New Talks For 2017

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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  The old version of my talk was written in 2014 and is woefully out of date now.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.
5. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.