Day four of Summit – Keynote 2 #sqlpass

The keynote started out with Bill Graziano taking to the stage in a kilt and declaring that the second day of the PASS Summit is now officially SQL Kilt day.  Bill asked everyone in a kilt to stand up.  It had to be a record number of men in skirts today.

Lori Edwards was recognized for her volunteer work and received the PASSion award and myself and Jack Corbett were highlighted as Outstanding PASS volunteers.  It was awesome being asked to stand and getting applause from 1000’s of data professionals.  It was very humbling.

Bill also went over some financials.  Looks like the community involvement spending has increased ALOT.  It is obvious to me that more funding into SQL Saturday’s, 24 HOP, and other events are helping to grow the PASS Community a great bit.

Quentin Clark took to the stage with a lot of iron sitting in racks behind him.  He kindly told all of us to drop the name “Denali” and refer to it as SQL Server 2012.

Bob Erickson – Executive VP of Interlink Transport Technologies – #2 transporter in the world.  Bob discussed how mission critical the data for his company is with having to route containers to port authority and the sheer volume of data.  Zero downtime is a huge requirement.  Downtime means shipments stop.  Microsoft implemented an always on solution for them to assist with there mission critical systems.

During the live demo of Always On which is one of the more favored new features of SQL 2012 the presenter was doing a great job covering the product but no one could see his slides.  Twitter lit up with everyone asking for them to use Zoomit to zoom into the areas of the slides so we can see what he is typing and highlighting.  When the presenter finally caught on and stated he was going to use Zoomit, the audience erupted into a very loud applause.  The SQL Community is awesome isn’t it.

ColumnStore Index was covered next.  Very slick technology that will really help out in the BI stack.
Lara Rubbelke took to the stage and teased us with more Excel demos.  When Lara came out a round of applause went out.  Still some issues with the color scheme of the slide deck for those of us in the audience but she quickly brought out Zoomit so we can all see what she is featuring and typing.  Well done Lara.  During her demo she highlighted data quality issues with Radio Shack being placed in the middle of a lake.  The purpose was to show how the knowledge base works.  Rather cool way to demo this feature.  With the columnstore index she drastically reduced the time the query for the report took to run.  47 seconds down to .3 seconds.  Not bad huh?

SQL Server Appliances are being optimized and pre-tuned.  Organizations being able to go out and purchase a BI appliance to implement an enterprise data warehouse is truly awesome.  Imagine purchasing a SQL 2012 Parallel DW appliance to implement a multi terabyte end to end BI solution.  No more guessing with configuration, hardware, installation.  Over 480 cores for scale out ability.  HP’s enterprise DW appliance was shown and stated you can scale to 700 TB of data.  1-5 TB of DW space can fit in a single 6U unit.  That is six inches of rack space.  This is a great solution for small to mid size companies.  From the box to DW is only 20 minutes for the setup.  This should really help everyone get a BI Solution up and in place.  An HP Business Decision Appliance is as small as a 1U server.

HP Database Consolidation Appliance.  Can order within the next month.  First private cloud appliance available on the market.  Extreme availability, enough spares that you don’t worry when a drive fails.  A full rack contains 2TB of ram, 192 cores, 400 disks with 60k IO’s available.  You can start with a half rack in order to be able to scale out to a full rack.  The max scale out is yet known.  HP has yet to reach the limit.  Want 10 units to build a POD, no problem.  WOW.  The speaker said “We have yet to build the biggest one”  Kinda funny and was pointed out on twitter by Brent Ozar, “The biggest one you have built is the biggest one”.  HA

Michael Rys – Principal Program Manager.
Started out showing his book collection and of course did a shameless plug for his own book.  If you got it, flaunt it I guess. Semantic Search results was highlighted by pulling out keywords and displaying them of different books.  Semantic Search looks at the language models of documents and will determine keywords.  Pretty neat stuff.

SQL Server Data Tools (formerly “Juneau”) will ship with SQL Server 2012.  This was met with lots of fan fair from the audience.  The tools are unified across database and BI.

A sweet new feature demo’d was connecting directly to SQL Azure storage from within SSMS.  SQL Azure Federations also were shown today.  Many folks got really excited as this enables more scalability.  A new Metro UI theme has been very dominant during the demo’s yesterday and today.  It appears this will be a new “feature”.  There is a mixed response to the new GUI.

New CTP’s for SQL Azure Reporting and SQL Azure Data Sync are available today.  Coming end of year SQL Azure Federation, New Management Experience, and data size increase to 150 GB.