It’s Wednesday morning and time for the opening keynote.

The bloggers tables are filling up as we get ready for what we hope is not another Tina Turner spectacular.

Journey playing over the speakers. Can’t beat a bit of 80’s rock.

8:15 – ok, we’re ready, can we start now?

8:22 – Lights going down, here we go

Videos of people talking up the Summit. I guess this is meaningful to those watching at home. The rest of us are here.

Rushabh Mehta on the stage. No Tina Turner!

Board meet and greet on Friday. Want to ask something of the board? Be there and you can. Might be a good opportunity.

Damn, 430K technical hours of training provided by PASS this year (SQL Sats, UGs, virtual chapters, Summit,Rally, 24HOP etc). That’s a lot of hours. 20,000 new members this year. It’s a community of over 80,000 people. That’s a hell of a lot of nerds. Yes, nerds, I said it.

For some reason Rushabh thinks it’s important people who aren’t at the Summit care about schedule changes. No idea why that is. On the up side he is pushing the DVDs (get them, whether you are here or not, it’s well worth it)

I’m sure that it has nothing to do with the streaming of the keynote, but WiFi is just jacked here again. Second day in a row. I guess the convention center is just not cut out to provide the kind of bandwidth that a huge bunch of nerds require.

Apparently it’s fun to meet the vendors. Well some of them are fun.

8:43 – Ted Kummert to the stage. Hope we get something good, not a long sales pitch.

Ted gets to sit around every day and imagine the future. Nice work if you can get it (he probably works really hard, that comment doesn’t make it sound that way).

Little dig at Oracle….nice

4,000 registred PASS attendees? Damn this thing got HUGE

300 Microsoft SQL MVPs? I challenge you to name them all.

Ted talking of consistency across the environment with SQL & Azure, manage it all with the same tools and keep things seamless.

Denali going to be one of the most significant releases of the product in history. Talking AlwaysOn, BISM, MDS, DQS, data marketplace, Crescent and of course the cloud.

Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud shut up about the damn cloud already.

SQL Denali now SQL 2012 and will release in H1 2012. This is what we’ve been waiting to hear about. Still no firm date though sadly. Wish they’d given something more, but at least we have a name now.

Funny, Ted’s slide deck looks like Mango.

Talking consistency across the tools pack.

Big data…what is it? I’m guessing giant fonts, but probably wrong. I’m waiting for the announcement of SQL Server NoSQL at this point.

Close, announcement of support for Hadoop to get it on Windows & Azure. Javascript framework for Hadoop, ODBC drivers for Apache Hive, Apache Hadoop based distribution for Windows & Azure. Seems to me that MS is a little concerned on the NoSQL stuff. Partnership with Hortonworks.

Microsoft Hadoop coming soon?

There’s lots of talk around Hadoop, Microsoft, community and I’ve fallen asleep.

Hadoop on Azure CTP by years end.

Denny Lee bringing the demos…

First slide showing an example from a web log. It shows Firefox as the browser. I guess MS testers don’t use IE either.

Oh joy, there’s the Hadoop connector.

Wait, when did this become a NoSQL blog?

Here’s how you quickly dig into data…show the results of the report that took an hour to run last night. Erm, what?

Ted back…

Now Tim, Nino talking “Data Explorer” in the Azure labs. AZURE PEOPLE! IT’S THE FUTURE GET OVER IT! Is the message I’m getting here.

Cool, Contoso have moved on from bikes and are now branching out to frozen yoghurt. But only in the cloud.

Interesting how everyone seems how folks on stage seems to be using Windows 8.

Oooh “traditional reference data” with air-quotes

3-way join between Azure, excel, marketplace data. That’s nice.

Kids love frozen yoghurt. No, kids love ice-cream.

Ted again…

I, am a lot of people around me have completely checked out of this keynote. All we are hearing is Azure and self-service BI.

Amir Netz to the stage. He’s great and knowledgeable. Let’s see if he brings something interesting.

Well there’s some nice graphs, quickly building information from live data. He presents well and has a lot of enthusiasm which it’s difficult not to get caught up in. He’s really doing his best to get the crowd back. Of course all the energy he builds up will be dissapated as soon as Ted starts up with Azure again.

Oh wait, Amir lost everyone by bringing up a windows phone. Damn, he was doing so well in repeating last years presentation.

Time to leave and head down to see Red Gate who I’ve heard have something cool and interesting to say.