Notes from the January 29, 2015 oPASS Meeting

Posted on by SQLAndy
  • New location, the Cork and Olive in Lake Mary.
  • Fairly easy to find and easy to get to, plenty of parking
  • Meeting space is high top tables, with room for a screen and there is a monitor already in the room too. Nice space
  • Food was pizza. Blah. Bar doesn’t have iced tea either!
  • The room set up had the one door just behind the speaker, maybe arrange different next time
  • Had a power cord running across the floor to the brand new projector, need tape or different location next time
  • Not much news in the PASS deck this month, should be more than just announcing upcoming events
    • Shawn plugged SQLSat Tampa pretty well
    • Would still like to see more on this – maybe show the schedule, route to the event, etc .
  • Attendees were asked about BAC. No one in the room going. Not surprising, even for Summit there would only be a couple. Still, it felt a little flat, to me anyway.
  • Attendance a whopping 32! That’s a really good crowd for January. I think there is a lot of interest in the big data MS tech, people still trying to figure out if/when it fits in to their business and skill set
  • Josh Luedeman presenting Get Up and Go: Big Data Automation Using HDInsight
    • Really good overview of the various Hadoop ecologies, good level set
    • Good walkthrough of Powershell script to provision HDInsight. Well commented and Josh hit the high points, I think that makes it a lot more approachable for someone who wants to download and try it afterward. I thought he also did pretty well at talking about what and why and not bogging down in syntax
    • I think would have been better if started with a really quick walk through of the UI, then transition to the automation piece
    • Good that he reiterated the ‘turn it off’ mentality that is key to managing spend on Azure
    • It still feels like that HDInsight advocates struggle to explain the uses cases/thresholds for when it makes sense. I’d like to see more explanations of real world projects and why they were a better fit in HDInsight (or whatever big data) SQL or whatever else
  • More about venue selection in an upcoming post (which is not a complaint about tonight, it was fine)