Bill Graziano opened the day with some very white knees as kilt day kicked off at the Summit this year! Lots and lots white legs showing their love of this great community.

Lori Edwards was announced as the PASSion award winner and it is well deserved. I’ve known Lori for a few years and she has always been a deticated volunteer……..

Not Denali, SQL Server 2012
We got a nice feature overview of some of the 2012 features. They are still touting the feature list as the largest in any single release of SQL Server.

AlwaysOn
I can’t tell you how big a feature this is for us as a whole. I gets us closer to true shared nothing environments.

The AlwaysOn dashboard is more than just red/green dashboard. It actually helps you troubleshoot problems.

ZoomIt

I Think ZoomIt was probably the most popular feature of 2012 according to the cheers from the bloggers table every time it was used.

Performance

This is a large part of the improvements across the board from loadng and ETL to query processing.

Column Store

Again this year column store is a huge feature that was announced last year at the summit.

Talking in X’s

I’m not talking about your ex they are throwing around performance increases like 10x 50x or 100x. I’d like to see real numbers or live demos to back it up.

Self Service, Power View and PowerPivot

BI is becomeing more and more adhoc and end user friendly with more tools, tighter intergration. Shifting from a backend maintainer to an end user maintainable product.

Cloud, Azure and Appliances

Lots of talk about Azure and appliances. They are acknowledging that you need to be able to manage these new deployments and are developing management packs.

Only one Dell appliance, the Dell Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance. The other three. Warehouse appliances are all HP branded. We will see how long that stays true.

EXTREME!

I love the we will allow you to buy one or a fully configured container, moble datacenter, and gladly sell it to you.

Brian Knight Quotes

Glad to see the guys at Pragamatic Works on a slide from Microsoft. Those guys just flat rock.

ODBC Drivers for Linux!

They are talking about enabling migration from “other products” on the linux platform to get data into their new SQL Server deployment.

Integrating true ETL from Oracle to SQL Server not just export and bulk load.

Semantic Search, Beyond Full Text

Yet again ZoomIt is the killer feature in SQL Server 2012. Demoing a nice little silverlight app to display some of the new semantic search features. Symantec search will take Full Text beyond fuzzy search of words to something more inteligent.

Development Enhancements

SQL Server Data Tools, formerly Juneau, is taking a front seat for developers and SQL Server
Fully imbedable version of SQL Express for your apps! A nice feature where you don’t want to use compact edition.

Sunny Yet Cloudy

SQL Server + SQL Azure = love.
For the third time ZoomIt is the hit feature in Azure! The DAC or deployment assistant helps you migrate your onsite database to Azure for a seamless deployment. I don’t know how they will handle all the features that aren’t in Azure that are on your local install other than failing to create the deployment package.

Azure is highly available with three replicas of your data when it hits the cloud. They aren’t talking about the latency on keeping those three replicas in sync and that may be a deal breaker for some apps that demand full syncronus support.

They are continuing to tightly intergrate your local tools for SQL server and Azure including backups!

Connecting to your Azure storage from SQL Server Mangement Studio 2012. You can restore them locally and share them with others.

Star Trek The Next SQL Server

The Federation takes over SQL Server! Ok, we are actually talkinga bout federations for Azure. You can create large databases by end of year in Azure! Well, 150GB at any rate. That is a 3x emprovement but I wouldn’t call that “large” per se these days. You can manage all your federation members from their new Metro UI for Azure. I’m glad to see Azure growing up.

Hybrid IT

I’m glad to see they are really starting to acknowledge that you can’t just push everything to the cloud. They are definatly pushing SQL Azure but without the tools to join your local IT infrastructure it just wasn’t a very compelling arguement. Like all things Microsoft does they may release the 1.0 to get into the market and work hard to rev it up with features to make it competitive in the market place.

They rapped up with a really cool video that no one stayed to watch.

All in all, a solid keynote and some really great announcements!