Attending SQL Saturday Vienna

Last Friday, I attended SQL Saturday (yeah, I know it sounds weird that SQL Saturday is in fact on Friday, but that’s how it is). That was the first time I visited such an event and I must admit that I was really impressed with enthusiasm of the people who organized this event and the quality of speakers.

This event is completely FREE, unless you plan to attend whole day workshops day earlier. That means, for 0 EUR/USD you get (at least) 6 sessions full of demos, tips and tricks on whole range of different topics, including database administration, advanced data analytics, cloud technologies, etc.

Therefore, 36 sessions were divided into 4 separate tracks (Administration, Analytics, Cloud, Development), so there were 6 sessions in parallel every single hour! The hardest thing was to choose which session to attend. In the end, I opted for following ones:

Designing your tabular/PowerBI model for performance and scalability (Ivan Donev)
Automated Machine Learning – brauchen wir noch Data Scientists? (Mario Schnalzenberger)
Databricks for the SQL Developer (Gerhard Brueckl)
Temporal tables in SQL Server: practical usage scenarios (Andrea Martorana Tusa)
Power BI Live Data sets, Monitoring your key metrics (Jens Vestergaard)
SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters: Make SQL Server your Data Hub for everything (Ben Weissman)

It would be fairly complex task to separate single session which appealed most to me, but if I have to do that, I would say the last one, both because of topic and awesome presentation by Ben Weissman (who, by the way, wrote a book on this topic).

To be honest, I didn’t have a clue (and I still don’t have it at the time of writing this post) about SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters. However, this can be a real game-changer in the world of on-premise data storage and data manipulation. I promise to myself that I will do my best to go deeper into this concept of containers, nodes, pods, pools…So, that’s my next learning goal:)