Today I’m going to be live blogging the keynote at PASS Summit.
PASS President Bill Graziano started with talking what a great job PASS is doing with training in the last year with such programs as SQL Saturday, Summit, Rally and Chapters.
Quentin Clark (VP Data Platform, SQL Server) talking about the Data Platform in SQL Server. Talking about brick and mortar and the comparison to web vendors, but discussing cloud solutions and how on-premises solutions can work symbiotically to offer. Discussing how today’s keynote is going to focus on things that are around—not so much new tech going forward.
CTP2 of SQL 2014 is released—Quentin talks about how each employee needs to be empowered with information. Tracy Daugherty from MS is on stage to demo in-memory. I have a good bit of knowledge around in-memory and columnar data stores. Oracle flat out blocks their columnar functionality unless you are running on their hardware. Flat out, it’s a really crappy move.
Microsoft is introducing a bunch of new features that sync with Azure—hybrid Availability Groups, and better backup integration. The coolest feature I’ve seen mentioned is native encrypted backups, so we can now encrypt backups without taking the performance hit of Transparent Data Encryption.
The city of Barcelona talks about their data management. Much mention of Hortonworks Hadoop, not so much mention of HDInsight. Demoing PowerQuery against a demo Skype data sets—combining data from multiple sources.
Interesting that we have no release data for SQL Server 2014. More here tomorrow, same bat place, same bat channel.
That’s really a bad move by Oracle, which I think is good for Microsoft and bad for their customers. Oracle set the RDBMS the price ceiling, which gives Microsoft plenty of room to raise their prices Also, their extreme, and abusive, market segmentation allows Microsoft to make many features available only in Enterprise Edition. Of course, there are the lower priced substitutes MySQL, Postgres, and the various NoSQL solutions that make SQL Servers price less elastic.