I didn’t attend the //build/ conference this year and am slightly disappointed. Only slightly, since I was in these cities in May already and didn’t need another trip: London, Los Angeles, Austin, Brisbane. In addition, my family had to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, Mother’s Day, and a graduation in May. A busy month for me.
However, I did watch some of the keynotes and streamed a few sessions. I have more on my list, but one of the big things I noticed is covered in this article: the data platform is becoming more important. Both to Microsoft and their customers as we all start to depend not only on software, but on the data that powers our software systems. More and more executives are waking up to appreciate not only the value of data as an asset, but also that it needs protecting.
At the conference, there were some announcements that give us more options and more opportunity as SQL Server professionals. We get SQL Server on the Edge, running on ARM platforms, as well as some caching improvements in Azure SQL Data Warehouse. While not a lot of people use ASDW, the technologies that Microsoft builds here are filtering down to the on-premises version of SQL Server. Keep an eye on this caching to come in 2021 or 2022 to all of us.
There were other items, but one thing that strikes me more and more: this is an exciting time to be working on the Microsoft Data Platform.