Final thoughts Dear Reader.  This is a big launch year for Microsoft and we are getting some very cool toys to play with today.  Make sure you go get the SQL 2014 CTP 2 bits.  I was telling Brent Ozar before the keynote that I thought they would extend the supported upgrade path from SQL 2005 to 2014.  I was 50/50 on that.  After the keynote I'm 90/10.

As always Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks,

Brad

9:50 am  We slice by International and Domestic, and using Power BI through the Office 365 portal we are able to use the power of Bing and get a world map breakout of calls.  Using a simple typed search you get a scatter plot.

The slicing on the fly via simple English language queries.  They look at the data by country, by platform, then they add additional countries receiving different reports by typing in a simple text box.  Just like using a search engine.

ANNOUNCING a Power BI contest that is aligned with the BACON, PASS BA Conference, coming in April.  You can vote on the winner on facebox http://www.facebook.com/microsoftbi

The winner will get a paid trip to BACON.  Who doesn't love BACON.

We review how we've pushed the boundaries.  Looks like we are wrapping up.

9:40 am We will be pulling from multiple data sets and area's.  Power Query they are pulling scrubbed user data, nice dig at Google and respecting users privacy.  Couple clicks we've gone from big data to structured data.

Now we are going to pair data and graphics with our data.  We head over to Power Query, you do an online search and you can tie that data to columns.  The data is shredded and displayed in a relational format.  Dig at Quentin's ability to do joins by the speaker.  Lot of funny banter between the two.  Population statistics are pulled in to pair up with the country, divided by population to show what the Skype calls per capita are.

They are using M behind the scenes to, for lack of a better word, power Power Query.  M is how they internally refer to the language.  It is some powerful stuff.

We we get a display of how this works on a Surface, Android Tablet, iPAD, Chrome laptop.  It just works, and it used HTML-5.  No more Silverlight.

We get a great breakout of the data calls per-capita.

9:30  am  We get a video about how the City of Barcelona is using Hadoop and Big data to manage all the city services.  Nice plug that reminds me of how IBM advertises their infrastructure services.  Nice to see a Microsoft video showing how they do the same.

Every organization has an IT need, and must be an IT organization to better handle their data and distribute services.  Interesting to see a large international city that recognizes that.

NOW for some BI!

Quentin is telling us all about Power BI, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map.  Sense a trend here, you are empowered via excel.

DEMO

Very cool, looks like we will be using Skype data, 35 TB's a day are produced.

9:20 am We have a nice slide highlighting the improvements for HA/DR and how they utilize the cloud.  Next up Redefining mission critical data.

So how do we make the Cloud mission critical.  Resource Governor in the cloud using Premium Cloud Services.

Next up Big Data.  Hadoop has a lot of ways it is being integrated.  HDInsight is Microsoft Hadoop in the cloud.  Horton Works is the premier MS partner for Hadoop.  It runs on Apache, not Windows Server.

There are workloads not made for SQL Server.  Dr Dewitt did a great deep dive on Hadoop at the Summit 2011.  His keynote is online, and should be watched by any SQL Server person.  It contains the roadmap of what their team was looking at.  Hadoop tackles alot of those non-SQL Server based workloads and data sets.  In PDW v2 we have PolyBase to be able to run queries against Hadoop.

Lot of cool stuff coming with PolyBase.

9:10 am  We are getting more about hybrid DR and Availability can be used with on prem and the cloud.  Backup all versions SQL 2005 - 2014 directly to Azure storage is announced.

Natively encrypted backups for SQL 2014.  More to come on that. We also get a little more info on Managed Backup.  For shops without a full time DBA this will be a great feature.  If you're paying for a DBA managing Backups should be part of their job.

I would bet DIFF_MAP's are being monitored to trigger this.  Could be some interesting threasholds with this.  I do love good blog fodder.

Backup to Azure is being Demo.  We are walking through registering the Azure storage.  Nice thing is once you configure it, it can fire off automatically from there.

I understand that people are a little scared of the cloud.  But this is IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service using Azure Blog Storage.  Think backing up to a VM in another datacenter and the on-prem translation is easier to understand.

9:00 am Enough about the slides, let's do a DEMO!  Tracey from the SQL team comes out to do the demo.

We've got a game website for X-Box 360 games.  We see the load times when games are recommended.  We see a 10x improvement just by converting the table to an In-Memory table.  converting the natively compiled stored procedure gives us another x11 improvement.

Look ups taking almost 10 seconds are now sub-second.   We have a lookup process that runs for 26 minutes.  Using a Clustered Columnstore index we get down to less than a minute.

No need for application coding changes to use Hekaton and Clustered Columnstore.  I can't tell you how many calls and presentations I've done on those two technologies.  They are the big two for 2014 and they are going center stage.

Back to pushing the boundaries, next up Breakthroughs in availability and recovery.

8:50 am  Quentin says "Good Morning"!  He Thank's the community for the work we do to evangelize SQL Server.  There are a lot of pictures they were taking at the Pre-cons that are subject area's surrounding Cloud and Big Data.

Quentin is giving us a story about On-Premises and Cloud.  We are going to hear a lot about the merger between cloud and on-prem.  SQL 2012 CU 2 had a lot of integration, SQL 2014 takes that even further.  Nice graphic of climbing the Himalayas to signify the journey of bringing cloud and on prem together.

We will only be talking about product in GA, in preview, or that will be in GA soon.  Nice chuckle from the AZURE CAT team.

PDW V2, Power BI for Office, Power Map, SQL Server in Azure VM, HDInisght, 2012 SP1, SQL Server 2014 CTP 2.  (*There it is).

Quentin has announced that CTP 2 is the last publicly available CTP before RTM!  Next up, all about SQL 2014 and "Pushing the boundaries".  The keywords begin.

1st Up In-Memory, nice jab at Oracle. We are covering the high points of Hekaton/In-Memory OLTP.

8:40 am Amy Lewis has received the PASSION award for volunteerism.  Way to go AMY!!!  Honorable mentions are given to another nominee Ryan Adams.  Ryan does a lot of work in his local user group and the DBA performance virtual chapter.  All of the volunteers, speakers, and chapter leaders are asked to stand.  There is a myVolunteering link at the PASS website.  Bill is asking everyone to update their profile.

Quentin Clark is introduced to the stage.  We get a nice video about how SQL Server is awesome, nice community pictures, Plug for SQL Server 2014.

8:30  am     Bill Graziano is on stage making the PASS announcements.  Over 700,000 hours of free training where given this year.  The main focus will be volunteers.

Really cool video using Power BI to show the history of SQL Saturday, nice shout out to Andy Warren, Brian Knight, and Steve Jones for starting what has become a great community mainstay.

Hello Dear Reader!  It's that time of the year again, I'm sitting at the PASS Summit and I'll be live blogging the keynotes.  Read it from the bottom up!  With the 2014 CTP 2 bits already live on the web, I expect that announcement shortly!