Manchester April Meetup - Remote Only

Network, learn, ask a question, meet other folks - these are all things that happen at user group events. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning experience.

Remember to tell your friends and the people you work with; make sure you register as soon as you can.

Online only event. Not being recorded.

Thank you to UInsure and Venturi for their support.

17:50 – 18:00 Intro and updates
18:00 – 19:00 Will Martin - Dredging the Data Lake: Empowering Modern Data Analytics with AI.
Data lakehouses remain the backbone of modern data analytics. Rather than replacing them, AI agents and LLMs are enhancing these platforms and unlocking their full potential. This talk explores how combining AI with SQL-based lakehouse architectures enables organisations to analyse more data, more effectively than ever before. By extending beyond structured data, emerging agentic lakehouses can tap the full depth of the data lake and interrogate unstructured content such as text, images, and audio. Embedded AI functions and natural language interfaces also make true self-service analytics possible, empowering more users to explore data and derive insights with confidence.
Quick Break
19:00 – 20:00 Andrew Pruski : New features in SQL Server 2025
With the release of SQL Server 2025, join Microsoft Data Platform MVP Andrew Pruski for a deep dive into ten exciting new features (that aren't AI) that will shape the way we work with the platform.

We'll explore enhancements across multiple areas of the engine, including:

• Query execution: Optimized Locking, ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION, and improvements to sp_executesql.
• TempDB: Space resource governance, accelerated recovery in TempDB, and support for tmpfs on Linux.
• Extended Events: Time-bound extended events to prevent events consuming resources and potentially generating a large amount of data
• Backups: Full and differential backups on secondary availability group replicas, plus the new ZSTD compression algorithm.
• Brand-new capability: Invoking external REST API endpoints directly from SQL Server.

This session is aimed at anyone working with SQL Server who wants to understand the new capabilities in 2025.