Facility9

10:06 SQL Server 2008 is going to increase productivity, once these new features are available we’ll be able to leverage additional tools both as data people and as consumers and users of data. Office and Excel are going to be huge in the future, combined with SharePoint and PerformancePoint. These new tools, the new vision is going to be amazing!

10:04 The users are able to serve themselves. This is very very important to the users. It’s very important to data folks. It makes our jobs easier by offloading the development time. This is all built on SQL Server 2008!

10:00 Analysis Services now has a section in the Share Point administration page, cool. Showing SharePoint as a way to view key IT decision points – query response times got bad, more memory was added, query response times got good. This is way cool. “Social network for data… it’s when data suddenly becomes significant.”

9:57 More Donald Farmer on stage.

9:56 Gemini is about end-user empowerment and making it visible and trackable. It’s managed self-service.

9:52 BI today – you can do embedded BI today. What’s in the future? More solutions building – adding more of these capabilities to the end users. Users will find a way to solve their own problems, so we need to be on board with how to help them and support them.

9:50 BI is becoming part of the standard interface. It’s the only way to help it grow to every user. Embedded reports again. Embedded KPIs. With the same tools, it’s a lot easier to move from OLTP to BI. We’re putting BI into the context of the applications we all use today. Context is king. Give data context and meaning and it suddenly becomes information

9:45 BI is very very important for the future of SQL Server. Bigger deployments, bigger volumes of data, better UX. Reports are being embedded inside of mainstream applications, you can even include a Report Builder in your apps!

9:42 Overall there are a lot of great features available in Report Builder 2.0. Looks like it’s a lot more powerful that it’s ever been, there’s a lot of potential.

9:40 Okay, these new features are very, very cool to the business people, however I’m not sure that the SQL Server nerd brigade really wants to see how their boss’s boss’s boss can build reports that help them downsize the DBA team.

9:37 In under two minutes, we have a slick report with a nice theme, formatting, a data source, and now we’re running it! TA DA!

9:35 Report Builder 2.0 can be downloaded right now. Go get it! Go! Go! Go!
New UI in Report Builder – it looks like Office. Very smooth integration. Report Builder has many more powerful features available – users can write MDX or use those smelly old reporting cubes.

9:33 Carolyn Chau is taking the stage – Lead Program Manager for Report Services.

9:31 Managed self-service building – give the users more power with Report Builder 2.0

9:30 “SQL Server is a data platform that works in a heterogeneous environment.” Ain’t that the truth! New data providers have been brought out for Oracle, TeraData, others.

9:27 Tom is talking about scaling in SQL Server – out and up! There was a big focus in SQL Server 2008, too, on bringing together the end-to-end experience – moving data into SQL Server through SSIS, OLTP, SSAS.

9:25 Tom is back on stage talking about moving away from BI as a specialty and moving towards building collaboration that turns data into information and helps people analyze their data in Excel. It brings BI to the primary data consumers, really.

9:20 Excel, as a front end to PerformancePoint data, can be used to adjust forecasts. Changes in the Excel spreadsheet happen in real time with PerformancePoint and then it’s possible to post an announcement to your team with SharePoint’s built in collaboration tools.

9:17 Back to the dashboard – task driven work instead of app drive work. Showing off the chat integration in SharePoint. Also showing off some of the custom searching you can do in SharePoint based on data stored in SQL Server.

9:14 Demonstrating scorecards, plan vs actual performance using SharePoint as the interface, office docs and Outlook tasks as the home page. There are some great tooltips popping up giving additional metadata. Live Maps integration showing running oil rigs with weather overlays, additional contextual information for each of the oil rigs when you hover.

9:12 Bruno Aziza, Business Architect in Enterprise Marketing, is up on stage to demonstrate a real-life example of how pervasive BI can be used with SharePoint, PerformancePoint, and SQL Server.

9:10 Microsoft’s goal is to bring value to all users in an organization, not just specialists. The user experience should be familiar, not confined to special tools. It shouldn’t be a quantum leap to go from being an OLTP person to a BI person (I agree with this! It’s been very tough for me to get my head around what they’re going on that side of the house).

9:07 BI is definitely a huge part of what Microsoft is doing – Pervasive BI is the theme of the keynote. How can we catalyze BI adoption in our organizations?

9:05 Tom Casey – GM for Microsoft Business Intelligence at Microsoft is giving the keynote.

9:02 All of the volunteers and bloggers have been recognized for the help they give to the community. PASSion Award for being an amazing volunteer: Kathi Kellenberger.

