Distributed SQL Summit Schedule Now Live!

In two weeks, thought leaders, database builders, and application developers are coming together for a free online conference to push the boundaries of cloud native RDBMS forward. Distributed SQL (Virtual) Summit, now in its second year, is taking place September 15-17.

We’re excited to announce that the 2020 Distributed SQL Summit schedule is now live!

Speakers include:

• VMware – Joe Beda, Principal Engineer
• Trifacta/UC Berkeley – Joe Hellerstein, Chief Strategy Officer & Professor
• Pinterest – Lianghong Xu, Storage & Caching Engineering Manager
• Rakuten Mobile – Hale Donertasli, Cloud Architect
• Kroger – Mahesh Tyagarajan, VP Engineering
• Twitter – Mehrdad Nurolahzade, Platform Engineer
• Mastercard – Ken Owens, VP Cloud Native Engineering
• Comcast – James Taylor, Principal Engineer
• Hasura – Allison Kunz, Solutions Engineer

For a complete list of speakers and workshops, check out the conference schedule.

In this post, we’ll cover what inspired us to host the free event, what you’ll get by joining, and some highlights you can expect this year.

Why Distributed SQL?

Cloud-native first designs are now the default way to build new scalable and resilient applications at any modern enterprise. At the same time, legacy applications are being modernized to be able to run in cloud environments. However, the choice of the database for these applications is non-trivial.

Traditional relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server were designed to run on a single node, which presents a challenge for modern applications being designed for resilience to failures, scalability, and development agility. While NoSQL databases solve scalability and fault tolerance challenges, they often lack the transactional ACID guarantees and the rich feature set supported by RDBMS, which hampers development agility significantly.

Distributed SQL databases, with a newly emerging architecture, present the perfect solution to these problems. They support ACID transactions and relational features essential for building these modern applications, while retaining cloud native properties such as fault tolerance, high availability, scalability, and geographic distribution of data.

Why Distributed SQL Summit?

Distributed SQL databases have come a long way over the past few years. Increasingly, applications are being built to be cloud native by default, which in turn increases the need for distributed SQL databases.

The user journey typically starts from the evolution of modern applications, or the modernization of legacy applications moving to the cloud – which often leads to a need for distributed SQL. The next steps in the journey are to design these applications in a manner that leverages the distinctive features of distributed SQL databases and figure out how to migrate from a traditional RDBMS. Finally, there are a number of best practices for running distributed SQL databases in production environments, including understanding how to achieve high availability as well as good performance. The Distributed SQL Summit started last year as a gathering place to discuss these aspects.

This year, we’re taking the conference online and aim to accomplish the same goals:

• A place to learn: The Summit provides an educational forum to foster learning related to distributed databases across various topics such as the driving forces behind the evolution of these databases, the practical problems that are being solved, and real-world migration journeys to these architectures.
• A place to exchange ideas: You can hear insights from developers, users, platform architects, and database enthusiasts. There’s a live chat during each session — ask questions, share your experiences, and take part in the conversation.

A Glimpse of What You’ll See

As we worked through this year’s event format, given the climate around us, we originally thought to host a virtual mini-summit over one day. But then ideas and overwhelming interest from the broader community poured in, and we ended up offering an immersive virtual Distributed SQL Summit experience over three days (Sept 15-17; 10am -3pm PT each day), with sessions such as:

• Visionary keynotes, including Joe Beda, one of the original creators of Kubernetes at Google, and currently at VMware, who will discuss the origins of Kubernetes and its evolution to support stateful workloads, and what that means for Distributed SQL; as well as Joe Hellerstein, who will discuss the challenges of data management in serverless computing, and promising new results from the Anna KVS and Cloudburst “stateful” serverless computing efforts in Berkeley’s RISELab.
• Inspirational sessions, including beloved brands like Pinterest and Twitter, discussing the evolution of databases inside their companies leading up to their adoption of distributed SQL.
• Engaging roundtable with architects from notable telco enterprises talking about the future of software development, including important trends and their impact on data infrastructure. These trends – such as IoT, 5G, Edge, and more – could revolutionize the way we operate as a society.
• Real-world migration journeys from experts who have “been there done that” when moving from traditional relational databases to distributed SQL.
• Interactive workshops that will offer hands on exercises around building cloud native applications; DBAs and operators who need to achieve zero downtime, survive failures, and perform day 2 operations seamlessly; and anyone who wants to move from a traditional RDBMS to cloud native distributed SQL.
  

Join Us!

If you want to learn, exchange ideas, and see what distributed SQL is all about, then the Distributed SQL Virtual Summit is for you. Check out the full schedule and customize your agenda so you are able to participate in the sessions you find most interesting and actionable.

See you there!