Welcome to the PASS Summit 2013 LIVE keynote blog. I’ll be live blogging this morning’s keynote so refresh your page often. I’ll be taking short notes to keep you up to date as opposed to paragraph form.
We are about 5 minutes from start time and this place is packed. The room is huge and there is tons of buzz as the family unites for our big kickoff!
PASS President Bill Graziano hits the stage to welcome us all to the Summit and introduce the board of directors who work tirelessly to help keep our organization thriving in conjunction with PASS HQ.
700k hours of free technical training was delivered by the PASS organization this past year. Bill thanks all the volunteers that make this possible.
We are watching a video using PowerMap to zoom us around the world and witness the growth of the SQLSaturday movement. It’s amazing to see how we have grown!
Amy Lewis is announced to be this year’s PASSion award winner. If you don’t know here she is AMAZING and since she was just elected to the PASS board we know there are great things to come.
I just go announced as the honorable mention for the PASSion award. I’m floored and honored!
Quentin Clark the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft hits the stage. He also thanks all the volunteers that make this community tick with PASSion. The PASS organization is doing an awesome job of thanking all of our volunteers.
Quentin is going to introduce what’s ahead for SQL Server and right now is showing us what they have done in the last year. He announces that SQL Server CTP2 is released today.
We are seeing a live demo of an online game selling store. First we see the times for what happens in a game search and then we see the time it takes to purchase it. These are simulated with 20k people doing it at the same time. Now they are converting the table to an in memory table and we go from 6 seconds to .07. We have now coined the phrase “Wicked Fast”.
Quentin is talking about some breakthroughs in availability and recovery like Always-on secondaries in Azure and the ability to backup to Azure. They are now showing a demo of backing up to Azure. It’s baked into SQL 2014 and they also announce multiple encryption options for your backups. They also have a separate download to add the ability to backup to Azure fuctionality for SQL 2008. It’s really cool to be able to backup locally and to Azure at the same time.
We are now seeing some customer case studies on PDW with DW loads going from days to hours. They are showing a video of a case study from the city of Barcelona. They use HDInsight and the data to see what their citizens need and cater to them, especially during their big city carnival. Being able to decipher this data in near real time allows them to respond that way from things like sanitation censors and even casual observations tweeted from citizens.
We are seeing Microsoft’s plan for real time insights from data like Power Query and the Data Catalog. We have ways to manipulate the data with Power Pivot and a rich presentation layer with Power View and Power Map.
Kamal a BI Program Manager comes on stage to show us a demo. He is going to show us an example using data from Skype. We start in Excel with Power Query. He does mention that the data is not real data to protect exposing Skype proprietary data. We connect to the data, pull it in, and convert it to JSON all with just a few clicks. The big selling point here is how easy it is. As a data professional we know other methods to get the data, but it’s complicated. This gives that power to a regular business user with great ease. Now that we have the fake Skype data we are going to pull in some more information using Power Query to correlate that with a web data search for countries and their population. This allows us to easily see calls per capita. Now that we have our data we get a data model that we can easily use on multiple devices. We see that it works on a Surface 2, and an Android, and laptop, and even a “fruity device” if you want to lower you standards. I’m sure you folks can guess what device that is!
Now Kamal logs into Power BI in Office 365 and simply types in “calls per capita per population” and instantly we see a chart using the same data model. He does it again with “calls by country and destination as map” and we get the same thing on that data model, but we get a beautiful map. You can signup at powerbi.com and check it out by querying data with every day language.
Microsoft is announcing a Power BI contest to show them how you are pushing the boundaries with Power BI. www.facebook.com/microsoftbi to enter the contest and they are giving away Surface 2s and Xbox Ones to the winners.
Quentin wraps it up as he challenges us to push the boundaries with Power BI.
Thanks for joining me to today and make sure to come back tomorrow for day 2!