Search results matching tag 'PASS 2012'

T-SQL Tuesday : Reflections on the PASS Summit and our community

AaronBertrand — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:20:00 GMT

Last week I attended the PASS Summit in Seattle. I blogged from both keynotes (Keynote #1 and Keynote #2), as well as the WIT Luncheon - which SQL Sentry sponsored.

I had a fantastic time at the conference, even though these days I attend far fewer sessions that I used to. As a company, we were overwhelmed by the positive energy in the Expo Hall.

I really liked the notebook idea, where board members were assigned notebooks to carry around and take ideas from attendees. I took full advantage when Douglas McDowell stopped by our booth. He had a good explanation for some of my questions/gripes, but definitely walked away with some work items. I think the whole "we are listening" message went over quite well, and PASS continues to demonstrate its commitment to improving the community.

Highlights of the conference, for me, were chatting with Steve Dybing (an MVP lead from the past), attending a Paul White session, and talking briefly with both Conor Cunningham (off-site) and Dr. David DeWitt (on stage).

I had many other great conversations with friends and customers, new and old, far too many to mention. Which brings me to the point of the post: community.

I think we have a fantastic SQL Server community. Is it perfect? No. Do we all want to hang out together all the time? No. Like any family, there are the weird uncles that you just don't see eye-to-eye with on a few or even a lot of issues. And that's okay. Families are supposed to have disagreements, fallouts and other rough times. They make us stronger. And in a roundabout way, remind us that we're all here for each other.

This stage of my career was launched on the backs of the SQL Server community, and I am very thankful for that. And I get the feeling, more and more every year, that folks attend the PASS Summit both for the technical content and, to an even greater degree, the people that are there.

Blogging from the PASS Summit : WIT Luncheon

AaronBertrand — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:08:00 GMT

SQL Sentry is very proud to sponsor the 10th annual Women in Technology Luncheon at the PASS Summit.

Probably 700 people in here - pretty crowded house. This luncheon is growing year over year and is always a refreshing and interesting event to attend.

Bill Graziano kicks things off and introduces our moderator, Wendy Pastrick. The panel is made up of Stefanie Higgins (actually the founder of the WIT Luncheon event), Denise McInerney, Kevin Kline, Jen Stirrup and Kendra Little.

Stefanie talked about her experience in college when a CS professor essentially shunned her in class until he realized that she knew what she was doing. He later admitted that was exactly the reason - "he didn't think girls could be good at this."

Denise talked about how far PASS has come in terms of female attendees and speakers and how the industry is changing (but perhaps not fast enough).

Kevin talked about technical conferences in the past and how, when he was a large part of PASS, conferences seemed cold and unwelcoming. He also talks about how in a lot of cases females are challenged by peer pressure as much as, or even more than, workplace or institutional restrictions.

Jen brought a European flavor (and great accent!) to talk about the low percentage of female IT workers in her part of the world, and her focus on encouraging other women in the community to pursue their careers in IT.

Kendra talked about her desire to learn, how she long felt that she was just showing up at work, and how speaking at SQL Saturday changed her outlook on her own career and her ability to inspire others.

Lots of great questions and discussion. At one point Wendy said she was overwhelmed by the love in the room (I think Buck Woody might have brought a few to tears with his quick story about Christina).

Blogging from the PASS Summit : Nov. 8th keynote

AaronBertrand — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:56:00 GMT

Douglas McDowell talks about day 1, the video montage featuring folks here from all over the world, and the fiscal year. The important point I took from this is that PASS is a not-for-profit committed to investing its revenue and other resources back into the community. They are hiring another full-time community evangelist, adding IT resources for online resources like the SQL Saturday site, and further expanding global efforts.

He introduces the new board members: Wendy Pastrick, James Rowland-Jones, and Sri Sridharan. They will serve their current term through the 2014 calendar year.

Tom LaRock comes on stage talking about the history of PASS and its community of volunteers. He announces this year's PASSion award winner: Jen Stirrup. Amy Lewis and Jesus Gil were honorable mentions. Congrats to all!

Registration is open for PASS Summit 2013, October 15-18 in Charlotte, NC. Home of SQL Sentry. :-)

Quentin Clark talks about the analysis of analysis (e.g. prediction models for election results that were very accurate), and deeper analytics being implemented around hotel guests and retail customers. Then we go into a data lifecycle story - a demo complete with movies and ZoomIt (but perhaps too much of the former and not enough of the latter). Basically the story is that Microsoft is making it possible to pull in data from disparate sources and use it together seamlessly for both review and for predictive analysis. Which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

Blogging from the PASS Summit : Nov. 7th keynote

AaronBertrand — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:40:00 GMT

Bill Graziano takes the stage at 8:15. He talks about how 3,894 attendees (and 5,611 total registrants) represent 57 countries at the 14th summit. There are over 127,000 members worldwide.

