We learned some things based on questions, speakers and attendance in sessions, along with survey results from the event. It was interesting to see sesions and interaction and see if we could determine how things are morphing over time between events, the site, articles and so-on.
One of the surprises, for me at least, was the interest in AI. While we had only one or two sessions specifically on the topic, they were both well attended and generated some good questions behind the scenes. In addition, our early event surve results were quite strong on interest in AI. We’ll be digging more into this to see how we can incorporate more topics in this area.
One of the things I’ve found in talking with people about this is that the term AI has many different definitions, depending on who you talk to, and what the target of the conversation is. I meantion the target, because everyone seems to agree that something like Watson and the capabilities there, represents AI. But it feels pretty distant (though in reality it’s put to use in many ways today).
But, when you ask about AI for the course of business – things like operational challenges, spotting things in information and data, machine learning, that type of thing, the definitions and applications start to get very muddy. I’m hopefully we’ll get better at defining this and not end up with the Big Data (deep booming voice again) issue of it meaning different things to different people.
Another interesting finding – tuning was a huge topic – specifically, undestanding indexes, understanding performance tweaking options, understanding query plans and the like. Things to do with the SQL language specifically, and how you tune them and best implement them have always been strong topics for events, including the virtual conferences and webcasts. This remains true in the event last week. We had a number of different approaches to this in sessions, and questions, questions to sswug staff and survey results were strong on these.
The final area was more of a behind the scenes thing – we had a couple of sessions talk to the fact that new SQL Server incorporates the same feature set across versions. This generated a lot of interest in “what does this mean and how do I deploy it…” type issues. It’s great to see people interested in diving deeper into the licensing changes that happen, feature sets, and version configurations.
I think it’s clear that SQL Server is of course charging forward, which is excellent. The features, options, configurations and different ways of approaching your solution with Azure, on-premise, Amazon and other options have people’s attention when it comes to figuring out which way to go. There are many questions, many tests to be done, and many considerations when thinking about where and how it’s best to support your applications for your own requirements.