Live here this morning from the PASS Summit 2012 keynote, we are starting with Bill Graziano, PASS president. We have 3894 attendees this year.
57 countries are represented at this year’s Summit. PASS Tv is new this year.
The PASS website has been vastly improved to make it easier to find events local to users. There is now a French language SQL Server virtual chapter which makes me happy. Viva la France!
The PASS growth internationally has been fantastic and big. PASS is launching a new BI conference in Chicago in May. Everyone is focussing more on big data.
The SQL Cat team is here and Microsoft has hands on labs this year. Additionally discounted certification exams are available all week.
Ted Kummert of Microsoft takes the stage. He’s the VP for SQL at Microsoft. SP1 for SQL 2012 is live today, which provides a lot of functionality integration with the recently released Office 2012.
The focus of today’s session is clearly big data, and business analytics. Talking about patient records and building decision support systems, leveraging the volume of data to make better decisions. Beginning to talk about xvelocity and in-memory systems for analytics.
In memory transactional database will be in the next major release of SQL Server, which means I hopefully never have to hear about SAP Hana again. We’re seeing a bad version of SSMS but this is very pre-release. Showing a 10x performance improvement with this product, which is code named Hekaton. Talking about Columnstore indexes. Demoing Columnstore and new Hekaton, will be updatable and be able to be clustered.
There is a video showing Bwin, and online gaming site and one of the biggest users of SQL Server. They have an incredible about of throughput. Windows Azure cache is going to leverage the Hekaton technology.
Now, we shift back to the Hadoop model in both Windows in Azure. I haven’t seen a lot of buy in for Hadoop on Windows, because most of the folks I know who use it, are really into Linux.
The latest version of Parallel Data Warehouse using Windows 2012 storage spaces in an effort to reduce storage costs. The new PDW is really fast, a count(*) on a 6 pb table ran in a matter of second. Showing impressive compression values, generally between 5x and 15x, which will save a lot of disk costs.
Now talking about changing the query processor for more modern processing. Introducing Polybase, which ties non relational data to relational. PDW continues to be mentioned, so I wonder if this is PDW only. Also, external tables are now supported finally. This is all nice stuff, but I wonder if will be supported outside of PDW.
Self service BI continues to be a big push, and ties nicely to office 2012, MS worked with Excel team to fully integrate BI work into Excel. Self service BI for all.