And we’re off. We opened with a video of people saying “Connect, Share, Learn” and “This, is Community”

Rob Farley & Buck Woody came out with a song about long running queries.

[8:20]Wayne Snyder has been working with the PASS organization since 1999. He spoke at the first PASS Summit and he’s been on the board forever. He has finally hit the point as immediate-past president where he has to leave the board. We’ve got a great little thank you for him from all sorts of people. Wayne is a magnificent guy, seriously. If you see him, thank him for his service.

[8:28]We have a new executive committee, Bill Graziano as President, WHOOP, Douglas McDowell is Executive Vice-President and Thomas LaRock is VP of Marketing and finally, Rushabh Mehta is now the immediate past president.

SQL Rally Nordic is taking place in Sweden and has completely sold out. SQL Rally Dallas will be in May. We have tons of SQL Saturday’s coming up.

You can get a registration, including 2 full days of Pre-Con between now & Nov 15, for $1395.

[8:33]Dr. David Dewitt, Big Data, What’s the Big Deal?

I got to meet Dr. Dewitt earlier in the week. I’m very excited about this presentation.

He’s going to be presenting with a co-presenter, Rimma Nehme is going to be on stage helping out. His presentations are magnificent.

[8:38]Dr. Dewitt, despite being smarter than the whole room, is really funny. He’s opening up with some great slides and some good humor.

And then we’re off. We’re talking big data. Petabytes. Typically housed on large clusters of low-cost commodity hardware. He’s also talking Zetabytes. Uh, wow.

Why are things growing so much? More and more things are picking up data. There are sensors from phone location & others. There are web clicks and page views. Data has been determined to be too valuable to delete. Cost of storage has dropped.