This past weekend was particularly busy for me with distilled SQL Server training. I attended the SQL Index Tuning pre-con with Brent Ozar on Friday followed by the all-day long SQL Saturday held at NOVA University in Ft Lauderdale. I am a full stack developer but find myself often needing to wear my DBA hat when queries are not performing as hoped for. I therefore focused on attending sessions that shared that theme. Big shout out and great thanks to the tireless effort of our community volunteers who made this event a great success!
A few months earlier, South Florida Code Camp took place at the same venue. This event focused on software development in general with a dedicate SQL track among many other topics.
I felt that both South Florida Code Camp and SQL Saturday shared some common themes that I wanted to share out loud:
1-Cloud (SaaS, PaaS) is gaining more traction and evolving quickly. This shift presents challenges and opportunities for developers and DBAs having to catch up the learning curve on the latest tooling and service offerings that Cloud offers and the best practices that maximize value for the cost (it’s all about TCO).
2-Be Lean, be Scalable, be Open. Economic challenges are forcing businesses to trim IT budgets and carefully scrutinize new IT spending. Consider latest technologies and frameworks when investigating a new project or implementation. For instance, we can now run SQL Server on Linux which may save on some licensing costs. We can also leverage serverless computing and the flexibility it brings.
3-Performance is Key. To Brent’s point on the value of the development DBA in a cloud environment, code and database optimization and performance have never been more important. The less compute and storage resources an application uses, the cheaper becomes its total cost of ownership.
4-Make your new development “cloud ready”. Follow best software and database development patterns and practices in anything new you create. Break the application into smaller logical components. Leverage dependency injection and composition to only consume what you need. Build telemetry into the application and periodically keep benchmarks of application performance to help “right-size” infrastructure and resource requirements should we host an application in the cloud.
5-AI more important than ever. Business are looking to automate tasks in areas such as security, marketing and customer service. Look into Microsoft Bot Framework, and Microsoft Cognitive Services, to name a few.
