After Bob Muglia, Ted Kummert came on stage. He's the senior VP of the server tools division and works for Bob. He talked about how life has changed for him at PASS and then gave us his top 5 to be at PASS

• PASS Continues to thrive and grow - Largest gathering of SQL Server professionals.
• Take your questions to the source - I completely agree here. Lots of MS people come. Ted had the SQL Server product team stand up in their horse-present-brown shirts.
• We have Wayne and Rushabh - Images of last year with the PASS leadership coming on stage on a Harley and a Vespa.
• Work Hard and Play hard - Microsoft has rented GameWorks for Wed night.
• Building Skills and Knowledge on the #1 database - OK , it's sucking up, but it's listed as the fastest growing db platform and #1 in units.

Great adoption of SQL Server 2008 in the last year. I'd love to know more about numbers here.

"SQL Server is a great thing to be a part of" - Ted Kummert.

The Vision

Microsoft rolled out a vision of how to fit SQL Server into the Information Platform Vision. So moving beyond data, to now only store, but gain insight and also use the data. The vision also seeks to get users more at the center of what the product needs to do.

The four pillar strategy

• Mission Critical Platform - It has to work.
• Empower IT - We can't continue to spend 60% of IT dollars on just making the business run.
• Pervasive Insight
• Dynamic Development

Mission Critical Platform - Quality has to be there. By all measures, SQL Server 2008 is the highest quality release ever. An order of magnitude less fixes in SS2K8 SP1 than SS2K5 SP1. But more than code quality, is the engineering. Things like slipstreaming in SPs and SP uninstall.

SQL Server is also very secure, a great track record as far as security items.

Lastly, it's also scalable. Working with partners to deliver reference configurations and information to quickly and easily deploy large systems. Fast Track 2.0 announced today with IBM as a new partner. New scale up is now to 256 logical CPUs on Windows 2008 R2. Is logical under dual or quad cores? I wonder.

A customer reference is one stage. Priti Desai of First American Title Insurance comes on stage to show how one of her mission critical applications uses SQL Server. Their application, if down, can cost them US$1million / hour. That is critical!

They upgraded to SQL Server 2008. Why? Partitioning and data compression were items listed as reasons to upgrade. Lots of blah, blah, save money, run better, etc. The standard story. Not a great reference in my opinion. Twitter grabbed my interest after a couple minutes.

Empowered IT - Some concepts that came about from conversations with customers.

• single unit of deployment
• integrated policy
• Visibility and control of the environment
• resource optimization

Data Tier Application Component as a new way to deploy applications. Dan Jones came out to show a demo of a feature complete build of deployment. This is after an early release demo of this last year.

SSMS 2008 R2, on screen. A new "utility explorer" that allows us to create a control point. That's the instance that is like a central management for a "cloud" of servers. After a control point, you start to enroll other instances. These are instances that are managed through policy, as a group. You can set thresholds for what are under- or over-utilized server instances.

Data Tier Application for existing applications? The demo shows taking an "application" or existing database, and register it as a DTA. A wizard creates a model of the logins, users, etc. in the database and stores meta data about the application/database.

There's a change request for a table. Dan sticks a new column in the table and saves it. Then changes polices for the application, deploy only to X64, TCP enabled, etc. The multiple changes are then "built" into a solution. You can click "upgrade" and it generates the "ALTER" scripts for us. That is cool, if it's easy to track/save/store/VCS.

Demo complete, things went relatively smoothly.

Dynamic Development - Key tenets:

• common way to express entity relationships
• bring together producers and consumers of data
• interoperability of languages and platforms.

These are the ideas that will help leverage things with the SQL Server platform. The changes coming in .NET 4 are here to support this and we get another demo. This time VS 2010, latest build. It builds on the DAC pack from the last demo. It's imported into the product.

Based on domain driven design. This is getting out of my area, but he is showing the classes for entities that you've built. This can be good or bad, depending on how you design the application and database. You can turn off class generation in VS, which is probably a good thing.

Pablo builds classes by hand, but I'm losing interest. This is becoming a bit of a long keynote, especially with a lack of code and lots of talking about how/why changes were made.

VS demos on designing classes and deploying them is B-O-R-I-N-G

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

StreamInsight

A complex event processing engine. Acts on information in real time for large streams of data. It will release with SQL Server 2008 R2, and while I don't understand it, it looks cool. It will have a programming surface, a nice new term.

Some examples of how it's working. NFL, using Silverlight, allows you to click cameras and see different views. The Streaminsight piece grabs the click stream in real time to see what people look at.

Another example, processing sensor data from oil industry and make real time changes to something. About as general an example as you can give and not provide information that helps us understand what it is.

Pervasive Insight

One of those great terms. We want an answer to some question in the data. This is about shortening the loop for getting answers. MS is looking to efficiently manage the information and align the systems. Master Data Management is what they are working on here. Self-service BI and then share and collaborate, meaning more piss-poor Sharepoint, is their vision.

I think we have good ideas here, but I'm not sure the implementation from the MS perspective is a great one. The need to sell units seems to override the need to slow down and build better, more intuitive and effective solutions. And build more polished, properly documented products. I'm thinking about the issues with Sharepoint here, and maybe SP2010 will fix things that haven't been done well in SP 2007.

Amir Netz is on for a demo. This has been a long keynote, but I have always enjoyed hearing Amir speak. He's one of the few I've recommended as a must see, regardless of the topic. The demo is here in looking at managing data in terms of policies and if the data is being properly used.  Data quality and validation are shown.

A data warehouse monster: 20 processing nodes, each with 20 processing threads. Very cool. 60million rows added to 10TB data warehouse in seconds. 60Billion rows in total existing in there. If that's true, it's pretty cool. A report was built, and all nodes peak out, scanning the rows. A query aggregated 2billion rows in about 8 sec.

Showing off Report Builder 3.0, grabbing parts of other reports to assemble onto a new report. Also some geographical information components you can use. That's cool. Often wanted some map controls to mess around with.

The End is near: about time.

This was too long, and it lost a little focus near the end. Too much "trying to impress" the people. However a few interesting items given, new scale and features in SQL 2008 R2.

SQL Azure is feature complete, and is a complete RDBMS platform. That is interesting. They'll start billing for it in 1/1/2010. So test it now while it's free.

One more demo..noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It shows a decent SSMS like interface for SQL Azure tables and objects. That's good.  Shows some management and integration of local databases with cloud databases.

OK, I'm done.