Note that you can watch the keynotes and many sessions through Pass TV.

PASS serves SQL Server community - expertise, support, commitment. He talks about SQL Saturdays, SQL Rally, 24 Hours of PASS, and the Summit. He announces that there will be a third annual SQL Rally Nordic event next November, and that there will have been 543,000 hours of training delivered to the community in 2012.

PASS is delivering its first Business Analytics Conference, April 10-12, 2013, in Chicago.

A lot of people think PASS Summit is about a bunch of sessions. There are also other resources here, such as the SQL Server Clinic (4C3), Developer Chalk Talks (4C4), Hands-On Labs (304), Focus Groups, a Solutions Theater, and even on-site MS Certifications. And don't forget about all of the social interaction and conversations that happen outside of these formal settings.

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1

Ted Kummert takes the stage. He talks about SQL Server 2012 and announces the general availability of Service Pack 1. (You can download SP1 here - it's build # 11.0.3000.) There is already a "What's New" article on MSDN.

Hekaton - In-Memory for OLTP

He finally let the cat out of the bag about Hekaton (greek for "100x" - implying 100x performance improvement), an in-memory transactional engine that will ship in the next major version of SQL Server. We've known about this technology for at least 18 months, but were sworn to secrecy (though there were a few slips, e.g. on Connect and this blog post). Shawn Bice demonstrates a tool that identifies tables that are great candidates for in-memory optimization (trading CPU for latches), and helps you migrate them to in-memory tables with no changes to applications.

Anyone remember <code>DBCC PINTABLE</code>? This is NOT that. Paul Randal liked <code>DBCC PINTABLE</code> about as much as he likes shrinking databases.

The tool will also identify stored procedures that can be memory-optimized - essentially re-compiling the procedure so that it runs natively in memory. The big thing here is there is no re-learning and no re-writing of application code to take advantage of this in-memory technology. Very exciting stuff.

ColumnStore Improvements

Shawn also shows a demo of ColumnStore (which they're going out of their way to label "xVelocity ColumnStore"), which we've all seen, but he talks about two great enhancements in SQL Server vNext: ColumnStore being updatable (finally!), and the clustered index on a table being eligible for ColumnStore.

My take: If you weren't excited about SQL Server 2012, you should certainly be excited about the next version of SQL Server.

SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse

The new version, scheduled for H1 2013, will use Windows Server 2012 (Storage Spaces), updateable and clustered xVelocity Columnstore indexes, an updated distributed query processor, and offers totally redundant appliances with up to 40 nodes.

Christian Kleinerman comes up and demonstrates the new admin console and "insanely fast" queries. He does a COUNT(*) query over 294 billion rows (over 1 Petabyte) sub-second, and a much more complex query using the ColumnStore clustered index over the entire table returns in less than 2 seconds. Space savings with ColumnStore clustered index is 5x-15x.

PolyBase

New technology allowing users to query over both relational and Hadoop data through PDW. New syntax: <code>CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE ... WITH (LOCATION = 'hdfs://.../whatever.tbl');</code> Then you can join against this Hadoop source just like you would any other table. More info at http://gsl.azurewebsites.net/Projects/Polybase.aspx

Excel 2013

Amir Netz comes up and talks about movies. Shocking. He demonstrates the ease of using PowerView, PowerPivot and insightful visualization within Excel. The first demo to get applause was turning the data into a map - a scrolling, zoomable map, with pie charts, tooltips and legends - again entirely inside Excel.

Ted's high-level blog post about these announcements:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/07/accelerating-insights-in-the-new-world-of-data.aspx

Also see Jen Stirrup's great overview post here:

http://www.jenstirrup.com/2012/11/microsoft-sql-server-2012-latest.html

PASS Summit '12, Day One

AaronBertrand — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:46:00 GMT

I had an incredibly interesting experience getting to Seattle this week. I flew out of Providence through Philadelphia. Apparently there was some smoke in one of the towers at PHL, so our flight was an hour delayed. I missed my connection by three minutes. I was absolutely amazed that after a one-hour, full ground stop, flights shortly afterward were leaving exactly on time. It was like anti-Aaron magic. I got to the gate and watched my plane back away. My luggage never would have made it but it would have been great for me to get here. US Airways told me, "Tough break. We can put you on a flight in the morning; have fun in Philly!" No hotel voucher, no meal voucher, nothing.

I finally got here yesterday morning. It only took me about 23 hours to get here.

After walking around in Seattle, I've come to the conclusion that there must be a market for a shirt like this:

Now I'm in the "consolation session" which was a great idea that PASS came up with when most MVPs were rejected from the insider sessions with the product group (a first, IIRC). It's a little quieter here than I expected but I imagine that (a) many MVPs knew far enough in advance to change their travel plans and (b) many others who had already booked travel signed up for pre-cons or photo walks or other activities instead.

Looking forward to catching up with all of my #sqlfamily.