PASS/ PASS Summit/ Syndicated

Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit 2009 Keynote Highlights Live

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I’m sitting here at the Blogger’s table between @mrdenny (Denny Cherry) and @BrentO (Brent Ozar) heckling PASS President Wayne Snyder listening to the PASS Opening Keynote.  Wayne Snyder is up first.  Followed by Bob Muglia (President, Server and Tools Business (STB), Microsoft Corporation) and then Ted Kummert (Senior VP Business Platform Division, Microsoft Corporation).

It’s too hard to flesh-out the full slide deck of Wayne’s portion of the keynote address, so I’ve simply bullet-pointed the highlights here: 

  • 42% of attendees at this year’s Summit are first-time attendees
  • 31% DW/BI  28% DBA  20% App/Dev
  • 400+ Microsoft Employees in attendence  (CAT, CSS, PSS, Marketing, )
  • 98 SQL Server MVPs
  • 53% New PASS Local Chapters
  • 199 Chapters worldwide
  • SIGs rebranded as Virtual Chapters
  • 50,123 registrations from 70+ countries for 24 Hours of PASS
  • SQLServerStandard relaunched as online publication.  Archive of back issues available online.
  • PASS Board of Directors to have Q/A session Wednesday room 6E 4:30-6:15
  • Live Twitter feed #sqlpass is designated hashtag
  • 160 Technical sessions
  • CSS / SQLCAT Clinics
  • Hands On Labs
  • Microsoft Technical Learning Center
  • MVP/SQLCAT Lunch Wednesday
  • PASS Chapter Lunch on Thursday

 

Bob Muglia has now taken the stage and is captivating us with the story of 1/13/1998 when Microsoft announced the release of the Ashton-Tate Microsoft SQL Server product.  Meeting Bill Gates for the first time in the elevator down to the green room to be introduced; his (Bill Gates’) nervousness at speaking, and Steve Ballmer practicing jumping up and down (even then) with Bill Gates to get him pumped-up for the speach.  To be a fly on the wall…

Bob brought with him a shrink-wapped box (larger than an Xbox Elite package, by the way) of that product, “complete with 3.5 and 5.25 floppy disk.”  Quite facinating to go back to a time when Microsoft, an O/S company with no market share or products in the Business Office Space, took a big leap into that area with what has now become Microsoft SQL Server.  21 years.  Cool.

Other highlights from Bob’s portion of the keynote:

  • tpsE world record of 2,012 OLTP
  • Record DW performance on Windows:  TPC-H 3TB: 102,778 QphH
  • Dynamics CRM xRM business applications 20,000 users sub-second response time
  • Demo of load migration in SQL Server 2008 R2 – migrated an active SQL cluster node from virtual server to virtual server with no (NO) downtime.
  • I/O subsystem issues with virtualization concerns addressed.  Bob asserts that substantial improvements exist in Hyper-V.
  • The Private Cloud.  (Teh only cloud I’ll advocate as a DBA.)

 

Now we move on.  Ted Kummert steps out to discuss R2, cloud services, Madison.  The first relational DB in the cloud, SQL Azure will be released as CTP.  SQL Server 2008 R2 announced to ship in first half of 2010.  Ted also presented his top 5 list of good things about being here at the PASS Summit 2009:

  1. World’s largest gathering of SQL Server Professionals  (Oracle came to be mentioned.  An appropriate slam of the phrase “Open World” and “Unbreakable” was met with a rousing wave of laughs.)
  2. You can take your questions directly to “The Source” with all of the SQLCAT, CSS, and PSS Staff on-hand.
  3. The PASS Leadership – Wayne and Rushabh, specifically.
  4. Work Hard – Play Hard – Thank you event at Gameworks on Wednesday night.
  5. You will build your skills & knowledge on the #1 Database in the World.

 Ted then went on to discuss the Information Platform Vision from Microsoft:

  • Empowered IT
  • Pervasive Insight
  • Dynamic Development
  • Mission Critical Platform (Desktops/Mobiles –> Server/Data Center –> The Cloud)

The plaform vision is powered by SQL Server 2008 and SQL Azure.

 

Other bullet-points from Ted Kummert:

  • Scale up to 256 logical processors on Windows Server 2008 R2
  • PHP driver for SQL Server
  • StreamInsight being used to allow for Microsoft/NBC collaboration on interactive Sunday Night Football broadcasts on the Intertubz

 

Ted brought out crowd favorite Dan Jones to go over improvements in Multi-Server Management n SQL Server 2008 R2.  Control points to analyze CPU utilization, storage utilization, Policy-Based Management, deployment, script execution, upgrade verb (if using Visual Studio and DAC Packs for deployment) across all managed instances.

 Following Dan was a demo by Amir Netz of Microsoft for Report Builder.  The interesting part of the demo was the database behind the reporting:  60,000,000 rows loaded into a 16Tb OLAP DB hosted on 20 node, 16 cores per, 336 cores total host.  Said demo’s second query?  Well that was to return 60,000,000 rows from the database utilizing all cores… in under 10 seconds.

 

Well, it’s time to rush off to the first technical sessions (even if the speakers fail to realize that.)  I’m posting (warts and all) so please understand the circumstances around any  structural, grammatical, and factual information!  Have a good week!!