9:00 Hosted Trial Program of SQL Server 2008

8:57 PASSPort is going live today. This is a social component of the sqlpass.org website that allows PASS members to participate, learn, and be recognized within the community. We’re getting a demo now.

Create a profile by Dec 31, 2008 and you might just win a red Dell XPS laptop!

8:53 Technology Update – sqlpass.org has left beta. Thanks to MaximumASP and Dell for hosting and hardware. Key feature updates:

• Technical Articles
• PASS Tips
• PASS Blog
• Over 300 hours of recorded content
• Community Events Calendar – user groups, etc – will be coming soon
• Chapter website integration

I’ll be providing content for the AppDev SIG once the conference is done.

8:50 PASS Financials – PASS is committed to openness and transparency in both the financials and board minutes. The conference is responsible for 86% of the organization. Come to the Summit, help support PASS!

8:49 SQL Server Heroes Unite event from 6-9 PM in the main hall.

8:47 Overview of today’s events: Women in Technology Luncheon (don’t have to be a woman to attend). PASS Summit Expo Hall open from 11 to 5. VOTE IN THE ELECTION BY 3PM TODAY!

8:45 Nice plug for idera and their vespa

8:42 More Steppenwolf this morning. Rushabh Mehta is up on stage on a Vespa right now. There’s some great self-mockery of his “well-shampooed” hair going on.

I, like Brent Ozar and a few others, am liveblogging the keynote. Keep refreshing this page for more details on the keynote.

Music’s started – Born to be Wild. PASS president (Wayne Snider) is sitting on Harley welcoming all of the SQL Server Heroes to the largest conference in the world for SQL Server (the most popular database in the world).

Encouraging us to be inspired by peer based knowledge and learning, networking.

Wayne is talking about the quality of the community and how we’re all a great source of information because we all encounter the same problems. We definitely aren’t the “zombie” conference that people have commented on attending in the past in other places.

Microsoft is listening to us – we have a voice to influence the direction of SQL Server. There are over 500 Microsoft employees here this week (WOW!)

There are certifications available here all week – sponsored at 25% off. Wish I could get that taken care of this week, but my schedule is already full.

PASS is the community. It’s run by volunteer. The speakers are chosen by volunteers, the board of directors are volunteers. There is no distinction between PASS and the community.

Slide on the 2008 PASS Accomplishments is up:

• New website at sqlpass.org is up. Over 300 hours of content is available online! (Webcasts, white papers, many other resources)
• Increased the number of chapters to 136, this year’s goal was 120!
• PASS membership has increased by 70% – it’s now free to join PASS! (JOIN PASS)
• Closer relationship with Microsoft – access to more experts, tools, information for PASS members. More access to more experts! The SQLCAT team is here, too. These are the best practices people that solve the hard problems. Located in room 6E

Introducing the PASS Board of Directors (I met Bill Graziano this morning, apparently he’s been reading this blog over the week).

Voting! Vote for the PASS Board of Directors if you’re a chapter leader or at the conference. Check your email for the ballot (I didn’t get one for some reason).

Introducing the current board and candidates.

60% growth in registrations 2445, up from 1528.

Hands on labs are available near the first aid.

Evening receptions every night because PASS members are party machines! (Two free drink tickets were included with my registration. Hooray for free soft drinks.)

There’s a Women in Technology luncheon. This started at PASS about 6 years ago.

Don’t forget to go by the exhibit hall! They support the conference, so let’s go give them some support and money if you really find something you can’t live without.

Thanks to the sponsors: Microsoft, Dell, VMWare, hp, idera, and NEC.

Don’t forget that we’re the community, introduce yourself to everyone around you. Vote for board members.

Next up: Ted Kummert, Corporate VP Data and Storage Platform Division of Microsoft. He’s been with Microsoft since 1989 (before Microsoft he worked for hp and Apple). He’s the big guy in the SQL Server totem pole.

Video highlights of PASS in the past while we wait for Ted Kummert on stage. Great things are being said about PASS and SQL Server 2008.

SQLCAT people will be wearing “ugly green shirts”.

Ted Kummert is talking about the historical presence of Microsoft at PASS, very excited to be here having shipped SQL 2008 in August.

This is the largest PASS Summit ever. Over 32,000 members and 136 chapters.

Microsoft sees PASS as a great community to help everyone be successful and to help Microsoft build a better product for the users.

Introducing the SQL Server team – they’re all wearing the same shirts, we’ll be able to smell them by Friday. They want to hear about our business challenges, where SQL Server should go next. (I already got some good input from one of them this morning – JC Cannon, I think).

We’re going to talk about where we are right now and where things are going.

