Last Saturday I went to the free day of the biggest and best SQL Server conference in the UK: SQL Bits. SQL Bits is a fantastic four-day conference held every year in the UK; two days of pre-con training and two days of shorter session based learning. Best of all, the last day is free! You might expect that last day to be full of those sponsor sessions where you're enticed in with an amazing sounding abstract and then 5 minutes later, realise you're being subjected to death by powerpoint but happily, you'd be wrong. The session abstracts are overwhelmingly accurate, the speakers exceptionally knowledgeable and best of all, there are lots of demos! Many of the speakers make their slides and demos available to download online so you can go over the material again at your own pace. In addition to all of that, SQL Bits have all the past sessions available on their website for you to watch, for free. Loads more info on their website: https://sqlbits.com/

One fun fact about Olympia is that the nearest tube station is closed at weekends, despite what the signs on the underground tell you and so after a brisk 10-minute walk I'd made it to the warmth of the exhibition hall.  Lord Richard Douglas (yeah, really, he is) started the day off with a great session on how to "Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes". Next, it was off to see Bob Ward present on what's available and coming up in SQL Server 2017, including SQL Server on Linux and Docker, Automatic tuning, HADR and adaptive query processing. One of the things I'd look to look at next is getting our dev workloads on to SQL Server running in Docker Containers; being able to spin up the latest and greatest for dev/test would be a real boon, rather than the brand new VM approach we have now. Following that was a double session on Azure SQL Managed Instances -  a really interesting looking new offering that gives you near complete control over a whole SQL server instance, for those who are looking to lift and shift their more 'legacy' applications into the cloud. I would have loved it if Borko Novakovic had had a little more time for his demo; there was quite a bit that I would have liked to have understood in more depth. After that was a brilliant session about joins with Rob Farley. Now, I'd never seen Rob present before and so I had no idea what to expect when he said he wasn't going to use the projector but he completely pulled it off, getting loads of people from the audience involved in the demo of what the different joins are, what they do and how they're combined. The last session of the day was a poorly attended but great session by program manager Jakub Szymaszek on always encrypted and how it's being extended with secure enclaves so that useful querying can still be done on encrypted data, without exposing it to an untrusted third party. A superb day of free learning!

I should be mention at this point that none of this goes on without the sponsors and it really makes a difference if you go around the hall during the breaks and have a chat with them about what they offer. I had a great chat with Sam Spark (finally able to put a face to a name!) from Redgate about their new data privacy suite. In particular SQL clone seems to have come on leaps and bounds since I'd used the preview version, though it's pricing is high enough that I'm going to have to make a really good case to the business if we're going to get it. It looks fantastic and not having to worry about getting sanitised production data for testing and bug fixing would really help me sleep at night. I did talk through the issues we'd been having with the DLM automation tools (see my previous post) and if they were any other options available. I was introduced to ReadyRoll and how it works as a migration based system rather than a state-based one; so there's no comparison involved here, it simply applies migration scripts in order.

All in all a fantastic day; there were so many sessions that I wanted to go to but couldn't because of clashes with others I wanted to see. I can't recommend this event enough; the amount of effort that is put in by the organisers, volunteer helpers, speakers and sponsors all comes together to make it a truly inspiring event. I've come back with a number of ideas that I'd like to sketch out and put in to practice and I will endeavour to blog about them on here.

Thanks again to all of the SQL Bits organisers, volunteer helpers, speakers and sponsors for a brilliant day.