Liveblogging PASS Sumit Day 1 Keynote with Quentin Clark (#SQLPASS #Summit13)

Welcome to the live blog! Have some resources to start:

Edit: I have changed the title from “Livebloggin” to “Liveblogging“, thus losing me about 20% street cred.

Fire it up…

Here we have PASS president Bill Graziano! He’s here to do all the introductions – the PASS Board and so on. There’s a board QnA on Friday here at Summit, by the way.  You should also note all the free training by PASS…you really should check out the virtual and local chapters on www.sqlpass.org

Oooh, here’s a shiny video using technology (SQL BI) to show us SQL Sat data. It actually is really cool that SQL Saturdays have grown so much in the last 5 years or so. A SQL Saturday is a day of FREE training, and they’re now held annually all over the world.

PASSION: This year’s PASSion Award winner is Amy Lewis, the former leader of the PASS BI virtual chapter. She’s been elected to the PASS board this year… PASSion award honorable mention goes to our own Dallas-based Ryan Adams. I’ve seen firsthand that he really does do a ton for the organization.

Quick Summit notes:

  • The vendor exhibit is this evening. I’m particularly excited about this, because our brand-new, community written book Tribal SQL
  • SQL Server Clinic in Room 213 – go ask them questions, or just listen. This is a really big deal.
  • Also, there are 50% off Microsoft exams in the Westin this week. I’ve already taken and passed one of my catch-up exams!
  • Get the Guidebook app on your phone, download the PASS Summit guide, and give session feedback there!!

Next up…Quentin Clark, “Pushing the Boundaries”

That’s his session title, not mine. Beginning message: “SQL is good.” I might be summarizing overly, though.

Story time: In the late 90s, there was a lot of excitement about the imminent death of retail. I remember this. And (much like the Y2K deal), it ended up not being the apocalypse…ecommerce and brick-and-mortar can live in harmony.  Quentin is tying this to the on-premise and cloud database model.  This seems like a moderate change from the early impression we got that “OMG onsite databases are going away forever!”  That’s good, I like a little bit of sensibility with breakfast.

“A year of innovation.”  SQL Server 2014 CTP1 is out, if you haven’t heard. Also 2012 SP1 and 2012 PDW.

Announcement! SQL Server 2014 CTP2! It’s public, and it’s the final production ready CTP!

Don’t download it over the conference wireless, please. That’s me saying this, not QC. Here’s the link, for the lazy: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn169381(v=sql.15).aspx

Now we’re going to talk about how SQL 2014 is great. This, I’m very interested in.  A few notes that stand out to me:

  • “No need to rewrite existing apps.” Good, but I want to hear what this is about, exactly. 

Tracy Daugherty, program manager for 2014 here to do a demo

Show us in-memory…they’re showing us a “real application”, a game sales portal.  System is loaded with a million users, in the test frame every action is simulated to 20,000 people doing the same thing. The first demo shows several seconds for each action, just enough to really make a modern web user really mad.

Converting the table to an in-memory table. Haven’t we seen this demo at previous summits? We’re also converting a SP to native compilation, which is also neat, but also not strictly new.  Colin Stasiuk points out “we’re at a weird point…. too late for new stuff… too early for vNext.”  That’s fair, ish. And these ARE neat improvements. It’s “wicked fast”, in Tracy’s words.

More boundary pushing – Tracy’s cloud backup demo

Backup to Windows Azure Tool. “Encrypted automated backup solutions across all versions.”

Backup GUI – I hear mutters next to me, “learn to type” – choosing backup type, file, and credential. And encryption in 2014!

Big news: Encryption support for backups in 2014…I THINK that means all versions…? Yes, it looks like we’ll be able to back up SQL 2005 databases to Azure, too. That is a very nice touch.

Also cool: And intelligence in SQL to determine if the database has changed enough to be backed up, automatically. That could also be very neato.  Of the automatically named backups files, Brent Ozar says, “Ah there we go, the dates are at the end after the database name and the giant guid strings. “Nice.””   Kevin Kline adds: “How many people use SQL2005 or SQL2008 at #sqlpass #summit13? About 50%. Now – go ahead about backup to Azure! Oh, and have encryption too.”

Oops, demo explosion. “Azure not available.”  @FatherJack notes “Protip: if you aim to do an online demo, don’t mention a new version if your software is ready for download until AFTER the demo #summit13”  Yeah….convention wireless is always an issues, especially if a big download is announced.

“Redefining mission critical in the cloud”

“In the cloud”…..*drink*…

Sean just pointed out to me that 2014 offers Resource Governor adds IO governance”. Big, big whoa. (Brent notes that this is only for reads, not writes. Still…)

People are getting excited and/or critical about various  new features:

Video time. Suddenly, the 30% of the audience who had started daydreaming, perks up to look at the shiny!! #sqlpass #summit13 #adhd

Real-time insights for everyone, with Kamal Hathi

@SQLChicken: “Skype insight reminds me of this.”

Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, Power BI. I can actually get behind the naming consistency here. Demo time with Kamal Hathi.

“There’s data, there’s big data, and there’s Skype data.” 350mil users a day, some massive number of Tb per day. And we’re looking at Excel 2013. Okay, you have my interest…   @jenstirrup says “Demo in Power Query. We are doing Online Search in Excel 2013. Demoed this in my joint Big Data precon with @allanSQLIS

This is a little uncomfortable, with the recent NSA/privacy buzz…we’re doing a demo on gathered user data. Twitter murmurs.

  • @jenstirrup @kamalh onstage now. ‘We respect the privacy of our users, unlike some other companies out there…’ oooh! Fighting talk.

    @BrentO Well, and completely bad idea to demo. If you care about privacy, why gather 35TB/day of private data?

  • ‏@kbriankelley Yup, bad idea especially with the recent revelations about just how far the NSA reach goes.
  • @jenstirrup customers in Europe are put off cloud solutions after all the NSA stuff. We have laws about passing data around globe. I am not joking. I get this question about NSA looking at data all the time from European companies. it is not good.

Wrapping Up

And thank you, and there you go! Join us tomorrow for the Day 2 keynote with David DeWitt, the biggie!