Up early again, started my day at the Convention Center for breakfast. Light breakfast, drinking water, never seem to drink enough during the day. Ran into old friend David Koth on the way, did a lot of hand shaking on the way through the seating area to finding a table. Interesting experience, I know a few people from my many times here, yet I still know so few. Then off to the keynote, talking with Brian Moran, Douglas, Kevin Kline on the way up, running into Chuck Heintzelman up front, then checking in at the blogger table (Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey, Tony Davis, Brent Ozar, more), wishing I was back there instead of sitting up front – blogger envy I guess!

About 8am

Wayne Snyder was first up at the keynote, and had a great slide showing the registration numbers, overall attendance down about 9% from last year (our highest year so far), really good given how some conferences have fared this year. He said that 43% of attendees are here for the first time (which interestingly matches the percentage of first time attendees at the networking seminar yesterday). 75 chapters in 2007, now at 200 chapters. Interesting map showing where attendees are from world wide, just guessing at the numbers I’d say 500 or or attendees from outside the US. Great explanation that virtual chapters are focused based instead of regular chapters which are location based. Notes on the 24 hours of PASS; 3500 attendees, 50,000 registrations. Announced the relaunch of the SQL Server Standard as online only, first issue now available, paying $500 per article. Open session with the Board of Directors on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:15, come ask questions! Wayne also showed a liver Twitter feed showing #sqlpass, Steve Jones managed to get a tweet up mentioning that Wayne had mentioned SSC (I can just see everyone next year with a tweet ready to send if that comes up again!).

Next was Bob Muglia, President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. He was the program manager when MS announced the deal with Ashton Tate that launched SQL Server in 1988. Mentioned doing first demos for press showing SQL on OS2. MS was desktop focused at that point. Says that SQL Server can solve 99% of problems, but that there are some that SQL still doesn’t handle well (super huge db for example). Server rack on stage running IBM hardware, running 192 processors. Shows a workload on 64 processors, enabled 128 processors watch the CPU usage drop by about 50%, then they add more load back to 90%, changes to 192 processors, processor usage down to about 75%. Nice demo of the idea. Says adding a processor adds about 1.6 capacity. Talked about the growing capacity of machines, trend of virtualization, sees it growing in the database arena.

Demo: Edwin Yuen, Senior Product Manager, demonstrates live migration on HyperV on Win 2008 R2. Using Virtual Machine Manager shows machine running SQL, then starts a demo app that runs a workload. In VMM, right click, click on Migrate. It picks best available host. then moves the process while the workload was running – no change in the demo output, appears seamless and easy.

Note: photographer down front taking pictures, so if you seem one of me with my laptop on my lap, I’m writing this and not doing email!

Bob talked about cloud definition, and the idea that there are public and private clouds. Sees it as a natural progression for some things to move to the cloud (Azure is the MS public cloud). Becomes a decision about where best to host for a given problem. Challenge is to evolve our existing skill sets to solve problems using new options. Said thank you for the all the feedback they get about the product.

About 8:50 am

Introduced Ted Kummert. Talked about how exciting it was to speak at the PASS Summit each year, some of the things that were on the horizon last year, all due within 6-9 months. SQL 2008 R2 due in first half of 2010. Sees it as a significant release. MS rented out Gameworks on Wed night for conference attendees. Five years go they had platform vision; all tiers, all data, data lifecycle, progress made, time to involve – information instead of data, users more at the center of vision. Mentioned service pack uninstall supported, few vulnerabilities discovered within SQL. Announcing Fasttrack v2 with three new reference configurations. SQL will now scale to 256 logical processors on Win 2008 R2.

Priti Desai, VP of IT, First American Title. One of largest escrow/title in the US, 1200 offices. 10 terabytes data spanning 200 servers. 7000 concurrent users, 50k batches per second. Upgraded to SQL 2008, big features were partitioning and compression [fans spinning up on demo hardware – don’t know if that was in the plan!]. Had been using a third party backup, switching to use in the box backup. Results of upgrade; had one weekend to do upgrade, mentioned using SQLCAT as sounding board.

