It’s Day 3 at the live blog Friday’s keynote. 2011 PASS Summit and while I’m not sitting at the official blogger’s table, I’m one row in front since I get to live blog the keynote on Friday. I’ll update this post throughout today’s keynote, here we go…Rushabh Mehta up first!
Rushabh starts off talking about PASS goals and the amount of growth in the community. It is astonishing to see how many people are here, and on Twitter talking about today’s keynote. I’m also astounded by the breadth and depth of content that is provided via PASS throughout the year, not just at the Summit. If you are no a member of PASS and taking advantage of all the free training that is available throughout the year, I highly recommend you join today.
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2 was made available yesterday. Fifty-five MVPs contributed to the book, and there is book signing today and also one on Friday. The book can be purchased here at the Summit (level 4 by the escalators) and all earnings are donated to charity, the MVPs make no money from this awesome text.
Ted Kummert from Microsoft is up on stage talking about the reach of SQL Server. Nice joke about Oracle finally getting to the cloud (announced last week at Oracle Open World). SQL Server is the most widely adopted database application. Want some proof of that? The number of attendees at the Summit this year requires an overflow room. Holy cow.
Ted is talking about Denali and what’s coming. More work with the cloud, including BI. And Ted announced the official name of what we’ve been referring to as Denali: it’s SQL Server 2012, to be released in the first half of 2012. Kendra Little and I are betting on the official date of release…she’s going for June 1, just before midnight. I’m taking June 29, right around 12:12 PM.
The vision going forward has three parts and one of those is processing data any size, anywhere. This is a core part of strategy going back to 7.0. The platform is more than a RDBMS, it’s an integrated platform which is a continuous theme. It’s about having data anywhere –including delivery via the cloud. It’s also about choice – utilizing services from the Microsoft data center or your data center.
A common conversation right now is big data. What does big data mean? Large volumes? Processing unstructured data? Real time insight to data? People mean all of these, but of course there is no “one size fits all.” Microsoft brings 7.5 petabytes of data per month and runs 20,000 jobs against that data regularly. Who are the DBAs supporting those systems? Microsoft is going to be supporting Hadoop as part of production offering (makes sense that Dr. DeWitt is speaking about Hadoop on Friday).
[Side note: It is really hard to absorb everything and write about it coherently simultaneously…and deal with ridiculously slow connectivity. I’m doing my best, forgive inconsistencies!]
Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of hortonwork was just on stage with Ted. I missed a lot there 🙁
Next up: Denny Lee – Program Manager at Microsoft, here come some demos I hope! Denny is talking about unstructured data and Hadoop. I’m sitting next to Jeremiah Peschka, I think this stuff is right up his alley. Denny’s starting with PowerPivot for Excel via the new Hive ODBC driver. Denny’s having network issues. I feel his pain. But he’s got some magic connection and he’s downloading data into his Excel workbook. Joining the information downloaded from Hadoop with data from SQL Server. Oh, it shows up in a nice report with lots of pretty colors (good for management, ha!).
Denny has a query that takes an hour. He wisely decides to not run it now, because he can schedule it and actually ran it last night. Whew. This allows him to drill into that data right now.
Ted’s talking about data and I immediately think of Karen Lopez who wants us all to love your data. Not only is the data interesting, but what’s been done with it is interesting…transforming it, aggregating it. Is there an intuitive tool that helps with this? Data Explorer will go live in SQL Azure later this year.
Up now: Tim Mallalieu and Nino Bice from Microsoft talking about new functionality that will be available in the cloud. Big capability is discovering related data. Data Explorer will bring this data to you, rather than you having to look for it. You get to tell Microsoft what data has been classified and they will tell you about related data. Data Explorer also has the ability to access data from multiple locations. For example, Time and Nino demo’d a three-way join across Excel, Azure and a feed in the marketplace.
Ok, hilarity has ensued at the blogger’s table. Never a dull moment around here. I’m afraid Jes is going to fall off her chair she’s giggling so much.
Ted’s back on stage to talk a little more about Microsoft’s vision for SQL Server. He mentioned Crescent (code named Die Hard…which makes me think of Bruce Willis…then Saturday Night Live and the Chris Farley character who would interview movie stars and talk about how the cool things that person did…like the scene in Die Hard where Bruce Willis walks across glass. But I digress.).
Now up on stage is Amir Netz, who is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, which was just announced a few weeks ago. Technical Fellows are individuals who have been working on the product independent of Microsoft and make a significant impact with what they do. He’s talking about real data – movie data!! How awesome, real data and it’s movie data!
How much money was invested in the movie and how much did it make? He’s plotting the data to look at over time and two outliars appear immediately. Those movies? Animation movies which are ruling the industry these days. The second one? Comedies. None of the blockbusters are comedies. So they must be making a lot of comedies? Yes, which is why they make so much money. What are those comedies? Meet the Fockers (such an uncomfortable movie to watch!), The Hangover (“I didn’t know they gave away rings in the Holocaust.”), The Hangover 2 (really?). Ok, now he’s looking at movies over time, going back to the 70s. The number of films made each year has exploded over time.
Ok, I love love love that’s he’s using real movie data, but holy cow Amir talks fast.
In 1995 Toy Story was released and that changed everything. Man did Pixar hit it big there. How are sales changing over time? The graph now is Movie Seasonality. Lots of peaks that correspond to the month of July. Amir says that in the movie industry it’s Christmas in July…all the way until 2007. Hm, what happened after that? Oh wait, let’s look at July 2011 data…top movie was the final Harry Potter. Back to 2007…Transformers and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix were the two biggest money makers.
Moving on to Actor Analysis, which sums up the amount of money by Actor. This should be interesting. What do you expect? Who’s the top actor? Samuel L. Jackson is number 1. Get. Out. Tom Hanks is second…not a shocker, I still love Big. Third, Eddie Movie. Fourth is Harrison Ford (which character do you love more: Han Solo or Indiana Jones), fifth is Alan Rickman (Snape from Harry Potter…ad Amir didn’t know that).
Amir wants to know why Samuel L. Jackson is first? Is the number of movies? He’s made 83 movies…twice as many as others in the list. Who are the other actors with a lot of movies? Amir wants to know who makes more movies than Samuel L. Jackson…it’s only one person: John Wayne (by 2…Wayne is at 85, Jackson is at 83).
Now he wants to know why Eddie Murphy is so high on the list… Ah, he’s in Shrek. You don’t have to save Private Ryan, you don’t have to be in a galaxy far, far away, you just have to be a donkey. Altogether, this data tells a story. How I would love that data to use for demos. How awesome would that be?!
Ted says that exporting that data would be cool. I agree, can you send it to me Amir? Maybe? Amir just confirmed that as of last night they will be adding the ability to export to PowerPivot.
Amir has moved on a phone running Windows 7.5 and he’s digging into via the phone interface. Ah, now he’s got an iPad 2 to look at the data. Wait, now a Samsung tablet. Who has all these toys?
What did I miss? Amir is talking about an intimate experience with data. I don’t think I need that.
Oh, more movie analysis, this time by genre. The horror genre doesn’t make a lot of money compared to the others.
Ted wants us to get engaged. Download CTP3 of Denali if you haven’t already and provide feedback to Microsoft. And we’re done…
Ok, time to sign off and head off to the first session of the day, followed by lunch and then, for those of you here at the Summit this week, today is my first session! I’m presenting Who’s Responsible? The Vendor or the DBA? with Mike Walsh. We’re on at 1:30 right after lunch in Room 401 – we hope to see you there (and please come up and say hello if you attend!).
Finally, a huge bonus for today, Data Education published my interview with them! You can read it here; thank you Data Education!