Kilimanjaro to ship in first half of 2010.

Big emphasis on BI and manageability. How to manage at high levels of scale and ease management over the full life cycle.

Sweet demos are coming up as well.

The mission it to build a platform for ALL types of data – structured, unstructured, semi-structured, birth to archive, mobile to desktop to server to datacenter to cloud.

Talking about the pillars of SQL Server – Enterprise Data Platform, Beyond Relational, Dynamic Development (developer productivity and richer solution), and Pervasive Insight.

A few of his favorites:

• Policy Based Management – great for TCO and compliance.
• Transparent data encryption
• New spatial data types – geometry and geography can be stored in the database
• FILESTREAM
• Entity Data Model – dealing with data at a conceptual level in code – this is what ORMs are for
• Scaling storage with data compression
• Improvements to the whole platform for performance and concurrency.

Introducing Ayad Shommout from CareGroup Healthcare Systems to talk about his experience with SQL Server 2008.

They’ve been using SQL Server 2008 for a while – using hundreds of production databases, over half of them are mission critical. They went live in December of 2007 with SQL Server 2008. They’ve increased performance by 25% without changing any code, very stable even from the early version. Using policy based management, resource governor… most of the new features, in fact! Auditing has been really helpful with HIPAA compliance so they can collect all activity on the server down to the record level changes.

Over 40 applications at Microsoft are now using SQL Server 2008. There is a DW at MS with over 37 TB running on SQL Server 2008! Two SSAS cubes for Live Search at 1.4 and 1.8 TB each – probably the largest SSAS cubes in the world.

The most popular database in the world AND the fastest growing.

Fewest vulnerabilities of any enterprise DB.

In the leader’s quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrants for DW and BI.

Talking now about where we’re going in the future. 80% of expenses are spent on keeping things going. We need a more agile and adaptable infrastructure to be able to respond to changes in the future and move away from app and workload specific silos. The capabilities need to be used more broadly, less silos.

What does it mean to deliver the data platform as a utility?

Moving towards model driven development, but there needs to be more collaboration across the full application development lifecycle. SQL Server will scale up to 256 cores in teh future.

Project “Madison” – using DATAllegro. Provides a massive scale with low TCO. Integrating it with Microsoft BI. Accelerating their plans to support huge data warehouses. Will release in 1H 2010. This will enable SQL Server to scale up to hundreds of terabytes on industry standard hardware. Fully integrated end-to-end with the SQL Server products.

Bringing Jesse Fountain on stage to talk about some of the changes. He’s the principal group program manager in the data and storage division.

DATAllegro has been ported off of specialized Linux and is now running on Windows Server and SQL Server and NTFS. There will be reference architectures with their technology partners – EMC CX3/CX4, using Dell 2950s as compute nodes (works with hp too), Dell 2950 servers as the control node.

In two weeks, generated over 1 trillion rows of data for the database (1.013 trillion rows). 150+ terabytes of data. Load speeds will be published soon. The data was distributed across the compute nodes (both fact and dimensional tables were replicated). This allows for rapid computation and joins between fact and dimension tables.

Showing an example of the system running – 192 total cores for the system. Showing the code that’s going on behind the scenes. Running the query. The cores are going crazy across the board as data is being pulled. The balance across the machines is crazy – everything pushed to the max while the data was pulled. The magic is that the data is broken up across bulk commodity hardware to make queries happen quickly and cheaply. 30 seconds to look into huge volumes of data. Lateral scaling of data.

Very impressive!

Multi-server management tools allow DBAs to handle hundreds of servers at once. How to get the most out of infrastructure and use them effectively? SQL Server Kilimanjaro will deliver these tools to SSMS. A complete application model for SQL Server and a manifest that describes what will be needed to get this to run effectively will come along, too.

Dan Jones from Microsoft is on the stage now to talk about application and multi-server management.

PBM and the data collector in 2008 were just the beginning. Management at scale is the big problem.

The SQL Server Fabric will change this – collects config and utilization data to give a bird’s eye view to the DBA to help manage at scale.

Data Tier Application Component – complete application model for the data tier. Improves the collaboration between the data tier developer and the DBA for development, deployment, and management.

Demoing the Fabric Explorer. Holy cow! That’s a sweet dashboard. Policies can be defined to show what’s over and under utilized. Drill down is available to each instance in the fabric. Again, policy can be defined to determine the health state of each instance as well as a snapshot AND trends.

