PASS Summit 2018 Day 2 Keynote

The day 2 keynote today was given by Microsoft Data Platform CTO Raghu Ramakrishnan on the internals of our next evolution in engine architecture which will form the foundation for the next 25 years of the Microsoft data platform.

It covered Azure SQL DB Hyperscale. The changing landscape of data has many challenges. How to leverage unbounded storage and elastic compute as well as the perennial problems: size of data operations are slow with long painful recovery times while masking network latencies.

There isn’t one database system that can do it all well. Users need to move data across systems which is slow and complicates governance.

The most challenging for state management is ACID properties, transactional updates, high velocity of data changes and lowest response times. These issue lead to the SQL Hyperscale.

There are various technical themes: full separation of compute and storage, the quorum (log) is complex, uniquely skewed access pattern and network simply extends the memory hierarchy. He shared a newsflash about Multi-Version Timestamp CC rules resulting from 2 phase locking and MVCC (Hekaton) and lock free data structures.

Persistent Version Store (PVS)

This technical in depth talk was packed full of technical content about SQL Hyperscale and I would recommend watching the recording about this new product and era of database delivery.