Bill Graziano has come out on stage, looking marvelous, in a traditional kilt and stockings. Thanks Bill.

For those who don’t know, Day 2 at the Summit every year is Kilt Day.

[8:19]Outstanding volunteers being recognized are Tim Radney and Jack Corbett. These are some outstanding people who work their bottoms off for the PASS Community. If you meet them, thank them.

The 2011 PASSion Award goes to Lori Edwards. She’s simply amazing. Congratulations Lori and thank you for all the work you’ve done!

[8:23]Time to eat our vegetables. We’re looking at the financials. It’s a slightly painful process, but important to understand where the money goes since this is a non-profit organization managed by volunteers. You should understand where the money comes from and where it goes.

[8:25]Quentin Clark is the keynote speaker from Microsoft. We’re seeing a bunch of people talk about the new functions about SQL Server 2012 (nee Denali). There really is a lot of new functionality coming up. Some of it is quite exciting. Some of it is probably edge-case stuff for really big systems. Regardless, there’s lots to learn.

[8:31]SQL Server 2012 is the biggest release ever, especially when you take into account that SQL Azure is part of the common code base. Quentin Clark is going through his “Fantastic 12”. First up is Required 9’s & Protection. Integrations services is a server, they’re introducing HA for StreamInsight and there’s AlwaysOn. We’re getting a testimonial from the Mediterranean Shipping Company. I’m just not a fan of testimonials. Show me demos or teach me stuff, all the rest is marketing.

[8:41]Testimonial done, we’re getting some demonstrations of AlwaysOn. They’re showing how the wizard can be used to build out a true topology of mirroring servers. It really is cool to watch this happen live. I’m going to be spending some time with it myself.

It’s great how they’ve set up a single listener to manage connections so that code is no longer necessary to manage the capabilities.