#SQLFamily
Well, that was unexpected.
Somehow I ended up at this table, enjoying a meal with some of the brightest minds in data. Having been invited to share this moment is not something I will soon forget. I can imagine that moments like these inspire others in ways that are hard to put into words. My mind wandered, imagining the day I will reflect on this moment in greater detail, in such a way that Thomas LaRock did in On Speaking. I’ll call this dinner my “Rockstar” moment.
Throughout the rest of the week, there were plenty of opportunities to approach the experts. Many conversations about data, business, and career advice were had. After missing him at Pass Summit, I bumped into Pinal Dave. The term “live session” is an understatement. It was amazing to witness Pinal’s full hour of live demos, audience involvement, and “typing” during a presentation. He is a true master of his craft — and also a pretty cool guy.
Other sessions that I had the pleasure of attending were as follows:
- Bradley Ball, Jorge Segarra, and Josh Luedeman delivered an incredible precon session on experimenting in Python, Azure Machine Learning, and PowerBI. Mixture of twitter scraping and data science #magic. They were able to predict the best day to watch baseball, but could not tell when the Chicago Cubs would have another winning season. Maybe next year?
- Mindy Curnutt shared her method for using extended events to detect application issues. Since leaving the conference, I have already captured some new insights on a vendor’s application.
- Grant Fritchey went over #DataProtectionOps and #PrivacyOps. This was both a great history lesson and reminder of why it’s important to protect our data.
- Ginger Grant configured Machine Learning Services on SQL Server. I couldn’t even spell “R” prior to this session.
- Thomas LaRock and Karen Lopez gave us a full day of Azure SQL Database. This was a great primer for getting started on the cloud services platform.
Event Summary
All in all, Live 360 was an excellent event and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I spent some time in sessions covering technologies that I don’t generally have much experience with: Azure, data science and PowerBI. The event was well put together with a good variety of SQL Server content and another great reminder of how amazing #SQLFamily is.
Until the next one. See you then.