I/O! I/O! It’s off to disk we go...

Head in the Cloud...

SQL Server 2008 has a ton of great features to help you in your data warehousing endeavours. In this session find out what they are and how you can best use them.

Learn all about Optimistic Concurrency and how it works under the hood in this one hour session.

Data warehousing features in SQL 2008

Fast Track is a new reference data warehousing architecture provided by Microsoft. More than this it represents a new way of thinking about data warehousing. A Fast Track system is measured by its raw compute power - not by a DBAs ability to tune an index. Fast Track is an appliance-like solution that delivers phenomenal performance from a pre-defined, balanced configuration of CPU, memory and storage using nothing but commodity hardware. Of particular interest in a Fast Track system is the way in which the storage and SQL Server are configured. To achieve the fantastic throughput without using SSDs requires some careful configuration. This configuration is designed to make use of Sequential I/O to dramatically improve disk I/O performance. Interested? If you have a large data warehouse that's seen better days or perhaps you are about to embark on a new warehousing project then you should be! Fast Track is a great solution with a fantastic value proposition. In this one hour session we'll aim to get under the skin of Fast Track and get some answers as to how it delivers such great throughput on commodity hardware. In the process we'll aim to answer the following questions: * When might I need Fast Track? * What is Sequential I/O? * How does Sequential I/O improve performance? * What do I need to do to get Sequential I/O? * How can I monitor for Sequential I/O ? * What may I need to change in my ETL to get the benefit of sequential I/O? Still reading? I'll save you a front row seat....

When loading a Fast Track Data Warehouse it is important to ensure that your data is optimally laid out for Sequential I/O. Fragmentation is therefore the enemy. Know your enemy. Learn what it is, how it occurs and prevent it from happening to you!

Polybase is one of the most exciting, innovative features in PDW; enabling transparent data integration with Hadoop's distributed file system (HDFS) and soon Windows Azure Storage Blobs (WASB). See it in action.

PolyBase is one of the most exciting, innovative features in PDW; enabling transparent data integration with Hadoop's distributed file system (HDFS) and Windows Azure Storage Blobs (WASB). See it in action.

This session covers the more advanced aspects of development for Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Areas such as data movement, workload concurrency and resource management will all be covered during this intense 60 minute session.

Learn about the new compute optimized performance tier in SQL Data Warehouse and how to maximize your performance through improved table design and columnstore optimization.