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