On Saturday June 8th, in partnership with the SQL Tiger team, Boston Business Intelligence and New England SQL User Group leaders delivered a PASS and Microsoft and Intel Modern Migration event, covering SQL 2019 and Intel hardware, in Microsoft’s Burlington, MA office.
The morning was two sessions in lecture format. The afternoon was hands-on labs.
Without a doubt, having 49 people show up on a beautiful, warm, sunny Saturday, when it rained for 6 months, is amazing.
MORE AMAZING: Everyone stayed for the afternoon hands-on labs, where they used free tools Microsoft provides, to diagnose upgrade issues from SQL 2008 to 2017, and teamed up to help each other.
Registrants were told to set up their laptops in advance. The following tools were used:
- SQL Express 2008R2 edition with advanced services.
- SQL 2017 developer edition
- SQL Server Management Studio version 18.0
- Data Migration Assistant v4.3
- Database Experimentation Assistant 2.6
Lab details are handed out at the event. Essentially, a SQL 2008 database that had upgrade issues was installed on the SQL 2008R2 instance. The migration assistant was used to find static code issues. The Experimentation assistant is used to help performance-test after resolving upgrade issues.
These real-world migration scenarios, walked through in this lab, up-skill Database professionals to handle these situations as they arise. Years ago this was done through hard manual labor and custom scripts. Now, free tools from Microsoft can ease this upgrade.
On the Intel hardware front, there are amazing new technologies that help reduce the number of cores needed for a particular workload. As a long-time professional in this space, the hardware innovation coupled tightly with Microsoft’s software is an amazing combination.
Feedback for this event was overwhelmingly positive, with long-time user group folks saying it was the best event ever.
From left to right: Paresh, Mitesh, Taiob, George (myself), Elizabeth, and Vladimir. Thank you for helping organize, and for delivering this content.
SQL 2019 Migration Tour speakers
Finally, we thank PASS, who Microsoft helped start 20 years ago to help spread the message of the Microsoft data platform. They, in conjunction with our SQL Tiger team, put together the materials and training for us trainers in this event.
For those interested, the New England SQL Server user group has around 3000 members, and the Boston BI user group has around 2500 members. Please join us via Meetup:
Link to New England SQL User group posting: https://www.meetup.com/NESQLUG/events/261451694/
Link to Boston BI User group:
https://www.meetup.com/Boston_BI/
SQL Server Tiger team blog:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SQL-Server/bg-p/SQLServer/label-name/SQLServerTiger
George Walters 
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