Today was the first day of the SQL PASS summit. Starting the day with the keynote where a Laptop was given away to a member of the audience by Mark Souza (Twitter) the founder of the SQL CAT team.
Ted Kummert was our keynote speaker for this mornings keynotes. Before Ted come onstage there was a very interesting video which gave us some history of the SQL Server product. The thing that I found the most astonishing was that SQL Server 6.0 and 6.5 was a $100M a year business for Microsoft. Today the SQL Server product is a $3B a year business. That is a massive amount of growth over just 12-13 years or so.
Parallel Data Warehouse
The first announcement was that the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) has been released, and the first appliances will be shipped from Dell and HP starting in December of 2011. When you create a database without specifying where the database is stored. When you create a table you specify the column which is used to distribute the data across the servers, as well as how the table should be partitioned. The admin console for the PDW is a web based system which allows you to view how all the cores are running and really see what is happening with the system, this is in addition to the SQL Server Management Studio of course.
SSAS
The next thing which we saw was Yahoo telling us about their SSAS system which they have. It processes 3.5 billion rows a day which is 1.2 TB of new data per day being processed into a 12 TB SSAS cube. Truly an amazing scale.
Project Atlanta
Microsoft has announced the new project “Atlanta” which is a new self service configuration assessment service for Microsoft SQL Server which will hopefully reduce the number of support calls. Atlanta is a Azure based system which analyzes your system looking for problems with the SQL Server configuration. The Atlanta system will scan the system configuration configuration and upload the configuration to the Atlanta application nightly. Atlanta will then process the configuration and show the knowledge base articles which show how to resolve the potential issues. When systems settings are changed Atlanta will track those changes to allow the DBA to more quickly find changes which have been made to the SQL Servers.
SSRS
SSRS is now available as an Azure product where you can simply upload your SSRS reports to the Azure SSRS website and it’ll get its information from your SQL Azure databases. These reports are edited and published using the same BIDS application which we already use today.
Azure Marketplace
The new Azure Marketplace allows you do purchase a variety of known good data from a variety of sources such as local weather. The data is available to be imported into SSRS reports via a data source using an ODATA URL from SQL Server Reporting Services, either in the cloud or a local SSRS report. This published data can then be used side by side with the business data.
Denali (aka SQL 11)
The new Denali CTP (the first public one) has been released to the public. It will be shown during tomorrows keynote, so today was just the announcement. You can download the package today from the Microsoft website. I’m sure there will be much more information tomorrow about the product tomorrow. Be sure to watch Twitter (specifically the #sqlpass hash tag) to watch the information in real time.
Check back tomorrow for more keynote information.
Denny
