I arrived early to get my seat at the media table. Definitely exciting!

CEO of Redgate: Jakub Lamik

This year’s theme is Connect, Share, and Learn. Tomorrow will be the Redgate keynote!

People are here from 44 countries. The summit has 5 tracks, 232 sessions with 231 speakers!

43% of attendees are first timers!

Thank you sponsors! 

Next year’s Summit: 4-8 November 2024!

Vice President of Azure Databases: Shireesh Thota

Community is important to making this all work. Azure Data Community: 150000+ members, 172+ user groups, 44 countries! 

Microsoft loves your feedback!

Showing a history of Microsoft SQL Server. Either the crowd is quite, or not a lot of people here worked with SQL Server 1.0, or even 6.5, I feel old! 

Asad Khan, Azure Data Microsoft

SQL from edge to the cloud. Develop once, deploy anywhere. Last year they announced SQLServer 2022, SQL Server 2022 is the fastest adopted version of SQL Server. Paid instances grew 19% on Windows, and 15% on Linux.

One of the key innovations has been Azure Arc. It extends data services to your data estate. Brings Management, Governance (Purview), and Security (Defender). 

Announcing!

• Monitoring for SQL Server – Preview
• Enhanced HA/DR management – Preview
• Extended Security Updates as a service and Automated patching – Generally Available
• Azure SQL Managed Instance feature wave – Generally Available (Included things like being able to stop and start the platform.
• Azure SQL Managed Instance free offer! – Preview. Will give you up to a year of MI to try out the platform

Vladamir Ivanovic

Cloud Modernization Journey – Evaluate, Optimize, Migrate, and Modernize

Demoing Managed Instance, showing how they have Business Critical level, and MI Link. And you can use it to migrate to a Managed Instance.

With an MI instance, you are just a few steps away from modernizing your application by connecting to Microsoft Fabric.

Shireesh Thota Returns

Asks a question about who is building AI apps. Not a lot of replies from the crowd!

It is a generally accepted forecast that 500 million new apps will be built in next 5 years.

Announcing: Azure SQL Database Hyperscale – Same price as commercial OSS databases- Generally available 

Bob Ward and Conor Cunningham

Both wearing proper clothes for a keynote . GO Cowboys 

Showing us things about hyperscale (and they have a developer edition now). Batch mode working on hyperscale. Making lots of investments on this. And always trust Conor (Conor is super smart, but so is Bob).

Next showing how they have solved the schema lock problem. Added a column to a table and other queries didn’t see the column until after it had finished (and was committed).

Next showing a Chat Playground to have a chat session with the data in their SQL Server. You can even build a stored procedure to do the same thing with the database! (Uses the REST API interfaces in the T-SQL)

The Bob and Conor Show did not let us down!

Shireesh Thota Returns

Azure Cosmos DB for AI apps; AI Built-In, Guaranteed performance and scale, Flexibility and efficiency, Mission Critical

Announcing: Dynamic scaling per partition and per region – Public preview

Azure Database for PostgreSQL and MySQL

Fully managed community databases, Built in intelligence, Best total cost of ownership

Announcing: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Improvements

• Premium SSD v2 – public preview
• Near Zero Downtime Scaling -generally available
• IOPs Scaling – public preview

Announcing: Azure Database for MySQL Improvements

• Performance enhancements with Accelerated Logs – Public Preview

Building AI-ready apps on Azure databases

Bob Ward and Anna Hoffman

Bob and Anna are demoing A copilot for SQL.

Bob “I’ve written four books, of course I know SQL”  I wish that was all it required to be as smart as these two folks.

Basically this is a demo of how cool the AI tools are in Azure are. Bob Ward is the John Henry in this story. You still want people with Bob’s (and Anna’s) knowledge around when the extraordinary occurs 🙂

The tools are really cool, the more they automate the mundane tasks the better!

PS Bob, work on your typing skills so you can win next year!

Shireesh Thota Returns

Azure Cosmos DB 

Azure Cosmos DB for Mongo DB vCore – Generally available

Vetor Search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore – Generally available

Natural Language queries for Azure Cosmos DB – Public Preview

Microsoft – Claire Giordino

“Azure Database for PostgreSQL Extension for Azure AI – Preview”

Interesting demo that showed us how you could add an extension to PostgreSQL and get some cool AI features!

Shireesh Thota Returns

Database of the future – autonomous and intelligent, developer friendly, cost efficient, and mission critical by default. 

Looking forward to what they can accomplish (this was a lot of what my article was about yesterday here: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/autonomous-databases/)

Big thank you to the Microsoft team that put on this keynote. Really enjoyable, and so many cool things announced.

See you tomorrow!