Conor Cunningham

Conor has been working on building database engines for 25 years at Microsoft. He has worked on features such as the Query Store, Table Partitioning, Window Functions, PIVOT/UNPIVOT, DMVs, and many others. Conor served as the Breadth Architect for shipping SQL Server 2016, 2017 and 2019 and still serves as an architect across the engine on challenging architectural issues. Conor is based in Austin, Texas (USA) and also serves as the Engineering Site Leader as we build a new engineering site there. His team there recently delivered a number of T-SQL language extensions into SQL Server 2022 and SQL Azure as well as doing the AVX-512 performance improvements that shipped in SQL Server 2022. Currently he is working on Synapse Data Warehouse and future database architectures.

Conor Cunningham's Sessions

Adaptive query processing in SQL databasesSQLBits 2018

Come learn about the new adaptive query processor in SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database. We will discuss how this feature works, how it can benefit your application and queries, and the future of intelligent query processing.

Whats new in Azure SQL DB and SQL engineSQLBits 2017

Attend this session to get an overview of the wide array of significant changes and investments with Azure SQL Database, including parity with SQL Server 2016 and Intelligent database capabilities.

Adaptive QP Enhancements in SQL Server and SQL AzureSQLBits 2017

The SQL team has been working on next-gen query processing improvements to improve the performance of your queries and to enable new scenarios. This talk will explain these enhancements and how they fit into the overall product roadmap for SQL.

SQL Server/Azure Engineering ModelSQLBits 2017

The SQL Team delivers value monthly to both cloud and on-premises environments. This is not easy to do. This talk will explain the model, telemetry and security

Query Store: New Query Tuning Feature For SQL Server & AzureSQLBits 2015

Query Store is a new feature that is coming to SQL Azure and SQLServer. It aims to greatly simplify the process of getting insight intothe performance of your application. Come learn how the SQL team is going to make your life awhole lot easier!

Keynote - Architecting Large-Scale Solutions on AzureSQLBits 2013

While there are many similarities between SQL Server and SQL Azure, there are different kinds of applications that are easier to build in one or the other.  One of the major differences relates to how to build an application that “scales”.  This presentation will provide an introduction into the difference between scale-up (SQL Server) and scale-out (SQL Azure) architectures and give you a primer on how you can build a large, Internet-facing service that can scale to arbitrarily large sizes on commodity hardware.  This talk is targeted at SQL Server practitioners to give them a working knowledge of how the two platforms differ based on Microsoft’s experiences with its largest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customers running on SQL Azure.

Saturday Keynote: Inside SQL Server 2012’s ColumnStore IndexSQLBits 2012

This talk will describe how the new ColumnStore index technology in SQL Server 2012 makes queries go faster. Covering details of the storage and execution model, how this model interacts with modern CPUs to deliver significant performance benefits.

Distributed Query Deep DiveSQLBits 2012

This talk will cover how the distributed query feature in SQL Server works, end-to-end. Topics include the query model, metadata, query optimization, execution, distributed transactions, and scale-out scenarios via Distributed Partitioned Views(DPV)

DW Design With The Product TeamSQLBits 2012

This talk will explain the patterns that we recommend to customers when designing data warehouses. This talk will help people learning about DW for the first time and also give insight for those who wish to learn more.

Update Queries-Deep DiveSQLBits 2011

Ever wanted to know exactly what is happening underneath the covers in your queries. Let me show you.