* Announcing the PASS Business Analytics conference in Chicago, Il on April 10-12 2013.
* Announcing SP1 for SQL Server 2012.
We arrived sunday for PASS 2012 and immediately met up with some friends and had a great time.
Following that we were both in precons yesterday. I was in Private Clouds with Allan Hirt and Ben DeBow, and Jen was in t-sql with Itzik Ben-Gan. If you’ve never been to a precon before I recommend you give it a try. It’s an endurance trial though. 8hrs of concentrated training on a topic isn’t easy to get through, but if you throw a little water in your face you’ll get through it.
* Announcing Hekaton, a new in-memory technology that will ship in the next major version of SQL Server. In-memory computing is a core element of Microsoft’s strategy to deliver a data platform that enables customers to analyze all types of data while also accelerating time to insight. Currently in private preview, “Hekaton” will complete Microsoft’s portfolio of in-memory capabilities across analytics and transactional scenarios, offering customers performance gains of up to 50 times. Because Microsoft’s in-memory capabilities are built into SQL Server, customers don’t need to buy specialized hardware or software and can easily migrate existing applications to benefit from the dramatic performance gains. The live demo showed a 9x perf increase in a workload by using Hekaton to pin the table into memory. They then optimized a stored procedure with Hekaton and got a 28x performance increase.
Also, a preview of the next version of SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Microsoft’s enterprise-class appliance, available in the first half of 2013. SQL Server 2012 PDW will include a new data processing engine called PolyBase, which will enable queries across relational data and non-relational Hadoop data to drastically reduce time to insight.
* CTP Microsoft HDInsight Server is now available. HDInsight Server is the name given to the next iteration of Hadoop capabilities.
PolyBase was also demoed. PolyBase is a new query construct that allows you to query multiple data sources easily and merge them together. So tsql and hadoop for example, are well within reach now in a single query.
*PowerView and PowerPivot are now fully integrated into Excel2013.
The integration is being billed as something that’s extremely easy for end users to setup. I tried the same demo he did on stage with a very simple data set I created in excel on the spot and I was able to recreate his demo very easily on the spot without ever having played with it before. This is the first time MS has billed something as being easy in the BI platform and I’ve actually been able to duplicate what they’ve done.
Great job guys.