PASS President Thomas LaRock on stage !

PASS President Thomas LaRock kicked off the summit keynote.

Tom talked about the history of PASS and its growth curve. Positive numbers all over the place !

One of the key things to note is that PASS has delivered 1.3 million hours of training which is pretty impressive.

Next up was Microsoft Corp Vice President TK Ranga Rengarajan talking about Evolving Microsoft Data Platform.

Ranga talked about the explosion of data/data sources and its positive trend.He stressed on the evolving Data culture and how data professionals can lead this change.Microsoft data platform is capable enough to manage all the data requirements.

Ranga Rengarajan on stage !

Goal is do more,achieve more via :

Capture Diverse Data

AzureDocDB, AzureHD Insight, Analytics Platform System, Azure Search.

There was a demo by Pier1 Imports on Azure Search, and the demo explained the value of Azure Search capabilities

and its power.

Pier 1 gave another demo of their Promotions app/page which uses AzureDoc DB.

They also achieve scaling using SQLDatabase sharding capabilities.

Pier 1 is also leveraging Geo Replication for its premium SQLAzure Database.

Achieve Elastic Scale

SQL2014 with Win 2012 R2, SQLServer in Azure VM’s, Azure SQLDatabase.

Max Performance

Azure SQLDatabase, SQL2014.

Simplify with Cloud

Hybrid scenarios with SQL2014, Azure as a data lake.

Ranga also talked about various businesses which are leveraging SQLServer to achieve their data/scaling requirements.

Some great numbers for SQLServer this year :

1.2 Million downloads of SQL2014. 1M Azure SQL DB’s deployed.

Major Announcements :

Azure SQL Database Major update : Leap in TSQL compatibility, Larger index handling, Parallel queries, Extended events, In memory Col Store.

Technology Sneak Peak : Pier1 Imports

Pier1 Demo was focused on In memory OLTP/ Col store on Azure SQLDatabase. 13,000 transactions/second were fired up and at the same time a reporting workload was ran and performance was awesome .

They also demonstrated the ability to stretch On Premises database to the cloud.

Next up was Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft CVP Machine Learning & Information Management.

Joseph talked about Azure Machine learning and other capabilities.

Joseph making sure the crowd is engaged !

Again the goal is Do more,achieve more, Put data to work  :

Understand the past

Azure Data Factory

Demo from Pier1 demo on trend/stream analysis using Kinect/Azure Data Factory. Data from Kinect sensors are streamed

to azure and data is analyzed real-time.

Analyze the present

Azure Stream Analytics

Predict whats next

Azure Machine Learning

Demo by Pier1 Imports on machine learning. Pier1 app allows customer to login to the app and the customers

shopping trend/taste data is checked from Azure and results are shown.

Next up was James Phillips , Microsoft GM Data Experiences

James talked about bringing insights to more people – faster.

James talking about Power BI and Machine Learning !

Goal again is Do more ,achieve more :

Simplify data discovery 
     
Deliver faster time to insight

PowerBI,QA

Connect to on-premises

Data Refresh, Interactive Query

Enable data culture

Live Dashboards, Drill through

James gave a cool demo of PowerBI Dashboard.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more !