An awesome start to the PASS Summit!

The Keynote from Microsoft Team was something which I was looking forward to with an expectation to learn more about Microsoft investment in SQL Server, the latest innovations and see the latest & greatest feature set in SQL Server 2017. There were some nice takeaways for me from this session and I have noted them down in this blog post. If you want to listen to the Keynote, I think it is also available in PASS TV.

PASS President Adam Jorgensen started the keynote talking about the amazing PASS Summit, details around it and the contributions from the SQL Family.

Rohan Kumar kicked started the Microsoft keynote talking about Data + AI + Cloud – the 3 disruptive technology trends coming together and making customer experience better.
Just within 16 months, SQL Server 2016 and 2017 was released – showing Microsoft continuous investment on SQL Server.
Its cross platform and you can host SQL Server 2017 on Linux, Docker and Windows Server now.

Bob Ward showed how SQL Server 2017 is 5 times more performant with 50% of the cost/storage.

SQL Server 2017 is the only commercial DB with AI built-in. It is the most secure over the last 7 years and at this point, it is the fastest DB in industry.

New features in SQL Server 2017 —

• Support for graph data and queries
• Advanced Machine Learning with R and Python
• Native T-SQL scoring
• Adaptive Query Processing
• Automatic Plan correction
• New string functions
• SQL Server running in Linux Containers – Setting up DEV environment faster

For seamless & reliable migration to cloud, there are new services available —

• Azure SQL Database Managed Instance – Preview
• Database Migration Service

There were other Azure related topics covered during the keynote as well with detailed demos —

• Using new Azure Data Factory with Biml
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse Compute-Optimize Tier
• Microsoft Business Intelligence Hybrid Architecture
• Scale out feature with Analysis Services
• Power BI Premium

The demo showing 100 terabytes of data scanned within 6 sec was amazing!

Rohan also announced the Microsoft SQL Operations Studio for SQL Server developers and DBAs on Windows, Linux and macOS. The public preview will be out in November.

Overall there are lot of cool stuffs and new features/investments coming up continuously which are available to be leveraged. Hard to keep pace up with! Exciting times ahead for sure.

Categories: Conference, SQL Server, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017