PASS Summit 2011 Day #1 Post #1

Hello again. The PASS Organization has once more allowed me to sit at the bloggers table for the key note. I’ll be posting updates as the information unfolds.

[8:06] The crowd is filling in. this looks like one of the biggest crowds I’ve ever seen at the summit. The organizers have done a great job so far. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

[8:10] SQUEEEEE! I just met Dr. David Dewitt and got a picture with him. I’ll post it after I get home and find the cable.

[8:22] Watching the videos of different people on the big screen talking about what they like about the PASS Summit is really cool.

[8:26] Rushahb Mehta is introducing the board and the Partners of the PASS board. We now have a new additional structure which is three people from different regions of the world, Rob Farley Raoul Illyes and James Rowland-Jones.

[8:28] The organization is up to 430k training hours this year if you count up all the various ways the organization reaches out to people through the Summit, 24 Hours of PASS, Rally, Virtual Chapters, SQL Saturday and the PASS Chapters. The organization really has grown a lot. Plus, they’re working with SQLBits and SQL Relay in the UK.

[8:32] They have a bunch of the bloggers and twitterers up on the screen. Nice to see everyone. It’s also nice to say that I know most of them and I’m friends with most of them. This is an amazing community.

[8:36] The different ways that we have for networking are excellent. The First Timers method for introducing people to each other has really taken off from last year. Then there are all the receptions and the Women in Technology lunch. There are just some great ways to make connections within this community and those connections really will help you in your job and your live.

[8:41] Yes, please visit the vendors and thank them, even if you don’t buy anything. And fill out your eval forms, it’s the one give you can give back to your speaker. If they did something wrong, let them know what it was. If you didn’t like their presentation, let them know why.

[8:42] Key note speaker is Ted Kummert from Microsoft. His topic is The New World of Data

[8:44] No other way to describe this, but we’re going down the marketing path now. The appliance choices in SQL Server are expanding and becoming more and more attractive to the enterprise, no question. SQL Server has a number of versions and service packs released over the last year. Azure is still a choice that Microsoft is making. Whether or not others are making that choice is still very much up in the air. Marketing or not, Microsoft is clearly committing 100% to this. Reporting and cubes are being set out there too.

[8:49]Denali: It’s coming. There are lots of new mechanisms and structures, especially supporting BI and knowledge management.

[8:52]First bit of news, Project Crescent will be released as Power View.

[8:53] We have a new name people, no longer referred to as Denali, but now referred to as SQL Server 2012. It’s official. Further, the release date is the “first half of 2012”

[8:55]Microsoft’s plan is all about “any data, any size, anywhere.” Concept is fine. Implementation is the question though isn’t it. Microsoft is starting to talk about Big Data. No definition yet on what that means. Ah, they’re going to support Hadoop as part of the product suite. Cool.

[9:00] Announcements, they’re going to support hadoop, odb driver & add-in in Excel for Apache Hive and a JavaScript framework for Hadoop. They’re going to partner up with HortonWorks as part of getting Apache Hadoop going.

[9:02] Now talking Eric Baldeschwieler, the CEO of hortonworks.

[9:04] Denny Lee, Microsoft developer is now coming out to show us how to move hundreds of millions of rows using Hadoop and Azure. Now, I’m excited. Denny Lee is a good, excited, informed presenter. This is what we like. Nerds excited about technology sharing the knowledge and passion.

He’s starting with the Hive ODBC driver in PowerPivot to connect to over 300 files. The ODBC driver will be available next month, so PowerPivot and Hadoop are connecting.

He’s pulling from a multi-node hadoop cluster to an excel workbook. He’s showing reports through Excel into hadoop data. It’s nice. No question.

[9:16] They’re working on capturing everyone’s data that is going to allow people explore everyone’s data. It’s called Data Explorer and will be part of Azure labs later.

[9:18]Introducing Contoso Frozen Yogurts, the self-service yogurt company… Anyway, it’s a sample set of data showing locations & performance scores of the various stores. They’re using that to relate to other global data available. So the machine is going to start learning what data might be interesting to you.

[9:28]Unfortunately, these demos, while somewhat interesting, were pretty dull, that, and the fact that I’m sitting with a bunch of witty people with ADD, we’re suddenly paying no attention.

Look, it’s interesting, but there is a TON of code behind the scenes to make this stuff happen. And, all that code has to be on Azure, and once it’s put together, you can pull it down to Excel.

[9:34] Power View is all about getting data out to the business people. That’s good. Amir Netz, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, is up to do a demo.

[9:36] I’m taking off a little early today. There’s a big announcement down in the expo hall from Red Gate Software at 10:05 this morning. please keep an eye out for it. It’s going to be HUGE!