SQL PASS Conference - Day 1: Highlights–CRESCENT, “Atlanta”, COLUMNSTORE in relational engine

· CRESCENT is BIG thing!!   Great product, amazing demo, awesome!

· Code Name “Atlanta” (www.microsoftatlanta.com) is another cool Cloud based services that is in beta 1 right now. It’s “Pro-active Assessment Services” – covering most of BPA

· COLUMNSTORE (Vertipaq Technology) similar to what we have in PowerPivot that powers multi-billion rows data sorted and filtered in sub-seconds – is now going to be in Relational Database in DENALI. In a demo querying multi-billion rows table with regular query vs. COLUMNSTORE index based query – highly optimized regular query ran for 40 seconds while other query finished in 4 milliseconds. It’s amazing how superfast it was.

This is the biggest PASS ever. Here are some the highlights that I captured from day 1.

Key Note by Ted Kummert was great. Very good speech he gave with fantastic Demos. Some notes from his Key Note:

PDW is now RTM

1. Capable of loading 450 gb to 1.5 TB data in hr

2. SSIS plug-in for PDW for loading massive amount of data which also offers UPSERT through GUI

3. Query numbers – able to query 800 Billion rows of data in 19 secs

4. PDW - Admin console - Real-time web based interface

5. PowerPivot now has PDW as a Data source

Cloud

1. CTP’s schedule

a. Web Admin – available in current CTP – Code name “Houston”

b. Reporting - CTP by end of this year

c. Data Sync – CTP2 of this feature is available

2. Windows Azure - Marketplace, Data Market - this is very awesome concept. There was a great response from community on this feature.

3. Adam Wilson - Program Manager gave a great demo using ODATA data source adapter consuming URL based Marketplace data consumed in SQL Azure based Report

Denali

1. 1st CTP available Now - minus new BI capabilities - Crescent

2. Three main focus

a. Mission Critical Applications

b. IT Productivity & Developers - Faster and Easier Development

c. Expanded BI Reach

3. Data Quality Service

4. Crescent - new web based reporting tool

5. COLUMSTORE index based on VertiPaq technology on relational engine similar to PowerPivot and future Analysis Service's capabilities

ATLANTA ( www.microsoftatlanta.com):

· Configuration Assessment Cloud Service

· Beta 1 release is available today, V1 targeted for 2011

· A Microsoft engineer "checklist"

· Store configuration history in Cloud with CSS for pro-active and quick support

· Three key objective

o Proactively avoid configuration problem

o Reduce downtime and improve performance

o Resolve issues faster

· No need to RAS into server or vpn - its available over the internet through cloud service – IT Productivity

· Once a day periodic update of configuration data to Atlanta

· Agent sends data to Gateway

· Daily upload includes Alerts and Configuration information

· Periodic Download to customer - Updated rules and new configuration points

· Agents are Windows Services based agent similar to SCOM agent.

· If SCOM agent is on the server it installs multi-home collector - that sends data to gateway

· Life span of the data on local server - Files are kept for five days

· Life span of data in the cloud - don't know.

· It's not real-time monitoring solution

· It leverages SCOM 2007 R2 agent and mgmt pack tech.

· It doesn't require SCOM, but can work side-by-side with SCOM via multi-homing..

· Data collection details --very small footprint

o Agent cpu < 1%, occasional spikes

o Agent memory < 75 MB

o Gateway upload - ~75 KB/server/day

· Server Mgmt data only

o Diagnostic data (config settings, error logs)

o Utilization (cpu, io, available memory, etc.)

o Workload throughput (transactions/day, gb served/day)

o No customer data or custom workload data

· Atlanta only has visibility into servers with agents deployed on them

· Upload time is configurable; you can stop uploading at any time

o Close account

o Delete registry key

o Disable upload

· No other non-Microsoft party will have access to your data

· MS will not use this data for Sales/Licensing validation