Summit day 2 keynotes have become special.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has dedicated the day 2 keynote to a technical dive into an advanced, future-looking topic. Past examples have included future-looking guidance on Hekaton, columnstore indexes, and how Azure SQL DB protects data.

I love Microsoft for doing this. It costs them a lot of money to basically buy the stage for the morning, and they’re kinda donating that money to you, dear reader, by letting you learn about something you might not be putting into practice anytime soon. They teach you where they’re going, and you get the chance to think about whether it makes sense to focus your own training on these topics.

As a presenter, I can tell you that building a session like that is incredibly hard. The attendees have a wide range of job duties and experience levels. How can they teach something advanced when it’s so hard to get everyone onto the same starting page?

When Microsoft’s Dr. @RimmaNehme takes the stage this morning, after the fun music and community news, I bet you’re going to be impressed. She has a solid track record of delivering interesting, informative keynotes where everybody in the room learns something. Hell, a lot of things.

She’s going to be introducing you to Azure Cosmos DB, a cloud-first globally distributed database system. It’s the artist formerly known as DocumentDB, and it’s like Google Cloud Spanner. You, dear reader, probably aren’t going to use Cosmos DB this year, and probably not even next year. However, developers who are sick and tired of struggling with database problems are very interested in Cosmos DB’s simpler approach. It solves a lot of development problems. It would do you some good to learn about why and how Microsoft built it so that you can have better conversations with your developers.

Do I think you need to drop everything and learn how to manage it? No, because that’s Microsoft’s job. However, your role is to understand where Cosmos DB makes sense, and when your developers wanna build something that’s a good fit, point them towards it to go take a look at it. (In the stuff we build here at the company for our own use, we default to cloud databases like this first, too.)

To follow along with my notes:

• Open one browser tab with the PASS Summit keynote live stream
• Open another tab with my Twitter feed, and it’ll automatically refresh with my notes & photos