My Recap of SQL Saturday Athens

I had the honor and the pleasure to speak in SQL Saturday Athens last week. It was a short visit to Athens, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

I spent a day travelling around the city. I went to the Acropolis, of course, and also to the Panathenaic Stadium. There is so much history in these places. I also walked in the streets and alleys of Athens, and enjoyed the atmosphere and the endless number of cafes, restaurants and bars. I even had time for a 12k run around the city.

The next day was SQL Saturday. It was a well-organized event with two tracks and nine sessions (one of them was a double session) delivered by nine speakers. There were around 70 attendees that enjoyed a great learning and networking day.

My session was first. I talked about how to work with very large tables like a professional in SQL Server, including some of the new features in the latest versions, such as Stretch Database, Incremental Statistics and Resumable Online Index Rebuilds. You can download all the session materials, including the presentation and all the scripts, from the session page on the SQL Saturday website.

Then I attended a session by Stavros Menegos with the title: Design, Build, Deploy & Monitor a Store on the Cloud Using Azure Services as Lego Blocks. Stavros demonstrated the power of the cloud and how they designed and built a system composed of Azure services, such as CosmosDB, Azure Functions and Azure Queues.

Then it was time for a double session by Hugo Kornelis about the Hash Match operator. Hugo has so much deep knowledge about the various execution plan operators. He did a lot of research and experiments with the hash match operator, and he can probably talk about it the whole day. For me, this was a fascinating session, as execution plans in SQL Server is one of my favorite topics.

The last session I attended was about Effectively Troubleshooting Latency and Failover of Always On Availability Groups, and it was presented by Marcelo Fernandes. Troubleshooting Availability Groups is not an easy task, as you need to review various logs, performance counters, DMVs and more. Marcelo provided a lot of resources, tools, techniques and references about effective troubleshooting. I am definitely going to review his presentation again.

We concluded the event with an Ask the Experts panel and the traditional raffle. It was a successful event, and I would like to thank Antonios Chatzipavlis and his team for organizing this wonderful event and for inviting me to speak and to meet the data platform community in Athens.