PASS Summit Day 2–Key Notes

Bill Graziano has come out on stage, looking marvelous, in a traditional kilt and stockings. Thanks Bill.

For those who don’t know, Day 2 at the Summit every year is Kilt Day.

[8:19]Outstanding volunteers being recognized are Tim Radney and Jack Corbett. These are some outstanding people who work their bottoms off for the PASS Community. If you meet them, thank them.

The 2011 PASSion Award goes to Lori Edwards. She’s simply amazing. Congratulations Lori and thank you for all the work you’ve done!

[8:23]Time to eat our vegetables. We’re looking at the financials. It’s a slightly painful process, but important to understand where the money goes since this is a non-profit organization managed by volunteers. You should understand where the money comes from and where it goes.

[8:25]Quentin Clark is the keynote speaker from Microsoft. We’re seeing a bunch of people talk about the new functions about SQL Server 2012 (nee Denali). There really is a lot of new functionality coming up. Some of it is quite exciting. Some of it is probably edge-case stuff for really big systems. Regardless, there’s lots to learn.

[8:31]SQL Server 2012 is the biggest release ever, especially when you take into account that SQL Azure is part of the common code base. Quentin Clark is going through his “Fantastic 12”. First up is Required 9’s & Protection. Integrations services is a server, they’re introducing HA for StreamInsight and there’s AlwaysOn. We’re getting a testimonial from the Mediterranean Shipping Company. I’m just not a fan of testimonials. Show me demos or teach me stuff, all the rest is marketing.

[8:41]Testimonial done, we’re getting some demonstrations of AlwaysOn. They’re showing how the wizard can be used to build out a true topology of mirroring servers. It really is cool to watch this happen live. I’m going to be spending some time with it myself.

It’s great how they’ve set up a single listener to manage connections so that code is no longer necessary to manage the capabilities.

[8:45]The blogger table got a little rambunctious during the demo because the guy doing it had very small font sizes and didn’t use zoom it at all. When he occasionally used zoomit people started cheering. Big tip, just because the screen is large doesn’t mean people in the back of a large room can see what’s there.

Seriously, the demo was good, but you need to make sure your presentation skills are up to snuff.

[8:48]Blazing fast performance is set up off Performance Enhancements. But the big one is ColumnStore Index. #3 is Rapid Data Exploration, which is some of the stuff from yesterday. #4 is Managed Self-Service BI, in short PowerView and PowerPivot. But there’s also expanded management from Sharepoint and they’re adding Reporting Alerts, which is really huge.

[8:51]#5 is Credible and Consistent Data. They’re working off the BI Semantic Model, cloud data through shared information, mentioned yesterday. They’re also expanding out Data Quality Services and Master Data Services.

[8:53]Lara Rubbelke is showing how to manage the data. She got a quick dig in at using Excel for everything, which was funny if a little subtle. She’s using SharePoint and TSQL. Better still, she used Zoomit and large fonts so not only did we get a great demo, but we could see it. I’m excited about this stuff in ways that I wasn’t before the demo, which is the purpose of these demos. Well done Lara. Thanks.

And yes, there is more cloud stuff in here. We’re going to the cloud people.

This is some snazzy stuff and Lara is making it look great. I’m excited about the concept of business people being able to set up alerts on reports that they work from.

[9:02] #6 is Organizational Compliance. They’ve expaned Audit and added user-defined auditing and filtering. They’ve added User-Defined Server Roles (already wrote that up in my new SQL Server In a Month of Lunches book).

#7 is Piece of Mind. That breaks down to production-simulated Application Testing (WHOOP!). They’re expanding System Center Advisor & Management Packs for SCOM. They’re expanding critical support to a Premier Mission Critical level.

[9:06] #8 is Scalable Data Warehousing. #9 is Fast Time to Solution, in short, appliances. They are releasing an Optimized and pre-tuned appliance. They’re working with vendors to have hardware & software ready for plugging in instantly to your system. Better still, they’re providing your choice of hardware.

They’re working at with, based on the logos, HP & Dell, to create these things. These are very nice ways to get yourself a major system in pretty much no time.

[9:19]#10 is Extend Any Data, Anywhere. They’[re working with PHP, Java & Hadoop as mentioned yesterday. But they’re announcing a LINUX driver in order to convert from “something” to SQL Server (huh, wonder what “something” is, not). Finally they’re expanding file table, 2d spatial and semantic search.

And a demo from Michael Rys. The room just got smarter. Although now, we’re looking at a screen that is unreadable. Same thing with the new app, which sounds cool. Then he zoomed, with a comment “For the Zoomit Fans” and we got to actually see his app working. Huge applause from the bad kids at the bloggers table.

This is pretty neat stuff. I love seeing new code at work. This is slick and very powerful. We’ll put that stuff to work. EXCELLENT demo. Exciting stuff.

[9:28]#11 is Optimized Productivity. IN short, Juneau, or the new SQL Server Data Tools. It’s still Visual Studio… enough said. they’re talking about changes that make things unified across Database & BI. They’re creating a deployment & Targeting Freedom too. The main thing is a new embedded express version that doesn’t require an actual install to have a database ready to go. That sounds great!

#12 is Scale on Demand. AlwaysOn, of course. Deployment across Public & Private combined deployments, and Deployment & Targeting Freedom.

The demo is going to be good. We started with an example of adaptive learning when the presenter came out on stage and said he’d been reading the tweets and immediately used zoomit so we could see the screen. Yay!

We got to see the dacpac at work with Azure and the bacpac (god I hate that name) at work as well. It’s really cool. Oh, and now they’re setting up a method to connect from SSMS to the Azure Storage so you can restore your bacpac files locally. Nice work.

[9:40] And a second Demo! Cool. Cihan Biyikoglu is showing Elastic Scale.

Oooh, just saw an execution plan in Azure. I’m excited.

[9:50] That was actually a really decent key note. I wasn’t bored. I got enough technical information that I’m leaving feeling a bit excited about what’s coming out. Well done guys!