2017 is just around the corner, and my intent is to revamp my presentation lineup for the new year. Here is a quick look at how my presentation lineup looks for 2017, given the proviso that by August, the lineup will probably change.
Headline Talks
These are the talks I lead with. They’re fun and fit a particular niche that not too many people are hitting.
- R for the SQL Developer. Already finished. I may tweak the talk a little bit, but I think at its core, it’s a good talk.
- Kafka for .NET Developers. Already finished. I’ve given this a couple of times and have an idea of how it flows. I’m really looking forward to pushing it next year.
- APPLY Yourself. Already finished. I’ve been giving this talk for a few years now, and I’ll be giving it a few years from now too.
- Much Ado About Hadoop. Need to revamp. The old version of my talk was written in 2014 and is woefully out of date now. I intend this to be a high-level overview of the Hadoop ecosystem, focusing on Spark and streaming more than “classic” MapReduce operations.
- Polybase. Need to write. I also need a good title for this. I think Polybase will be a big talk for me in the second half of 2017.
Midline Talks
These are the talks that I’m still happy to give, or which I want to create but don’t think they’ll see huge play next year.
- Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Integrating Hadoop and SQL Server. Already finished. It’s a stable talk and still quite relevant, but I gave it 14 times last year, so that limits the number of places I can submit it.
- Securing SQL Server. Already finished. It’s nice having a security talk. I (semi-)jokingly describe my set of talks as the weird side of SQL Server, but having this talk and the APPLY operator talk keeps me somewhat grounded.
- Big Data, Small Data, and Everything In Between. Already finished. I will probably need to revamp the lists, but I’m still happy with this high-level overview of the data platform space.
- Rent-A-Cluster: HDInsight In Action. Need to write. I wanted to have a talk specifically on HDInsight, as most of my Hadoop talks focus around using the local sandbox.
- Who Needs A Cluster? AWS Aurora and Azure Data Lake In Action. Need to write. This feeds off of my Rent-A-Cluster talk and focuses on two Platform-as-a-Service offerings which give you parts of Hadoop without dealing with the administration effort.
Other Talks
These are still good talks (at least in my biased opinion!), but I see them as more of niche offerings that I’d submit under certain specific circumstances.
- Client Migration with Biml. Already finished. I’ve enjoyed this talk and it’s still a viable topic, as familiarity with Biml is still surprisingly low among Integration Services developers.
- Working Effectively with Legacy SQL. Needs revisions. I tried pushing this one in 2016 and other talks were more popular. I think that’s fair, although this does fit into a mainline SQL topic: cleaning up older code which might have been a good decision for SQL Server 2005 but doesn’t make as much sense in SQL Server 2016. Speaking of which, I’m going to revamp the talk a bit and include some SQL Server 2016 functionality as well.
- Power BI Custom Visuals. Already finished. I gave this talk a couple of times and it was fun. The problem is that it can’t crack the top ten talks, so it probably would be a niche topic for user groups.
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