SQL PASS Summit 2014 – Day 1

Having spent several days enjoying Seattle and getting to know and enjoy the city the conference is now underway. Yesterday there were some introductory meetings where we got to meet some of the other attendees and get a feel for the environment, today everything was in full swing.

The morning started with the opening keynote presented to a huge audience. There were demonstrations of some really exciting new features – in one we observed Kinect being used with Power Map in order to track customer movements to observe customer interest in different parts of the store. We saw some great looking Power BI dashboarding functionality with the ability to drillthrough into detailed reports.

As well as this we saw some further enhancements SQL Server Azure and on-premise integration including a new stretch functionality which will allow users to seamlessly ‘stretch’ their data into the cloud, keeping the most frequently queried records on premise and the other ones in the cloud. We also saw a Columnstore index being created on an in memory table!

Miguel Lopes gave a talk on the new features in Power Query where we saw the ability to query using ODBC and support for Analysis services connections, on the whole though whilst I think the ODBC will be particularly useful for some situations, much of this talk was giving an overview of Power query as a whole rather than demonstrating new functionality. The integration of SSIS and power query in future was mentioned, however no dates have been set for this and we are told that this may (or may not) be available at some point in 2015.

Jen Stirrup gave an interesting overview of some of the features available in R, the session was so popular that many people had to sit round the front on the floor! Niko Neugebauer’s contagious enthusiasm when presenting his session on ETL Patterns with Clustered Columnstore indexes was great to see and I picked up a few tricks here that were quite handy when working in 2014 environments. I also very much enjoyed John Welch’s session in Continuous Delivery for Data Warehouses and Marts, this is something I myself have been involved with a lot recently and it was very interesting to see his methods of achieving this and also to discover that in many cases we were both doing things in the same way 🙂

Overall the day has been very interesting, we have seen some exciting new features announced today and some significant enhancements to the Power BI product range, it seemed to me for some time that the lack of dashboarding functionality in Power View was holding it back and I think many people will be very pleased with this new functionality and the further enhancements to the Azure service.