8:17 – Bill Graziano hits the stage wearing a kilt. Good start. Shout out to the kilted. Nice start injecting some humor. Bill’s parents watching the keynote from home. Nice.

Celebrating volunteers. You can’t run this Summit in fact PASS doesn’t run without volunteers.

Outstanding volunteers Tim Radney, Jack Corbett.

PASSion award winner Lori Edwards. So well deserved. She put this thing together from a selection and speaker perspective. She really has worked so hard. I was on the speaker selection committee and know the work that she had to put in to make things a little easier for us. Always in contact, always available. Aren’t enough good words to say.

8:27 – Quinten Clark to the stage

Videos of people talking up SQL 2012. It’s nice, but why are you trying to sell this product to us? We’re here. Show us things.

Metro PowerPoint slides. I actually like these, they are nice and clear with a certain smoothness.

Tag cloud slides, biggest thing that stands out? ODBC driver for Linux.

Integration Services as a Server, HA for StreamInsight, AlwaysOn – all this for “required 9’s & protection” (of course this could be one 9, there’s nothing behind that message)

Bob Erickson brought up to talk how his company does mission critical. Lots of talk of how his business has to have high availability.

OK, how they use AlwaysOn, this is about to get real.
Demoing using the wizard to setup an AlwaysOn group. I’m down with this. Technical bits in keynotes to demonstrate the new tech that you want us to buy is smart.

There’s going to be a SCOM pack to monitor this (shame that SCOM still can’t monitor mount points out of the box, but baby steps)

Nice demo, even a little zoomit so that we could see what was going on.

Quinten back

ColumnStore indexes are going to be big.

Self service BI – Power View + PowerPivot (not sure why there’s a space in Power View, can’t we get some consistency), admin from SharePoint.

Data consistency – BI Semantic Model (BISM), Data Quality Services (DQS), Master Data Services (MDS). Lots of new acronyms to learn.

Lara Rubbelke up with a sense of humor and an awareness of the crowd

Users love SharePoint. Slow running query on stage and data quality issues. Demo of creating a columnstore index and showing the perf difference. NOT USING THE GUI!!!
That’s what a presentation should be at a keynote like this.

Back to Quinten

Expanded auditing for compliance and user defined server roles (very glad to see this one)

Peace of mind – distributed replay so that you can test load from multiple machines, nice.

Fast time to solution – SQL appliances (pre-tuned & optimized), HW + SW+ Support (just plug it in) and a choice of hardware.

Talking hardware – Parallel Data Warehouse, Business Decision, Enterprise Data Warehouse, Business Data Warehouse appliances. I’m not seeing any OLTP appliances.
Ah, the consolidation appliance willl take care of that. Nice nerd hardware talk. Good stuff.

The future of PDW includes changing the optimizer. That could be fascinating. Wonder if there will be any talk of that tomorrow.

ODBC drivers for linux coming out today, CDC for SSIS & Oracle. Nice move for getting to people who might want to switch.

Michael Rhys on statistica semantic search. There’s slide or something on screen. It’s so small we can’t see. Semantic search recommends the Odessy after reading the Iliad. That’s semantic search for you kids. Actually wound up being a good demo after zoomit was used.

Scale on demand – IT’S THE CLOUD with Nicholas Dritsas. There’s atually some good information coming out of ths. however I’m not a cloud guy, so there’s not much Im going to say about it.

Elastic scale with Azure – Chihan Biyikoglu – federation. Sharding for Azure. This could be significant for some companies. I think it’s a niche thing, but could be key for some customers.

Databases up to 150GB in size by years end. That might make the cloud more interesting for some companies. Metro UI for Azure. MS is certainly all in on that one.

We get booklets as we leave and CTP on DVD.

Overall much better than yesterday with Lara being the real stand-out.