[On Twitter everyone trying to guess how much heat the server is throwing off to spins the fans into turbo mode]

Dan Jones, Principal Group Manager SQL Server Manageability. Demo hanging up on Step 1. Back on track! [Twitter abuzz with comments on the demo glitch!]Connecting to R2 instance, runs validation upfront, all green. Connected to control point, step 1 complete. Now to collect utilization data. Demo not exciting so far. Switched to one that has history accrued, nice dashboard – shows storage usage, under utilized instance, drills down, finds dbs not using much of spaced allocated (and could then reallocate). Can now generate a dacpac – unit of deployment from developer to DBA. System will generate alter scripts from package. Interesting, they did make it see easy compared to doing a compare and creating the scripts.

Back to Ted. Able to publish data feeds using reports as a source. More work on PHP and JDBC drivers.

Pablo Castro. Using Entity Framework with VS 2010, imported dacpac. Created a diagram (projection) of a couple key tables. Separating domain model from storage concerns is key point. [Down to 28 mins of power, wireless off now, trying to make it through – wish I was at the blogger table]. Definitely a dev person demo now, wondering how it plays to audience. Persistence Ignorance! Setting access to data in code with SetEntitySetAccessRule – that’s on top of SQL security I guess?  Thinking DBA’s are looking for coffee right now. Shows URL access to data. Shift to Sharepoint 2010, every list exposed for data access via URL.

About 9:45

Stream Insight is for high volume event streams, will be in R2, integrated with VS. Master data services, scale out data warehousing in R2.

Amir Netz(sp?). Master data, shows data issues – wait, problem not there! Connecting to scale out data warehouse, 20 notes with 16 processors, 336 processors. Using Powershell to load data, 60 million rows, splits out work automatically, showing about 2.1 TB/hour speed. 60 billion rows in 10 tb warehouse. Change to Report Builder v3 connecting as SA..wow. Doing a group by against 60 bil rows, splits across all processors, to return 7 rows – very fast. Of course, that’s serious hardware behind it! Building a report using existing report as source. RB definitely nicer than earlier releases, supports maps in reports.

Talking about Azure briefly. [Watching camera guy wander around – we should have a camera on the camera guy, and really low on power. Hoping I don’t have to switch to pen and paper!]

About 10:06

Wait, one more demo, missed the name. Azure demo. Running a standard group by on Azure, works ok. Shows option to sync to Azure from SQL db. Create an agent, definitely looks like replication, handles merge conflicts.  Not showing up on Azure. Web demo works based on data. Now trying to apply a dacpac to Azure. Changes connection string from earlier demo, seems to work.

New editions, Datacenter for up to 256 processors unlimited virtualization, and Parallel Data Warehouse. Expecting to continue deliver releases 24-36 months. Azure available as public CTP. Nothing on future releases yet. End of keynote.

I was headed for coffee when I ran into my friend Simon, so we had coffee (well, he had tea) and sat to chat for a while. Don Gabor came by and I introduced him, and just watched in a bit of awe as the master of small talk did his thing. Good way to start the day though.

From there I headed to the Birds of a Feather lunch, where about 50 MVP’s hosted talks over lunch about a variety of subjects. Mine was about how and why to participate in the SQL community and was thrilled to have 8 people join me (at a table that seats 10 mind you, we used one seat for bags) and had a really good discussion. Some points I'll share here:

• Giving back can be as simple and lightweight as just asking a question, answering a question, or commenting on a blog post
• Block out x minutes per week and dedicate them to this – maybe it’s writing 3 comments, doing one blog post
• Another way is to help your local chapter find speakers, or by bringing someone new to a meeting
• Think of community as a set of circles, with the innermost ring being those most visible, the outer ring those that don’t participate at all, and then start trying to take one step in at a time.

Next was a 2 hour session at the PASS area answering questions. Only had a few, more it was people I knew stopping by, chatting about Twitter, bingo, SQLSaturday, the open discussion with the Board tomorrow, and more. I’ll probably do another shift there later in the week.

Out of order: heard a lot of great comments about the networking seminar today, glad it was well received, and seems to be actually working. Had someone come over to meet me as a result of that, and he admitted it was still hard, but he was moving out of his comfort zone. Cool! Another said it was the first year at PASS without someone from work attending, but felt it was the most fun – the combination of being solo plus the head start from the seminar had her meeting a lot people and having a lot of fun.

I had a meeting after that, then finally caught up with Steve Jones for coffee, catching up a little, and then back to the hotel for an hour to finish writing this and catch up on email, then going back out for dinner.

Its almost 9pm eastern now, and I haven’t had dinner yet. Easy to forget/downplay how the time zone change causes pain. I’m always glad I attended, but I wish for east coast once in a while!