Now looking at the Data Tier Application Component (DAC). The build system is used to create a DAC Pack. Can extract a data tier application from an existing database! Showing the clickypop wizard. It computes objects and dependencies both inside and out of the database. The DAC Packs can be deployed by the DBA. The import process will check to make sure everything is valid and that the developers didn’t screw things up. All versions of deployed DAC apps can be seen in the dashboard with the existing version. The deployment tool will make recommendations on which instance to deploy the application – no more underpowered database (unless you’re broke)! Standard tools can be used to migrate data into the application. Fabric will show the utilization for the newly deploy DAC Pack.

The foundation of this will be available in SQL Server Kilimanjaro. I can’t wait for 2010!

Talking about SQL Data Services now. The first public CTP of SQL Data Services is available – sign up now!

How will SQL Server enable pervasive business insight? Moving towards managed self-service for BI – let more people produce, consume, and collaborate on BI solutions.

Now it’s fairy tale time… IT fairy tale. This is all about how people build their own solutions with Excel. The audience is cracking up. The moral is that IT can’t (and shouldn’t) meet all of the users’ demands – users will help themselves – but they need IT to provide solutions and technology to help them. They want familiar tools to get things done.

Managed self service builds on Excel – enabling self-services for end users but in a carefully managed environment.

• Self service analysis (Gemini)
• self service reporting
• sharing, collaboration, and management

Integrating this whole environment into SharePoint – its BI hosted in SharePoint. That’s one less tool to learn and support, by the way.

Report Builder has been vastly improved in 2008, Kilimanjaro takes this even further. It’s a componentized module for building reports: grab and go to assemble rich and correct reports without having to learn.

Donald Farmer is coming on stage to show this off… wearing fairy wings.

We’re importing data from a data source into Excel for an imaginary movie store. There are 10,000,000 rows in the Excel environment. This is actually running on a laptop in the back room! The filtering and sorting are actually instant. This is very impressive, very interactive, the users will go nuts for it! Copy and paste from Excel into the BI data in Excel and PIVOT on it on the fly.

There’s a new “slicers” feature of Excel that allows easy visual filtering by multiple columns, easy interactivity, exceptionally visual. There are pretty themes that you can use to publish it out to SharePoint. Huge volumes of data can be mashed together, published to SharePoint, and then everyone else can view the results. Social networking for reports! Hot.

SQL Server 2005 is still being supported, by the way.

Innovation will still be delivered 24-36 months after the release of SQL Server 2008.

Moving the platform into the cloud to expose more of the data platform.

Everyone, you are all ordered to enjoy the PASS Summit. That’s a direct order from Microsoft!

This afternoon I sat in a chapter leader break out session. I didn’t get to stay for all of it because of PASS ambassador training, however there was a lot that I took away from it.

First off were some great tools to use for getting the news out for chapter leaders:

The first is eNews Generator for the creation of bulk emails to chapter members. It also lets you include content from other news sites by either typing in the article code from a magazine or else searching through the content they have available online.

The next one was an add-in for Outlook called Send Personally. Basically, it lets you send out emails to a list of people, however it will generate a single email for each recipient, rather than mailing to a BCC’d bulk list. This lessens your chances of being flagged as spam. There’s a 20 day trial that lets you email up to 100 people, but otherwise it costs money.

There was a lot of great discussion specific to chapter leaders, so I’ll leave that out, but needless to say it was a great experience and I’m looking forward to continue to meeting as many people as I can.

If you read this in time, I’m going to be a contestant in the SQL Server Quiz Bowl at 6:00 PM in the convention center.

Update

Brent Ozar has posted his review to today’s festivities.

He also has a link to Andy Leonard’s review of the day as well.

Evening Update

I went to this evening’s welcome reception where I participated in the SQL Server Quiz Bowl. I came in second place in a pretty solid competition. Sadly, I know next to nothing about SQL Server Replication (time to learn), so the second round of questions stumped me completely. But, it was a total blast.

I also stopped by the Application Development SIG booth and signed up to volunteer. My plan is to begin helping out however I can and develop content through both written articles and web casts.

PASS is such a great organization and I’m looking forward to contributing over the years to come!

If I’ve missed anything, my apologies, I’m writing this as fast as people are talking.

Chapter News

Greg Low

• DVDs of past conferences
• Four physical mailings a year of PASS related news
• Part of a huge group of professionals:
  
  62 US chapters, 70+ chapters outside of the US

Program

Lynda Rab

• Speaker and abstract management system
• Program to develop new speakers for PASS
• Upcoming speaker resource site in Q1 2009

Volunteer Program

Pat Wright

• Monthly volunteer newsletter
• Volunteer org chart has been put together
• Upcoming task lists to help people contribute to PASS
• Quarterly/annual report coming from board of directors
• Increase in contact with new volunteers

Special Projects

Rick Heiges

• Started a virtual road show in January for SQL 2008
• SecondLife virtual user group
• PASS Tips
  Initially designed to help attendees choose content at the Summit.
  Moving forward, tips from PASS members on various SQL Server related topics that help us get our work done.
  A Live Meeting account will be made available to help people share tips.

