It’s almost showtime here and the room is packed out. There’s a real buzzing atmosphere as folks are eager to get Europe’s biggest SQL Server event kicked off. No doubt the allure of a free English Breakfast could have had something to do with it too.

It's a Full House

Nice classic intro from Simon here, short and sweet.

Quentin Clark of Microsoft, setting the scene by providing an overview of industry trends.

• Data Explosion
• Consumerization of fit
• Public and Private Cloud

Is it time for a Demo yet?

Introducing SQL Server 2012:

• Mission Critical Confidence
• Breakthrough Insight
• Cloud on Your Terms.

That makes four mentions of Cloud in the first 10 minutes. Are you keeping score Twitter bingo?

AlwaysOn is being demoed. Got to be honest, I’ve seen this stuff before and am struggling to follow along. Will we hear an ooh or an ahh from the audience?

Acessable Secondaries

“Offload your CHECKDB operations and Database backups”….

Showing the power of acessable secondaries. Blatantly spelt that wrong but we’re live here people….

More sales stuff, Quentin discussing “Mission Critical Confidence”.

BigData is THE hot topic in technology right now. “Breakthrough Insight” and Microsoft’s vision for BI solutions in SQL 2012

• Managed Self Service BI
• Rapid Data Exploration
• Credible Consistent Data
• Scalable Analytics and DW

PowerPivot Demo

PowerPivot demo. Interactive reporting capabilities. “Understanding the importance of the data and engaging the audience”.

I think the impressiveness of what I’m looking at is perhaps lost on a DBA….

Another Demo, this time on Columnstore Indexes. More magic for the analytics folks..

Columnstore Indexes being Demoed

Data Quality Services. The audience seems very engaged in this segment. It’s certainly something new to me.

Ah ok, it’s about data cleansing….

Performance of the query dropped from 80 seconds down to 0.8. A round of applause from the audience.

“Cloud on Your Terms”. Demo on FullText Search and Semantic search.

Technical difficulties on stage, credit to the speakers, winging it through a scenario based discussion.

Semantic search, a spinning sphere of words. I’m impressed!

For more info and to keep up on the latest with this subject Jamie Thomson(Blog|Twitter) is a good chap to keep an eye on.

To summarise then:  ”Cloud on Your Terms”

• Extend Any Data, Anywhere
• Fast Time to Market
• Scale on Demand
• Optimized Productivityvty

SQL Server Data Tools

Talking SQL Server Data Tools, a new tool weapon for SQL Server developers.  A lot of work has gone into this area of the product!

“The DBA who has the fun task of moving the local datbase into the Cloud.” <- Wait that’s me

That was impressive, super easy to deploy to the Cloud. The audience seemed to love it too. Clearly some closet cloud adopters out there…

Quentin: “SQL Server 2012 delivers ROI of up to 189% with a l  Year Payback period.”

David Flynn, from FusionIO taking to the stage…

FusionIO

David: Calls a FusionIO customer(BetOnSoft) to the stage. Online gaming company share the story of their performance woes and how with the combination of SQL Server 2012 and FusionIO, they were able to significantly improve their performance.

FusionIO: “Do you use a SAN anymore?”

Some folks are starting to sneak out at the back, eager to get a good seat at the first sessions of the day.

Whoa, cheese overload. A FusionIO marketing video spoof on the StarWars credits is being played. Not right for a British audience folks…

SQL Server 2012 looks packed full of new and exciting features. I’m sure we’ll pick up more insights in sessions throughout the day. I’m off to the first session!