VP Finance, Bill Graziano comes on stage in a great kilt (but white socks!). No Tina Turner this year.
1,000 people from 53 countries watched the keynote yesterday. He recognizes Tim Radney (@tradney) and Jack Corbett (@unclebiguns) for their outstanding volunteer work over the past year, and then congratulates Lori Edwards as this year's PASSion Award winner.
Next he's on to financials. 45% revenue growth - over $5MM this year. Spending on community programs has increased by over 100%. He reminds us that the PASS Board Meet & Greet is Friday, 12:15 - 1:30, in room 307-308.
They show some videos pimping the various new features in SQL Server 2012. Brent and I have a running bet on whether "PowerView" should have a space. It turns out it does, but I suspect most will spell it like PowerPivot, PowerPoint, etc.
Quentin Clark, Corporate VP, Microsoft
Quentin comes on and recaps what Ted Kummert spoke about yesterday - large scale for all consumers. He goes over his "Fantastic 12" - top 12 features of SQL Server 2012:
1. Required 9s & protection
SSIS as a server; HA for StreamInsight; AlwaysOn
2. Blazing-fast performance
Performance enhancements in FTS, FileStream, SSAS & SSIS; ColumnStore index
3. Rapid data exploration
Power View + PowerPivot; SharePoint administration and reporting alerts
4. Managed Self-Service BI
5. Credible, consistent data
BI Semantic Model (BISM); Data Quality Services; Master Data Services
6. Organizational compliance
Auditing; User-defined server roles
7. Peace of mind
Distributed Replay Utility; System Center Advisor / MPs; Premier Mission Critical support
8. Scalable data warehousing
Optimized & pre-tuned appliances from multiple vendors
9. Fast time to solution
10. Extend any data, anywhere
Drivers for PHP, Java, Hadoop; ODBC drivers for Linux & CDC for SSIS & Oracle
11. Optimized productivity
SQL Server Data Tools ("Juneau") for both OLTP and BI; deployment + targeting "freedom"
12. Scale on demand
AlwaysOn; deployment across private + public; elastic scale (federation)
We saw demos of AlwaysOn, ColumnStore indexes, semantic search, backup from Azure, federation, and even DACPAC.