Other PASS Summit 2022 Days - Pre-Cons | Day 1 | Day 2
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Day 3 of Summit 2022 was "Community Day" with a "community keynote" given by the amazing Kimberly Tripp (@kimberlyltripp) with help from her lovely assistant Paul Randal (@paulrandal). The keynote was sponsored by Amazon AWS (@aws) but because it was community day the keynote did not include any sponsor content - a nice touch and a big thank you to AWS for supporting the concept.
Before the keynote Steve Jones (@way0utwest) introduced some warm-up entertainment, KillaDBA (@killadba) who rapped his way through #HugADBA getting the crowd ramped up for the final day.
Kimberly and Paul were up next, and Kimberly chose to take us all through "30+ Years of Innovation: How Do We Keep Up with Technology?" - a tour back to the start of her career and all of the changes in SQL Server and the world of data along the way. She and Paul displayed their inner hoarders with an array of memorabilia, old software, and giant boxes of documentation from versions long past, and also discussed the sheer volume of data being produced in our modern world, including the fact that while we made it to the Moon with 64 kilobytes of memory, today we generate over 333 *billion* emails every day (of course 2/3 of them are probably spam!)
Kimberly wrapped up with comments about the community and how amazing it is, especially compared to many other technologies that don't have anything like the #sqlfamily - I have to admit I teared up a couple of times hearing the comments of some of my friends as to how the family has helped them in the careers and their lives. She also talked about how sharing and teaching were the best ways to learn yourself - as she told us, "Learn-Share-Grow!"
Paul tweeted the following while I was writing this post:
Exactly.
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My first session was "Performance Monitoring, Tuning and Scaling Azure SQL Workloads" by Deepthi Goguri (@dbanuggets) and Surbhi Pokharna (@Surbhi_Pokharna). They were first-time Summit speakers and came through their talk in amazing fashion - even with a network hiccup causing problems in one of their Azure demos, they recovered well and handled questions and comments from the audience like champs.
Next I went to "Built-In Query Intelligence in SQL Server 2022" by Kate Smith and Bob Ward (@bobwardms) from Microsoft. I had already seen some of the material from Bob in his workshop earlier this week, but during the workshop he told us we should come see this talk to get Kate's insights, and it was worth it - as a Senior PM in the area she added extra info beyond the base presentation.
After lunch I went to see my buddy from Chicago Frank Gill (@skreebyDBA) - I first met Frank at a SQL Saturday in Chicago years ago, and he is a great DBA and member of the community. He talked about backups in Azure SQL and Managed Instance, and I definitely learned some things I didn't know before.
The last session of Summit 2022 for me was "SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines - Configuring for Price-Performance" by Pam Lahoud (@sqlgoddess) and Aditya Badramrajo (@aditya_feb22) of the Microsoft Azure team. I have seen Pam speak several times before but had not seen Aditya, and the two of them presented very well together. I learned the nuts and bolts of Azure VM sizing and the different models, especially as it relates to capacity constraints (any given model only gets a certain amount of SPU, a certain amount of RAM, of I/O, etc.), along with some recommendations on the best models and configurations to use for SQL VM's inlcuding Pam's favorite VM model for SQL Server, the Ebdsv5, aka the #DoubleSprinklesVMs
Summit 2022 in-person has been awesome - Redgate and the event staff did an outstanding job recreating the magic that was the PASS Summit from before the pandemic, and I can't wait to come back next year!
