While I won’t be speaking at this new conference I wanted to post about the event and mention what a great opportunity it is for app developers.

Modern Apps Live! is an innovative new type of conference, unlike anything you’ve attended before. This conference consists of a single track containing sessions that provide you with an end-to-end narrative covering all aspects of building modern apps using today’s technologies. All the speakers have worked together as a team to bring you the highest quality content such that each session builds on those that have gone before.

Check out the website for more details:
ModernAppsLive!

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Summit 2012 has now come and gone, but it was a great event indeed. In order to touch on some highlights from my point of view, I would like to acknowledge several people by saying thanks. First, thank you Magenic (my employer) for sending me to this fantastic training event. What a great opportunity to meet top SQL Server professionals from all over the world and to improve one’s technical skills. Next, thank you to everyone who organized the Summit event and to all the speakers. Shout out to the Costa Rican group I met. Sounds like a very active chapter and I hope to see you guys again next April at SQL Saturday #189 in Costa Rica if my submitted sessions get approved. 😛 I’d also like to thank the guy who sang Lita Ford’s Barracuda Wednesday night at the Hard Rock Café Karaoke event. While I don’t think you actually sang a single word correctly, your dance moves definitely made up for it. I’ve never seen a geek… well anyone for that matter dance quite like that. It won’t soon be forgotten and if anyone happens to put it on YouTube please shoot me a link. And finally, I’d like to thank Microsoft for hosting the event at the EMP Thursday night. Unfortunately, I cannot thank the person who created those sandwiches that were so incredibly spicy hot that I was nearly in tears… literally. At any rate, it was a very fun and productive week. I met a lot of great people. I hope to see you again soon at various events throughout the year, or maybe even at Summit next year in Charlotte.

Day 1 of the conference may be over but there were a lot of exciting announcements made this morning that should keep the SQL Community energized for a while.

Here are some highlights of what was announced.

1. Project Polybase. This project is working to allow the use of T-SQL queries to query Hadoop data as well as relational databases. It will also add the ability to use joins between the two.
2. Hekaton. This is the code name given to the project that is working on in-memory OLTP. Basically, you enable selected databases to be run all in memory which makes it super fast!
3. SQL Server 2012 SP1
4. SSRS is now supported on iOS and win8 mobile devices when you install SQL Server 2012 SP1.
5. Parallel Data Warehouse next gen.
6. Updatable column store indexing.
7. PowerView can be used with Excel 2013 as it’s data source.
8. PowerView will be able run on OLAP Cubes. Multidimensional as well as Tabular!

Some of these features are available in SP1 (SSRS & Mobile), H1 of 2013 (PDW), but most will be released in the next major release of SQL Server.

Last year (2011) was my first year attending PASS Summit in Seattle. I was very excited and it did not disappoint! What an awesome experience. I met a lot of great people. I remember the keynote speaker who announced that Denali was now going to be called SQL Server 2012. This year I’m happy to say I will be attending again. I’ll have to see what tag I get on my lanyard. I’ll be tossing aside the ‘First Timer’ tag for ‘Second Timer’? I look forward to the great sessions, meeting more people from the community, and catching up with the people I met last year. Only a week away so I better start packing. See you at Summit!

Tuesday, October 16th I will be presenting at the Minnesota SQL Server User Group. Data Quality Services is a new data cleansing tool in SQL 2012. I will show how to use this tool, how to create a knowledge base, perform data cleansing, data matching, and how to use 3rd party knowledge bases (Reference Data). I’ll cover installation, using the DQS UI, and how to integrate DQS into your SSIS packages.
For more details you can check the Minnesota PASS website here.
Hope to see you there!