CLOUD! BIG DATA! EXCEL! CLOUD! CLOUD! Okay, recap done. Not really…sort of. In all honesty, while delivered in a fairly terrible fashion, there were some pretty big announcements made in today’s keynote. First let’s start with the one a lot of folks have been waiting on….

Official Names Revealed

The release of SQL Server we’ve known as “Denali” for the last 12 months now has an official name: SQL Server 2012! I know, not exactly exciting but at least it’s nice to have an official name. Also, since according to Mayan calendar the world ends this year anyways, this is THE LAST VERSION OF SQL SERVER YOU’LL EVER NEED!!! In addition to Denali SQL Server 2012 getting a name, we also got the official name for project “Crescent”, which is now officially known as PowerView.

BIG Data on Windows/Azure

Those worried about the NoSQL movement and how Microsoft would play in that space? No more worrying, now you get best of both worlds with the announcement of Microsoft’s support for Hadoop on Windows and Windows Azure! This is actually pretty exciting even though, in this blogger’s humble opinion, this kind of scale doesn’t matter for 99% of the folks out there. With this announcement, however, Microsoft has made huge strides in make the Cloud more relevant for big businesses. Want a multi-terrabyte system that scales? Windows Azure can handle that for you now. Want to handle that internally? Local options also supported. Or create a hybrid solution, the possibilities are actually fairly cool here.

The other story that was sold is that you can use Microsoft BI stack against your data in Hadoop. An example of this was shown by using PowerPivot to connect to Hadoop on Windows via the new ODBC connector. This connector will be available sometime in November as a CTP download. Speaking of connectors, Microsoft recently released connectors for PDW as well so you can connect big data with big iron for those who need that kind of data firepower.

Project “Data Explorer”

They also showed off a new tool which allows you to explore and merge data from Azure marketplace and various data sources. They spent a good chunk of time demoing bringing together data from Azure Marketplace, SQL Server and some other sources. Honestly I started tuning out a bit at this point since the #sqlpass stream became “interesting” at that point.

The rest of the keynote consisted of a rather downplayed series of demoes in Excel/PowerPivot/Power View. If you’d like you can check out the keynotes yourself here.