Speaker

Mark Broadbent

Mark Broadbent

Microsoft Data Platform MVP & Microsoft Certified Master (MCM ), specialist in Azure, and MS Data Platform

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Mark Broadbent is a Data Platform MVP and SQL Server MCM with well over 30 years of experience in SQL Server and working as a Senior Solution Architect primarily focused on the Microsoft Data and Cloud Platform.

He is an expert in concurrency control, technical editor and reviewer to multiple book titles, and specializes in Azure, Data, DevOps, and related technologies.

Mark was the founder of the Hybrid Virtual Group, SQLSaturday Cambridge, the first and largest of its kind in the UK, founder of SharePoint Saturday Cambridge, East Anglia SQL User Group, and a co-founder of SQLNexus conference in Denmark.

These days he leads the Hybrid Virtual Group -a not-for-profit fortnightly virtual online event specializing in delivering and promoting Microsoft cloud and data platform content to the masses in which past recordings can be watched via http://bit.ly/hvgyt

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • SQL
  • Azure
  • Administration
  • Development
  • Performance
  • Scale
  • High Availability
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Business Intelligence
  • Azure CosmosDB
  • Azure SQL
  • Azure DevOps
  • Concurrency
  • Azure Data Factory
  • Azure Databricks
  • Azure Synapse Analytics

Preparing for your next role in IT

With over 30 years of working in IT across all industries as a permanent employee, contractor, and consultant, and having experience in roles ranging from developer, administrator, engineer, architect, manager, and many more, I have made my fair share of successes and failures during my career.

In this personal development career-focused session, I will provide detailed advice and guidance based upon my own (warts and all) personal employment experiences so that you may prepare for your next role in IT with the confidence that you have a clear plan and vision of what your want to achieve, how you are going to get there, and what mistakes you need to avoid along the way.

This session will touch upon:
* Knowing when it is time to start thinking about moving on from your current role
* Training and certification strategies
* Interviewing and CVs
* What skills you should learn
* Things to avoid

If you are thinking about looking for a new role in 2023 and beyond you should join me!

Introduction to continuous integration and delivery with Azure DevOps

DevOps is rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand skills for IT professionals and in this session, we will explain how you can implement continuous integration and delivery (CICD) for your infrastructure and application code using Azure DevOps from the ground up. These insights will be based on real-world experiences.

We aim to give you a good working knowledge of:
* Code version control using git enabled Azure Repos and Github.
* Azure DevOps Build and release pipelines.
* Github Actions

By the end of this session, you will be able to set up your first build and release pipelines and implement CICD in your workplace!

Edge Of Tomorrow - An introduction to Graph Databases

It is an unspoken fact in the world of data that relational databases are inherently bad at handling highly related data!

But there is a better way.

Graph Databases were born from the NoSQL movement and provide a highly efficient way to model and query data with complex relationships using the concept of Edges and Nodes.

In this practical demo-driven session, we will take a look at several implementations of Graph Databases and concepts, looking to understand how and why we should use them.
We will specifically take a look at SQL Graph Database (part of SQL Server and Azure SQL), Azure Cosmos DB, TinkerGraph, and Neo4j and demo the SQL Graph Extensions, Cypher, and Gremlin query languages.

If you are looking to get started using graph databases then this is the session for you!

Azure Cosmos DB for Dummies

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s premier NoSQL Cloud-based globally distributed database offering, providing scalable performance and resiliency, customizable consistency guarantees, multiple data models APIs, and comprehensive service level agreements.

In this session, we will explain how to get started in Cosmos DB and demonstrate simple administrative and development operations so you can learn how to go from zero to hero in no time. We will cover many fundamental topics which include:
Cosmos DB APIs
Accounts, Databases, and Containers
Geo-Replication
Partitioning and indexing
Consistency and throughput

Azure Cosmos DB is not just the future for Online-Transaction Processing, it is the present!

SQL Server Availability Groups for dummies

Availability Groups have become Microsoft’s default high availability and scalability go-to solution for SQL Server, but due to their relative complexity is often misunderstood, or worse, feared.

In this session, we will explain how to plan for, deploy, and manage Availability Groups from the ground up in easy to understand examples and demos.

We will look at both Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) and full deployments so if you want to finally get to grips with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, then this is the session for you!

2 Fast 2 Furious - designing for speed, concurrency, and correctness

With the multitude of isolation levels, concurrency models, and specialist technologies available in SQL Server, it is no surprise that transaction throughput and correctness can be directly correlated to the ability and knowledge of the person that wrote the code.

In this session, we will reveal how SQL Server concurrency and correctness often goes wrong, how we can avoid this, and how we can use our knowledge to design and develop for optimal server throughput for our applications and processes using tips and tricks gained from real-world scenarios.

We will cover SQL Server’s traditional locking model, In-Memory OLTP, Columnstore, Delayed Durability, and many other technologies and techniques you can use to make your transactions more robust.

Persistence is Futile - Implementing Delayed Durability in SQL Server

The concurrency model of most Relational Database Systems are defined by the ACID properties but as they aim for ever-increasing transactional throughput, those rules are bent, ignored, or even broken. In this session, we will investigate how SQL Server implements transactional durability in order to understand how Delayed Durability bends the rules to remove transactional bottlenecks and achieve improved throughput. We will take a look at how this can be used to compliment In-Memory OLTP performance, and how it might impact or compromise other things. Attend this session and you will be assimilated!

Mark Broadbent

Microsoft Data Platform MVP & Microsoft Certified Master (MCM ), specialist in Azure, and MS Data Platform

Cambridge, United Kingdom