Waiting on Microsoft keynote to begin. Hoping for excitement!

SQL 2012 has had fastest adoption rate. No arguing it’s good, wonder why adopted faster than earlier upgrades? Things to ask.

Only talking about things today that are available or ‘soon will be’. I get the point, but ‘soon’ is a word that isn’t quite the same as marking a date on the calendar when it comes to software! No matter, let’s see what they got.

SQL 2014 CTP2 now available. Publicly available and should be the final CTP before release. Maybe ‘soon’ really will be soon!

Off topic, interesting to scan the laptops used by the bloggers. I see a couple of monster machines, holy cow!

Sort of off topic, I planned to set up and then get coffee – but no coffee here. That’s just wrong.

Light years ahead of competitors. Ambitious. Or slow competitors? Sounds good though.

Lots of good comments on Twitter, fun to read a few.

Now to a demo. Showing game recommendations in about 6 seconds, purchase takes 4 seconds. Using Zoomit! Applause from bloggers (who are mostly speakers too, and thus aware of the value/need). Convert table to an in memory table, 10x faster with memory_optimized=on. 11x faster by using native compilation for the stored procedure. Recommendation now .77 seconds and purchase is .12 seconds. Wicked fast? Definitely faster. Background shows it processing 16k transactions per second. Other improvements by converting to column store. Definitely within the realm of doable to use this on existing apps.

Can backup to Azure – good, should have come sooner I think. Talking about integrating on-premise with Azure, no details yet. Demo now. Pick backup to ‘URL’ instead of disk. All backups now have encryption option. Good good good. “Managed backups” automatically backs up db when needed. Magic? Perhaps. Showed doing inserts and then a new backup appearing. Support for doing Azure backup/encryption in SQL 2005/2008 – that impresses me – for once the old version isn’t totally ignored.

It feels like – and I don’t think it’s just demo fever – that SQL in the cloud is finally getting to the point of being approachable for mere mortals. Being able to do it easily matters, and being able to easily do a hybrid matters.

Now switching to the big data/Hadoop/etc part.