Right before the saturday, Microsoft announced the withdrawal of their support of SQLsaturdays. What would this mean for the next events? I couldn’t find an official statement from Microsoft to share, but the message came across: SQLserver isn’t hot anymore. The real bets are on different cards, such as Artificial Intelligence and Big data.

But nothing of this impending doom on that sunny saturday. We were offered 35 sessions on subjects ranging from Business Intelligence, Azure, AI & Machine learning, performance,  specific subjects such as “U-SQL custom extractor for multi-gigabyte XML” and reminders that we should learn about powershell ( “dbachecks – The PowerShell Module to validate your SQL Estate”) or Extended Events (“Simplifying XEvents Management with dbatools”) .

A new kid on this block is GDPR. Privacy is well valued in this new law, so far so good,but implementing this law is a complex task with unknown unkowns on the way. Even Brent Ozar freaked out and doesn’t sell his services to inhabitants of europe anymore. “GDPR, A European Horror Story” by John Martin gave a nice overview of the problems to follow. He urged us to follow the recent news about Apollo.io, a spamfactory sales engagement startup, whose breach this summer may lead to the first serious testcase of GDPR after Europeans found their data back via haveibeenpwned.com.