I’m just back from DataGrillen 2022. As ever, I wanted to put together a short post and use the opportunity to share some things I learned, and share some photos of the event. First of all, thanks for such a hospitable welcome from William Durkin and Ben Weissman and congratulations for hosting a very successful event.

On top of everything else that goes into planning a complex event like this, they also had an added responsibility this time to keep people free of covid as far as was reasonably possible. This meant mandatory testing, vaccine passports and masking wearing (inside only). It was a small price to pay after two years of online conferences only.

The barbecue event was on the middle night after the sessions. There was a great choice of food and everything was cooked really well, and of course there were complimentary beers to wash it down.

Following on from the main event which comprised of two days of technical sessions, the host town of Lingen was celebrating the historic Kivelingsfest, a medieval festival dating back hundreds of years. As a result, many of the conference attendees stayed on an extra day to attend the festival which was great fun.

It was home on Sunday but not before we got the chance to celebrate André Kamman’s by taking a boat trip along Amsterdam’s canals.

Datagrillen 2022 photos

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DataGrillen 2022 Sessions

These are the sessions I attended. I tried to fit in as much as possible from the two day event.

John Martin – Performing successful cloud migrations – Chalk & talk

It was a very informal delivery by John who guided us through a timeline and the phases of a successful cloud migration. It was a cloud agnostic session so the key information could be used with any major cloud provider.

Andrew Pruski – A deep dive into Docker

I wanted to attend this as I haven’t used Docker a great deal and I wanted to learn more. Andrew provided a great overview and worked through some very well prepared demos. I am keen to try to follow these up by visiting his github repo for the content.

Gianluca Sartori – Time Series for relational people

Gianluca gave a great overview of the differences between relational and time series databases and went on to review a few. He settled on influxdb and demonstrated in detail how it could be used along with Grafana and Telegraf agent (TIG stack) to provide really useful metrics. I do use the TIG stack in my work but I learned about some great settings for dealing with or discarding older data that I plan to take forward.

Monica Rathbun – Performance tuning Azure SQL Database

This session was packed to the rafters and extremely hot, yet Monica’s enthusiastic and engaging style made it so easy to stay focused on the message. The message was delivered well and easy to understand. I took away some key information here regarding query store and readable secondary databases. Overall, it was my favourite session of DataGrillen 2022.

Argenis Fernandez – Ransomware sucks. Beef up your databases against it.

This had to be close contender for my top session. Argenis knew what he was talking about and it showed. He gave very good advice and I have returned home with a checklist that I will need to turn into an action plan.

André Kamman – Looking under the hood of the parquet format

I’m familiar with parquet as I use AWS Athena a lot however I’ve never really looked under the hood. I honestly expected this session to be a bit above me but André’s communication style made it very accessible for attendees of all knowledge levels and easy to follow along.

Jess Pomfret and Sander Stad – Deploying Azure Resources with PowerShell Azure Functions

Jess and I were fellow newcomers at Data Grillen in 2019. I always enjoy her sessions so this was not to be missed. It was my first time seeing Sander and the two presenters worked well to deliver this session. I left convinced that I need to change at least one part of my automation routine to include Azure functions, so I will hopefully be checking them out this week. (If time allows, the trouble with conferences is you return home with SO many ideas)

Heini Ilmarinen – Less Clicking, More Coding! Azure Data Platform Development Using Infrastructure as Code

I’ve dipped my toe into Terraform but I’ve used BICEP and Cloud formation a bit more. After Heini’s session, I get the benefits of Terraform and I’ve added it to my ever increasing list of things to review. A great session in which Heini did well to keep us engaged all the way through.

Robert French – Goldilocks and the three business bears; story telling for business

This was the last session of a very busy two days. They broke the mould when they made Robert and as expected, his session also broke the mould. Robert delivered the session with unmatchable energy, kind of at a blistering pace but the pace was just right at the same time. He got through a huge amount of visual aids. He gave great advice on where you eyes are drawn to in report, how to make key data pop out and how to usual colours and fonts carefully.