Today’s keynote with Ted Kummert starts at 8:15am EDT. Click here to watch today’s keynote live. For information on today’s keynote, see the SQLPASS.org page on Keynotes.
I’ve already blogged about some Summit topics here, but I wanted to continue the discussion on this blog.
Ok, during this opening keynote, Ted just announced the official name for Denali and it’s going to be SQL Server 2012 and it’s exact release date is in the first half of 2012. We’re alredy in CTP 3 so MS has some work to do before now and then.
One of the big themes in Denali is the cloud. MS is investing heavily in the cloud and until now the message has been very militant. For the longest time now we’ve been getting the message that we’re all going to be out of a job if we don’t transfer our skills to the cloud within the next 2-5yrs. Now they’ve backed off quite a bit and are saying that the cloud is just oging to enhance your current skills and just give you another avenue when it comes to deciding where your data’s going to go. Frankly I’m glad to see them calm down finally because it was making a lot of people very angry. Now, just because MS says it that doesn’t make it so, so why was everyone getting so angry? Well, in a word because of the offering. They’ve been telling us that we’re all in trouble if we move our skills to the cloud, but their cloud offering is anything but complete. So when there are such big holes in their offering, people get upset when you tell them their jobs are going away because it makes the scenario impossible. So anyway, calm down guys, your job isn’t going anywhere.
Ted also just announced that SQL Server will be supporting Hadoop for ultra-large data sets. They will also be making submissions to Hadoop to make it run properly for SQL Server. Now, I know what you’re thinking… you’re a SQL Server guy, not a Hadoop guy. Well, so am I, but it looks like we may have to at least get up to speed at least to a perfunctory level because we’re going to start seeing it in our DBs. So to get you up and going on Hadoop, have a look at some of these links:
Microsoft is getting in to BIG DATA. One of their new goals going forward is to be able to work with the super-large datasets from many different sources. A lot of this data is going to be unstructured, and that can be the hardest data to get at so bringing on products like Hadoop will help with that. Because let’s face it… as DBAs we really want for everything to have a nice queryable structure, but it’s not always stored like that.
Data Explorer is an interesting topic too. Microsoft has a new Azure Marketplace and apparently they’ll not only offer an app marketplace like we’re all used to seeing, but they’re also going to offer it as an internal service. What it sounds like this means is that they’ll allow companies to have their own app marketplace that they can use to give their internal people apps. Now, this is a new market for sure, but how useful is it? From a technology standpoint I get where they’re coming from, but I just don’t know how much of a use there is for something like that. If it does get picked up then it’ll mean a big paradigm shift for pretty much every company in the world. But this is definitely something to watch out for because it’s an interesting concept. I remember when MS came out with web services. They didn’t really know what to do with it, but they stood in front of their customers and said here’s this new technology, now we’d like for you to go see what you can do with it. I’m waiting to see if this’ll be like that again, and I’m also interested to see if this has any real teeth.