My PASS Summit 2012 Experience - Day 2 Keynote (LiveBlog)

Thursday is Women In Technology day at the PASS Summit.  This year I was able to wear a kilt  to show support for the fairer gender. 

The keynote started off with an overall PASS status update. Emphasis was given to the community, and how you can do much in the community without huge financial resources at your disposal.

Tomas LaRock stepped up and announced some additional awards being added to the PASS lineup. Jen Stirrup was awarded the PASSion award, and she totally deserves it for her contributions to recognizing Women In Technology.

PASS Summit 2013 was mentioned. It will be held October 15-18 in Charlotte, NC. www.sqlpass.org/summit/2013/

Quentin Clarke (Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Database Systems Group) spoke on data analysis and how businesses can use that data to market their business. This poses new challenges and problems when trying to analyze that data in a more real-time manner. 

A large package shipping company was mentioned, and the analytics that they perform to generate additional revenue by analyzing the contents of their data warehouse. The data life-cycle was discussed and demoed. Effective use of the data requires analysis and collaboration between multiple departments/companies to take full advantage of the advantages that proper analysis can reap.

Analyzing data from a movie theater company's data warehouse was demoed (utilizing PowerView). There was a mixed response as most DBAs and straight up developers were not incredibly impressed or interested. Karen Lopez tweeted that big data might not be interesting, but it is inevitable and that we need to at least be aware of the technology and how to work with it. As a DBA, I'm likely not going to be using Excel very frequently. If the demos could cover more information as to how things work under-the-hood, a lot more interest would be garnished. I think that's why Dr. DeWitt was so insanely popular last year.

The ability to add Azure as an Availability Replica was an awesome feature that was shown off toward the end of the demo.  The demo ended on a high note as more functions and features were demoed.

I'm really looking forward to Dr. DeWitt's session tomorrow. What a brilliant man!