Day 1 has kicked off in Seattle, a remarkable city. Having arrived a week early, I’ve had plenty of time to check out the sights and the food and have enjoyed it immensely – a brilliant venue for PASS!
There were a few announcements at this morning’s Keynote, mostly regarding Azure. Azure SQL Databases are gaining larger index handling, parallel queries, extended events and in-memory columnstore for data marts. Joseph Sirosh gave a talk about Machine Learning & Information management showing a cool example of Azure Stream Analytics using Microsoft Kinect sensor information of customer interactions in a shop being uploaded straight into Power Map! I am looking forward to hearing more on Machine Learning.
There are also a handful of great improvements for Power BI. I am most looking forward to the new Live Ops Dashboards and drill-through actions! Combo Reports also look promising…
Moving onto the first session, I chose to attend ‘What’s new in Microsoft Power Query for Excel’. As it turns out there’s not a massive amount of new stuff – some new data sources and a tick box when you do a merge to remove name prefixes. However one of these new sources is the long-awaited Analysis Services data source. The new ODBC Data Source is a great addition also. There was a mention regarding the possibility of a decoupled M-query SSIS component! We probably won’t hear of anything until later in 2015, unfortunately. I would say this was not a level 300 session, more like 100/200.
The second session was ‘SQL Server 2014 Always On (High Availability and Disaster Recovery)’: a nice overview of what was brought in in 2012 and the newer 2014 features – these including an increased maximum number of secondary replicas, increased availability of readable secondary’s and the Add Azure Replica Wizard. Despite not being a DBA and it being a level 300 session, I found it easy to follow and absorbable. I feel many of the DBAs in the room may not have taken away any information they would have not already have known, however.
Niko Neugebauer gave a fantastic, in depth session on ‘ETL Patterns with Clustered Columnstore Indexes’. It was a fast moving talk, despite the time spent waiting for some executions. It demanded your full attention! Definitely worthy of its 400 level. It left me a little tired for Marco Russo’s ‘DAX Patterns’ session which showed some examples of workarounds for common tabular weaknesses like distinct counts for Type 2 slowly changing dimensions and cumulative quantities.
Overall it was a strong day. I am looking forward to tomorrow. More to follow…
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