Last year we set out some very high goals.  1 million technical training hours, 250k members in the community, and 5 global regions.  In 1 year our community has provided 430k hours of training, added 20k members to bring us up to 80k, and created a new global region.  There is a reason why the PASS Summit is the largest SQL Server event in the world.

We have 189 Sessions, 5 tracks (57 Microsoft and 11 SQLCAT sessions), 204 speakers (93 MVP’s, 11 MCM’s), SQL Server Clinic and Expert Pods.  That is a lot of technical sessions and talents for one to attend.  I strongly recommend that every attendee purchase the DVD sets to be able to watch any and all sessions they missed.  There simply is no way to attend all the sessions you need.

The first timers event last night was HUGE.  Hundreds of people attended and did a speed networking event.  All the first timers where brought into the welcome reception as a group and made a very large and long entrance.  What an awesome way to honor our first timers to the SQL PASS Summit.

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives volume two has been released at the PASS Summit.  You can have it signed at 1:00 – 1:30 today and 7:15 – 8:00 am on Friday.  55 MVP’s came together to create this book.  All the proceeds for this book go to charity.  What a great way our MVP’s are giving back.

Ted Kummert – “The New World of Data”

Never before have we managed more data.  The cloud will bring in a new economic model.  The platform you support needs to support the cloud.  The cloud world is a hybrid world of both data in your datacenter and some data in the cloud.  SQL Server and SQL Azure come from the same code base.  In the hybrid world you need services to join it all together.

SQL Server Denali -Now called SQL SERVER 2012.  SQL Server 2012 will be released the first half of 2012.  To get engaged and start learning you need to download CTP3 and start working with it.  I suggest installing it on a dev box or on a VM to get exposure to it.  Denali CTP3 brings breakthrough insight, mission critical confidence (always on) and “cloud” on your terms.

Our Vision is any data, any size, anywhere.  Manage and process data of all types, mission critical scale from on premises to cloud and common management.

Integration with Hadoop is being developed to run on Widows Server and Windows Azure.  ODBC driver and add-in for Excel both for Apache Hive, Java Script Framework for Hadoop.  Available today is SQL Server and SQL Server Parallel DW connectors for Apache Hadoop.

Partnering with the Ecosystem with hortonworks.  Eric Baldeschwieler CEO with hortonworks stated in 2006 they had to process pedabytes of data for web searches.  This was with Yahoo.  Hadoop is behind every click with Yahoo.  Eric believes that in 5 years Hadoop could be holding half the worlds data.  I think that is a bit of a stretch but if you could non critical data like twitter feeds, search history and the like, then ok maybe.  Large critical financial data, health care data, etc.  Maybe not.

Denny Lee, Principal Program Manager teased us with a demo early on but then needed to give us some background first.  Denny then pulled up a HiveQL query and started showing us some data.  Rather cool.  Denny opened up Excel for a power-pivot using the ODBC driver for Hadoop.  With a multi-node Hadoop cluster he showed us a pretty slick report with ease.

Empower your data with “Data Explorer” in the SQL Azure Labs.  A three way join in the demo from the Azure market place, SQL Server, and Excel.  Rather sweet demo.  There is a good place for this in the BI world.  Bean counters will love the new way to gather and mashup data.  Although this demo contained cool concepts, the audience really seemed to lose interest.  WIth talks of three ways, five ways, vanilla, contoso yogurt, kids loving yogurt, penicillin, etc.  It really was the low point of the keynote.  Twitter was brutal but much more interesting.

Amir Netz – Unlock New Insights, Anywhere

The keynote was saved with Amir.  When you open up a presentation with “No data was harmed in the making of this presentation” and “This is real data”, it can only get better from there.  It was also announced that Amir is now a “Technical Fellow” with Microsoft.  Amir is also the speaker who last year said that PowerPivot is the “Engine of the Devil”.  Amir use movie revenue for his demonstration showing how easy it is to produce many different reports with ease.  The “Zoom It” feature of the chart really makes it easy to drill into your data.  Want a great July just put on another “Harry Potter and Transformers” movie.  Gotta give props to Power View, it is pretty slick.

At the end of the keynote powerview was demo’d on a Windows phone, an Ipad 2, and a Samsung tablet.  It was pretty slick on the Windows phone and Ipad but didn’t demo to well on the other tablet.

Now on to the sessions.