Technology,networking,knowledge sharing under one roof and that too for 3 consecutive days !!! Wow,thats TechEd for you.

[Picture courtesy - http://yodigo-contrablog.blogspot.com]

TechEd India 2012 gave me a fabulous ride this time.Even though I couldn’t attend the event in person,I was able to utilize the LIVE streaming options and had a gala time watching key notes,sessions and extravaganza demos right from the comfort of my home with a hot coffee in my hand.

I realized the fact that if I am getting this much fun while watching the LIVE stream,then how much fun it would have been to attend the event directly from Bangalore(TechEd India 2012 was held at Bangalore,India).

Twitter was flooded with live tweets from the event location and #TechEdIn tag was used.I had a great time tweeting LIVE all 3 days.

Day 1 started with a bang when Sanket Akerkar (Managing Director, Microsoft India) gave the opening  key note.He gave a clear picture on where Microsoft is heading to and what can be expected in the coming days.

I got a chance to watch three live streaming sessions on Day 3 of TechEd,and they were really exciting.

Here is a quick review of the sessions(In the order of occurrence) –

1. Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Debunked  – Vinod Kumar(@vinodk_sql )

Vinod’s session was very much interesting and the session evolved around on 3 main focus areas,ie Storage alignment and the behavior in SQL 2012,Security changes,Checkpoint changes and Memory changes.

The session explained how FSUTIL output needs to be read.When security topic came into picture,there were some very tricky questions asked.Couple of them which I remember is

Q – “How many sysadmins will be there by default on a SQL Server 2008 R2 Instance?”

Ans – I was pretty sure about SA already being sysadmin,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM will also be there.I also found that the service account that is used to start the SQL Server service and SQL Server Agent service are individually granted sysadmin rights in SQL Server.

Q – “How many new permissions are added to SQL 2012”

Ans – I had no clue on this and he confirmed that its 19.

The session also covered about DB recovery changes,VLF issues/enhancements,Checkpoints and some good take away related to Memory.

Overall an excellent session and it inspired me to read through Disk Alignment Best Practices doc to understand more about the concepts.I will be reaching out Vinod to clarify couple of my doubts and if I get more info,I will share that amoung every one here.

2.Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance  – Pinal Dave (@pinaldave)

                        [Picture courtesy - http://arstechnica.com/apple/news]

Pinal’s session was one of the very exciting and enjoyable sessions of TechEd 2012.He mixed fun from beginning till end of the session and was definitely a crowd pulling effort.

He started with a bang asking a ‘Who is he?’ question.No one had clue on what is happening and finally he came up with the answer himself.He was talking about Gene Myron Amdahl.He formulated Amdahl’s law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.

He gave multiple examples to explain the concept and he ensured that everyone understand the concept like MDOP value and Cost threshold for parallelism.

There were so many demos explaining if parallelism is good or bad.He also focused that the decision to go for parallelism for OLAP,OLTP or hybrid needs to be taken after careful analysis.

Overall I enjoyed the session a lot and expecting more interesting tips from Pinal on parallelism.

3. Lesser Known Facts of SQL Server Backup and Restore  – Amit Banerjee(@banerjeeamit )

In Amit’s session you can assure one thing. You will learn at least a new concept and can walk back happily to home. This happened with me yet again and I learned couple of new things after his session.

The session was excellent and it went with great flow. All kinds of backups were discussed which included File Group level, File level etc.He explained what is a piecemeal restore.

There was focus on Volume Shadow Copy Service and he clearly explained the behind the scene concepts.The discussion also touched VDI.

He explained about the Data Transfer Options like BufferCountSize and Maxtransfersize and showed great set of demos on the same.

In a nut shell all the 3 sessions which I attended was fun and there was definite takeaway’s from my perspective.

I missed to attend another 3 important sessions.One of them was not streaming and the remaining 2 had conflicts with other sessions.I will watch the on demand  video for these 3 sessions and will update this post.The sessions are –

T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012   – Jacob Sebastian (@jacobsebastian)

Keeping Your Database Available – ‘AlwaysOn’  – Balmukund Lakhani(@blakhani )

Tools to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems  – (@vinodk_sql)

Icing on the cake

Today morning when I opened tweet deck I was surprised to see this tweet which mentioned my name

This was Microsoft’s,TecEd’s way of saying Thank You and I really appreciate it.

TechEdIn 2012 closing key note was done by Moorthy Uppaluri (General Manager, Microsoft Corporation).As always this key note was also very special and his below words should make a big impact.

“It’s all about you and its starts with you”

TechEd was indeed a great event and a memorable one for me.

Thanks for reading.