for any data deployed anywhere.  The SQL Server 2016 functionality is extended with the hybrid transaction and analytical processing (HTAP) solution which the In-Memory OLTP, In-Memory Analytics, In-Memory Azure SQL Database (launched 15 November) combined with Polybase enable fast querying of structured and unstructured data. Polybase can connect to all data sources such as MongoDB, Hadoop, Teradata, Oracle.  Adding machine learning to the suite of tools add benefits such as real time fraud detection.  DocumentDB properties were also discussed highlighting the blazing fast performance and global replication.

The intelligence lake enables the handling of petabytes of data through algorithms and the extensible data lake. Azure analysis services is available at public preview and Azure SQL Data Warehouse with its parallel processing and scale out was offered as an exclusive one month free trial. There was a great demo by Julie Koesmarno on Azure cognitive services with U-SQL which provided sentiment analysis of War and Peace.

The final part of the key note presented deep learning which looked at many real life examples of learning everywhere from collecting data reviewing whether power lines looked in a good state of repair to face detection to medical research detecting cancer cells.

The keynote was truly inspirational. There were many other amazing sessions with a vast amount of information on diverse topics which I will share in separate posts.