This morning I will be live blogging the PASS Summit 2014 Day 1 keynote so those at home can follow one.

Thomas LaRock hits the stage and welcomes everyone to the Summit.  He thanks Microsoft as the makers of the best data platform on the planet along with all the volunteers and leaders in this wonderful community.  He is giving us a “state of union” of PASS with amount in chapters, virtual chapters, and training hours provided.

2oo hands-on workshops are being taught and provided by Microsoft and the ability to take certification exams are available this week.  The SQL Server Clinic is also available which is an area staffed by Microsoft Customer Service and Support and where you can get your technical issues addressed directly from Microsoft.

This morning’s keynote is being presented by Ranga Rengarajan, James Phillips, and Joseph Siroch from the Microsoft Data Platform.  We are now watching an introductory video where these 3 executives are explaining their roles in the MS Data Platform group and what areas they support.

Ranga says he has 2 daughters and tells them he is getting the industry ready for them as he encourages them toward the tech industry.  Ranga is talking about how he likes maps and how the map availability has changed over time due to data.  He is talking about how data drives so many things in our lives and how things have changed because of it.  Ranga shows all the things that the Microsoft Data Platform can handle all in 1 engine.  This includes things like scale out, scale up, in memory, on disk, OLTP, and data warehouse.  Some of the other aspects he points out are capturing diverse data with Azure DocumentDB and Hadoop.  We can achieve elastic scale with SQL 2014 scaling to 640 logical cores and up to 1TB of RAM per VM, SQL Server on virtual machines in Azure, and Azure SQL DB.

Ranga welcomes Tracy Daugherty from Pier 1 imports to show how they use some of the new Azure services for their business.  His demo is showing how they are trying to sell decorative pumpkins during the holiday season and how they can dynamically display seasonal items based on inventory.  This lets them know what they need to push from a sales perspective and how Azure allows them to do all this dynamically and without code changes.  He is now showing us how they can use elastic scale to handle the additional load during the seasonal promotions.  The last thing he is showing is Azure Geo Replication and how easy it is to add a replica across the country.

The reigns are handed back over to Ranga as he shows some customers that are using some scale out features.  He features StackOverflow and some of the interesting things that they have done and we are now watching a video about how Dell uses various features to scale out and and scale up their infrastructure.  In memory has had a big impact for them and they are happy with the ease of deployment in SQL 2014 and how their workloads have performed better on the platform without any changes.

Now that we have seen everything MS has done Ranga is going to talk about what they are doing in the future.  They have a major update coming to Azure SQL DB including many larger indexes, parallel queries, extended events, and in memory.  Unfortunately with the announcement the crowd is silent.

Ranga welcomes Mike Zwilling to the stage also from Pier 1 Imports.  He shows how you can now use in memory and columnstore at the same time on the same table.  Mike is now showing how you can take an on-premise table and stretch it into Azure.  We see how you can still query the data while it is being migrated.  He is simulating a crash of the local server and how long it takes to restore a 150GB database which only takes seconds and then synchronizes back with the data in Azure and maintaining transactional consistency.

Joseph Sirosh is welcomed to the stage, VP of machine learning and information management.  He is going to have the audience do the wave while shouting PASS…Community…Rocks.  He is talking about the Azure machine learning platform and how we can use the data from machines to analyze and make predictions.  We are seeing how Pier 1 Imports can use MS Kinect as a sensor to  see where customers are spending time in their stores.  They are using Azure to show how they are pulling the data in.  They now basically have SSIS in cloud and through the browser where you can pull from multiple data sources.  We are now seeing the real time data coming from the Kinect sensors through Azure streaming and it appears that candles are the hot item of the day.  Sanjay has his phone plugged in so we can hear the real time predictions for his Pier 1 Shopping experience.  He now asks his phone to find cocktail glasses and the application finds the product and tells us what department it is in.  It also brings up a map to show us where to find it in the store.

James Phillips the GM of Data Experiences comes out to tell us about some of the Power BI offerings.

I’m going to close it out as I head out to talk about AlwaysOn in room 6E, which will be live streamed on PASStv.  If you are here then I hope you’ll join me and if not I hope you’ll join me online at 10:15 PT.

I’ll be back to live blog tomorrow’s keynote as well.