Online Content

Chuck Heinzelman

• SQL Server Standard Magazine was acquired 1 year ago.
  Print publication discontinued in June (in part due to increased costs).
• Transitioning to an online content tool.
  This gives quicker turn around, better resource usage, less overall cost.
  Quality will be guaranteed by copy and technical editors.
• There have been problems getting content in place in the past.
• New content model will be rolled out as quickly as the technology can be put in place.
• The SIGs will be involved in generating and checking content.
• Old content will be added, some has already been staged for release.

Marketing

Bill Graziano

• There will be a marketing committee made up of volunteers.
  This is new for this upcoming year.
• Microsoft marketing has made a large investment in PASS.
  Prominent advertising on the Microsoft website, in publications, etc
• A public relations firm has been hired to help align public announcements.
• Updated graphics and logos were created to give a cohesive brand and marketing to PASS
• A repeatable strategic marketing & communications plan has been put together for both the conference and the other parts of PASS (yes, there are other parts of PASS)

Technology

Rushabh Mehta

• The goals of the new web site
  • not to replace existing content on other sites
  • Provide a hub to search for content and contributions from the community.
• Twitter feed
• RSS feeds will be available, will include tweets tagged with #sqlpass
• Upcoming community portion of PASS website to make networking easier.
  Goes live Thursday morning.
• PASS website leaves beta on Thursday morning.
• Events registration and notification (chapter meetings!) will be revamped on PASS site and will allow searching by geography, online/offline events, technologies, languages, etc. Coming in the next two weeks.
• Membership management will be integrated into the PASS website.
• Integration modules for DotNetNuke are ready.

Other news

Tim Ford has also blogged about today’s happenings.

Amazing Presentation by Itzik Ben-Gan

I registered for the Advanced T-SQL Querying & Programming in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 & 2008 at the last minute this morning and I was a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get in. Turns out that I had every reason to worry – the presentation room was packed, and with good reason.

Itzik is an amazing presenter. He’s obviously passionate about his job and passionate about writing T-SQL and that comes across in his presentation style – very engaging, very animated, and exceptionally capable of answering any questions that the audience threw at him. I plan on ordering his newest book later this week. He has two more Inside SQL Server 2008 books coming out in 2009 and I cannot recommend them enough to T-SQL developers out there. The new editions promise to have additional chapters giving a solid foundation in relational algebra and set mathematics which can only improve the skills of any database developer or DBA.

After the first question, Itzik remarked ‘There are two types of questions: good questions and excellent questions. A good question is a question that I can answer, an excellent question is answered in another slide in my presentation.’ This set the tone for the presentation, almost every question he was able to answer on his feet and provide amazing, in-depth responses about not just the how but also the why of the problem at hand.

I was able to take something away from every portion of the talk. In some cases, it was confirmation that I’ve been doing the right thing, but I came away knowing the underlying principles of why I should be doing what I’m doing. All-in-all, coming to Seattle was worth it for this session alone.

Data Geeks in Seattle

Today brought some added bonuses, as well. I finally got to meet and chat with Brent Ozar, TJay Belt, Tim Ford (sqlagentman), Tom LaRock (SQLBatman), Louis Davidson (drsql), Blythe Morrow (from PASS, she’s been amazingly helpful getting the Columbus chapter started), and so many other fine people that my head is reeling and I’m glad that we all wear badges at the conference.

Tuesday’s Agenda

Tuesday brings volunteer training where I learn how to keep TJay out of my hallway (we’re both volunteering as ambassadors at the same time) as well as learn more about how I can help out PASS beyond starting a chapter and keeping it alive in Columbus. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to volunteer with PASS as a whole and involve myself in this great organization.

In addition, I’ve volunteered to be a victim in the Quiz Bowl – Tim Ford and Louis Davidson volunteered me while we were waiting for the volunteer bowling event to start, and I happily agreed to embarrass myself in front of my fellow nerds.

If you want to know more, check out Rob Boek’s Google Calendar for PASS for more goings on as they arise. Also, keep an eye on Brent Ozar’s blog for more info, especially since he’s going to very different sessions than I am.

Update: Additional recaps

Both Brent Ozar and Buck Woody have posted recaps of the first day of the conference.