Things I did today

Good conference overall, but I believe I'll be heading back to PASS Summit next year - they've changed the venue from the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle to the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. That is going to be a much better sell for people on the east coast who don't want to go all the way to Seattle in November. After all, that's why I hesitated. Last time I was in Seattle, it snowed. It was rather miserable! I was happy to find a different conference to attend - in central Florida. It was a good conference - I had a few great speakers, an okay speaker, and one terrible speaker. I learned about data security, Always Encrypt, Dynamic Data Masking, Row compression, What Not to Do in SQL Server (and how to not give a presentation!), how to do performance tuning with code, and without code. I have a ton of articles and blogs and courses via datacamp/pluralsight/edx that would be a great point to learn more. The food quality was average, a

Day 4 didn't have a lot of sessions that were of interest to me. I did head to the SQL panel. The overarching theme is that SQL Server and Relational databases are not dead. Services for integrating RMDBs with things like NoSQL, or having SQL Server installed with Linux will become more prevalent. There will still be in prem data centers, but if you are going into IT today, it'll be more cloud services for storage and network. Physical hardware jobs, or repetitive administration tasks will be consumed by cloud and as a service. Data science and AI will play a larger role for the DBA and will be more important to the business as they will be called for dataops and devops. Basically, getting the right data and results to the right people. Machine Learning applied data science is getting bigger. Some of the normal DBA tasks will be taken over by machine learning - like Azure Performance Tuning. Enhance your role with these types of tools, because you can see what needs to be f

Yesterday morning, I went to a talk about troubleshooting, triage, PowerShell and a few scenarios that are important but not urgent. I learned about Extended Events for logging certain events that are lost when a reboot of SQL Server to clear a full tempdb. In the afternoon, I went to two sessions: Things You Should Never Do In Microsoft SQL Server and Improve Database Performance in Seven Steps. Things You Should Never Do In Microsoft SQL Server - the information was okay, and the presenter didn't have as much humor as I had hoped from the write up on his session. He shared many things that were interestingly wrong, but his delivery was very much "Comic Book Guy" from The Simpsons. While there were some good information in it, most of it was rather basic. Indexes are important. Understanding the data types you select when designing a table are important. While I know it was in jest, and a discussion on what not to do, the presentation was also something not to do.

Yesterday morning, I attended a keynote about how to get end users to use new applications. It's a lot about selling properly, setting up easy ways to ask questions to people who aren't multiple levels above them, allowing them to use the new application early while running parallel, and understanding that some people will go at their own pace of adopting new technology. I myself do not like using voice to search. I'd much rather query using a keyboard/touchscreen/etc as a input device. I likely will need to change my thoughts on that in the next few decades and speech to text/virtual assistant grows even more prominent. The speaker noticed the trend of IM (using Slack or Microsoft Teams) over traditional email, and that his younger team members wouldn't respond to emails until the end or beginning of the day - he inquired, and they said that they would prefer to answer through Slack/Teams as it's more dynamic, you can get a prominent notification straight away,

I attended Advanced Data Protection: Security and Privacy in SQL Server and learned many awesome features that were released with SQL Server 2016. Always Encryption, Dynamic Data Masking and how there are trade-offs for both. Also mentioned: Ode to a Shipping Label The difference between Deterministic and Randomized encryption and why to use each type. When people arrived to set up their laptops, it was funny to compare the difference in IT people and the general public. They troubleshot how to get onto the Wifi when the directions were unclear and joked/complained that the UI dev for the landing page to get access to Wifi wrote "PIN" when they meant "password" as to gain access, we were given an alphanumeric string. It was a fantastic look into new features in SQL Server and possible ways to think about data and when to encrypt or mask, and why. Blanket decisions are rarely the best answer.

Landed safely and took an Uber to the conference resort to check in. Room is nice, regular hotel room and if I want water from the hotel room, I could pay $7.50 for it. Suddenly the water bottle I spent $2.30 for in the airport looks like a better deal. (Of course, the room water will always be ridiculously expensive.) I felt odd bringing my winter coat because I'm heading to a place that's sunny and 75 degrees. Except yesterday. It was cloudy and 50, and I put my winter jacket back on. Also, until I went through my pictures, I didn't realize that the guy on the right is wearing a Jazz Cup pattern ! I walked over 5 miles yesterday - about 4 around one of the Universal parks. Quite a lot of things to do! I was tempted to get a Gryffindor scarf to go with the rest of my Hermoine Granger outfit, but it was $40 and thinner than my regular scarf, so I think I'll pass - but I have several more days to change my mind.

I'm heading to Orlando for a conference. This is the lightest I feel like I've packed in quite a while. Not bringing my camera, which means no need for extra lenses or batteries or the battery charger. I'm bringing a jean jacket and wearing a light jacket and pair of jeans on the plane, and the rest will be short sleeve shirts and shorts. I feel like I'm missing something! I have my fully charged phone, fully charged Kindle, fully charged 20k mAh battery pack, fully charged laptop with power cord, and even a small pillow for the plane! I tested out the workshop materials on the laptop and am ready to go for that, including blank notebook and pen in case it's easier to take notes on paper instead of laptop/phone. Guess I'm ready to go!