Today I will be LIVE blogging the keynote from the PASS Summit 2011 conference. Keep your browser tuned in here and refresh often. Today’s keynote is being delivered by Quentin Clark. Quentin is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the SQL Server database systems group. I will also try to tweet updates as I can so make sure to follow me. http://twitter.com/ryanjadams
Bill Graziano kicks us off on day 2 of SQLPASS and is sporting a kilt for the official SQL kilt day. Bill starts off thanking all of the volunteers that make this community as amazing as it is. He thanks chapter leaders, regional mentors, and special programs volunteers.
Bill thanks Jack Corbett and Tim Radney for outstanding service to the community. Lori Edwards wins the PASSion 2011 award for oustanding commitment with everything she has done for PASS over the last year. She is truly an inspiration for those of us that love this community. Congratulations and thank you Lori!
Quentin shares the Microsoft vision that was introduced yesterday. Their vision is any data anywhere, and of course integration with the cloud. Quentin is sharing his favorite SQL Server features which he calls the fantastic 12. The first 4 are required 9s uptime, fast performance, rapid data exploration, and managed self service BI.
Quentin brings a customer on stage to talk about their use of the SQL Server product. We are watching an Always On demo for how their shipping company uses the feature. This is one cool new feature that you need to check out. We are shown the Always On dashboard and everyone claps as they point out that it is all green. We now see how easy it can be to deploy a read only secondary that can be used for reporting and other purposes. There is clapping from the cloud as they remember to start using zoomit so we can actually see the demo.
Quentin is moving on to his second favorite feature of performance which covers ColumnStore Index. He is just quickly covering the specific features of his overall favorite categories. He mentions things like PowerPivot, SharePoint, Data Quality Services, and Master Data Services. He is just listing the features, but not digging in too much and the crowd is getting restless.
Everyone claps as we enter another demo. That’s right, Contoso rises again! They are showing some data quality features where you can use metadata to validate your data. Everyone sighs as they toss the cloud into the mix again. They are showing how you can use services from the cloud in the Azure marketplace to validate the quality of your data. I wonder what happens when the data in the cloud is wrong? It seems like a lot of trust in MS and their data services must be taken. I bet there is one heck of an agreement when using those services to idemnify MS from being responsible.
Quentin is up to 8 and 9 on his fantastic 12 list. They are scalable data warehousing and fast time to solution. The big thing pointed out here is appliances. Another guest comes on stage to talk about parallel datawarehousing. Both HP and Dell appliances are featured. HP’s has 700TB! One of the smaller appliances looks like the robot from Lost in Space. Danger Will Robinson!!
Quentin is on to number 10 which is Extend any data anywhere. He covers added interoperability and announces a new ODBC driver for Linux. He admits it’s a ploy to get them into the MS stack. Nothing better than transparency, huh? He also announces ODBC drivers for change data capture for SSIS and Oracle. We have another guest on the stage showing a demo, and the crowd is clammering for zoomit. They are showing how symantec search works to bring you related data for your searches. We are seeing how it can be used to search your document libararies. Symantec search is like full text search on crack. You can use it to search for keywords within your documents and even pull back the correlations in similar documents.
We are on to Quentin’s number 11 which is Optimized Productivity. Here we have SQL Server Data Tools, formerly know as Juneau, as well as Unification Across Database and BI.
We quickly move on to number 12 which is Scale on Demand which covers AlwaysOn. Our next guest from the SQL CAT team arrives on stage. It looks like he is a Twitter user as he points out making all the bloggers happy by using zoomit. We are seeing how to easily deploy a database to SQL Azure. They are announcing Windows storage in the cloud so you can back up your Azure databases to cloud storage and restore from there as well. They also show local SSMS management of your Azure DBs. After the demo of this feature there is clapping, but our guest has to prompt everyone to get more excitement.
Our next guest from the Azure team comes on stage. A new SQL Azure management interface is shown and it has live tiles. They also ann0unce that Azure can now hold up to 150GB databases. These features will go live by the end of the year, so don’t go looking for that 150GB just yet. The Azure reporting and data sync features are in CTP now.
Quentin is now talking about Hybrid IT where you can have combinations of server, private cloud, and public cloud. It look like Quentin is wrapping up by reviewing everything covered today.
The day 2 keynote is over. Do not miss tomorrow’s keynote with Dr. David Dewitt. I’m not at the live blogger table tomorrow, but I plan to blog it live anyway.