Wednesday morning. I’m at the blogger table waiting on the opening day keynote. LOTS of people here. Summit attendance is up quite a bit over last year. People still coming in. More touring the blogger table, just invited Dr DeWitt to attend SQLSaturday (I’m pretty sure we could make room on the schedule for him!). Kevin Kline to my left, Andy Leonard next to him.

Videos now, small quotes from speakers and attendees. Nice intro.

Rushabh doing the keynote. It’s being streamed as well. Mentioning the officers and the Board of Directors. We have a meet and greet with the Board on Friday (aka, the chance to grill the Board on what they have, haven’t, should, should not do!). Talking about trying to grow internationally.  Promising big changes for next year, kinda vague? Reminding attendees to use #sqlpass on Twitter and “sqlpass” on Flicker. 189 sessions this year, 204 speakers. Quick mention of the speed networking event we had last night for the first timers, reminder to network as part of the experience this week.

This part is dragging, feels like trying to mention everything. I get the reason,but it’s not the most entertaining experience. Of course I’ve heard it a few times,wonder what it’s like to a first timer – perhaps more valuable?

Now to the main act, Ted Kummert from Microsoft. Bragging some about launching their cloud ahead of Oracle. I suspect this audience still not sold on the cloud, not much response. Talking about hybrid, cloud plus local data center. Supposed to show a database consolidation appliance tomorrow, have to admit to being curious about that. Lots of database sprawl in most large businesses. Wondering how much he practiced, he’s a smooth presenter, not seeing him spend much time looking at the prompter.

Just announced that Denali will be SQL 2012. Can’t say the name is a surprise, 2008 R2 wouldn’t have sounded as good!

Microsoft has big data, talking about dog fooding some, sorta. Managed to blur big data definition into total murk. MS supporting a connector to Hadoop, going to “make magic happen” on the Windows/SQL platform.

Eric Baldeschwieler at Hortonworks up now. Wants to grow Hadoop ecosystem. No demo. Lots of talk about non-traditional data. Not sure it connects with this crowd…yet. We’re in the data business after all, not anti-Hadoop, just not pro-Hadoop either.

Denny Lee starting a demo on Hadoop. Mildly interesting, good applause I think more because of a demo than anything. Denny does a great job though, shows the enthusiasm.

Presenter says he looks like a barista – that’s a new one? Demo going to be finding next frozen yogurt location. Data explorer type tool, cross tab/drag & drop type thing. Probably incredibly complicated to build, not sure us DBA types get too enthused. This has gone off into total we don’t care. Bloggers tuning out, bad jokes on Twitter.

Amir Netz now up, a brand new Technical Fellow. Not a bad BI demo, but too much UI, not enough technology.

Tomorrow we get details on 2012.

press release says attendance is up 22% this year.