A Roundup from SQL Konferenz

This past week I have had the opportunity to present at SQL Konferenz hosted by PASS Germany in Darmstadt. This was also the first time that SentryOne has sponsored the event. Scott Fallen (t|b), Nick Harshbarger (t|b), and I had a great time speaking with a lot of the attendees who all seemed very interested in having a chat.

This was my first visit to SQL Koferenz, and I have to say that I am incredibly impressed with the quality of the event and how the team organize and run it. From a speaker perspective, they had a great AV setup, so that the attendees were able to see the content and hear the speaker. Little things like having screens halfway down the room meant that it was easy to see code and the like without needing to strain my eyes.

While I was unable to speak German, the general atmosphere was great fun, with everyone being very friendly and open to discussing SQL Server and the Microsoft Data Platform. A number of the community leaders were there representing their local groups in the community area, including the Azure Meetup community. There was a fire alarm during the conference which proved to be an interesting diversion while we all took a little walk out into the cold but sunny day.

The party on the Tuesday evening was fun with good food and, as always in Germany, great beer.

Overall, I had a great time, and will certainly be submitting sessions again; if you are a speaker that is looking for a new event to engage with the community then this is really worth looking into. If you are a member of the Data Platform community and looking for great content to learn from, I would recommend that when the team open registration for next year's event that you get in early to avoid any disappointment.

As sponsor, we got the chance to raffle off a couple of prizes to attendees who came to our booth and got their badges scanned. In place of the traditional pieces of paper pulled out of a box, I wrote a little bit of PowerShell that pulled in the raffle entries and then randomly picked the winners. First prize was a Google Home and a Full SQL Sentry license, won by Ralph, with second place going to Torsten. Congratulations to both our winners; we hope you enjoy the prizes!

My session at SQL Konferenz was an introduction to Azure SQL Database Managed Instances, looking at both what this new Azure service is and also some of the use cases. This service is still under Private Preview, so I was not able to cover some areas in great detail, but I was lucky enough to have Jovan Popovic (t) co-present the session with me and demo Managed Instance. Jovan is one of the Program Managers at Microsoft for this new service and his insight and demos were a great addition to the session.

As well as co-presenting my session, Jovan also had a great session first thing on the Tuesday, going over the architecture and some of the more detailed points of Managed Instance.

If anyone wants the slide deck from my session at SQL Konferenz, it can be found here.