COMMUNITY!

It is a packed house again this year. If you were here on Tuesday night and you were a first timer you got to meet a thousand of your compatriots as a first timer. I can tell you Microsoft’s Steve Balmer doesn’t have anything on the enthusiasim on the PASS community.

Goals From Last Year

PASS set out a clear roadmap for growth last year and they are well on their way to meeting the goals of the five year plan.

1 million 250k members five global regions

Working globally

SQL Bits SQL Relay

Connect. Share. Learn.

PASS is working hard to give Summit attendees a truly epic training event.

Connect

Streaming Keynotes:

Live Summit Site:

Share

Twitter #SQLPASS #SQLFUN

Flickr sqlpass

Learn

SQL Clinic is a fantasic resource so bring your questions!

Not to mention 93 MVPs and 18 MCM’s that are speaking and attending the Summit.

Birds of a feather lunch is also a great way to come ask questions of reconized experts and your peers during lunchtime.

Fun

Tons of after parties and reseptions abound. There is at least one open after party every night. If you are setting in your room after the sessions, its your own fault.

Even though you have to pay to attend, your registration alone isn’t enough to pull off a conferince of this caliber. The vendors who pay to show your there wares pay a large part of the bill. They are also engaged with the community outside of the vendor area and give more than just money but fund people like myself so we can reach out and teach to a wider audince.

The New World of Data

Ted “The Cloud” Kummert took the stage to dissuss the future of data storage and SQL Server. To say that SQL Azure and the cloud is playing a huge part of the future of relational data.

The Hybrid World

Even though the cloud is a new paridigim you still need to house some stuff locally, that means sharing data between

Denali

The most significant release of SQL Server, Ted is really touting the breakthrough features in Denali. Personally, AlwaysOn is a huge feature for me.

Denali is SQL Server 2012. Finally, Denali gets a name and a quasi date. First half of next year, leaves a lot of room so hopefully it will be closer to January and not the end of June.

The Future, In Three Parts any data, any size, anywhere:

Manage and process data of all types

Mission-critical scale from on premises to the cloud

Common Management and development

What do people mean by “big data” ?

Big data, to me traditionally meant large single databases. That world is changing. Things like real time streaming data from traditional and non-traditional sources.

Hadoop goes windows, plays well with others

Ted also announced Hadoop based windows distribution!

ODBC Drivers and add-in for Excel nad Hive available next month is huge! It opens up Hadoop to us and our tools.

A javascript framework for Hadoop comming.

Lastly, available today connectors for Hadoop to SQL Server and SQL Parallel Data Warehouse.

Partering with hortonworks!

Eric Baldeshwieler, CEO of hortonworks took the stage to talk to Summit attendees about Hadoop and hortonworks and the spin out from Yahoo! specifically formed to support Hadoop. I’m glad to see Microsoft embracing Hadoop and NOT spinning off Hadoop#, but giving back to the Apache Hadoop project.

There should be CTP’s of Windows on Hadoop very soon.

Denny Lee took the stage to talk about more real world Hadoop and showed us a bit about Hive. He also brought the first demos of the morning.

Hadoop for Windows console is my style, CMD window and ye old’ prompt. Hadoop is about scaling out to split the workload.

Denny showed off the ODBC driver for Hadoop and how seamlessly it plays with power pivot.

CTP on Azure by the end of the year

Connecting a World of Data

WHAT? A Windows Azure Marketplace brings a huge amount of reference and market data in a single place.

Private Azure Marketplace coming too.

Data Explorer

Well, it looks really cool, but as you guys know I’m a storage guy :). The tool looks really good and I understand the problem area they are trying to address but I just don’t know if this will be a game changer or just a nice to have. I would love to know how long it took to build this really slick demo.

Then, it went into the creepy zone a bit with yogurt, kids and delivery. Again, I’m not a BI guy so I don’t always understand the demos.

Amir Netz named Technical Fellow.

I’m not a BI guy and I still know who he is. He did a fun demo that didn’t involve yogurt at all. Power pivot on Windows Mobile is cool though. You don’t have to have build a specific report to fit on your phone or your tablet. You can’t optimize for the smaller screen but you don’t have to. Crescent is bringing a real nice cross platform reporting infrastructure from the iPad to Android and of course Windows based tables and phones.

 Rap up

I can’t wait for tomorrow and Friday for sure! See you in the morning.