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.

Sessions

Previous Sessions

Understand the Query Optimiser from the man who knows!
Ever wanted to know exactly what is happening underneath the covers in your queries. Let me show you.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
Q&A with Conor Cunningham and Simon Sabin
GDPR is affecting any business that stores data including the SQL Server product group. Come and listen to how the Microsoft SQL Team approached the GDPR challenge for the SQL and SQL Azure business.
A look at how the Graph engine introduced with SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database can help you generate insights from your highly connected data
The goal of the talk will be to show you how to choose among the various storage technologies that exist when building your next application.
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.