BI Architects visited the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 symposium

Yesterday a delegation of BI Architects visited the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 symposium at the Media Plaza in Utrecht.

During the symposium Microsoft presented the new version of their informationplatform SQL Server 2012. Richard Chin, general manager SQL Server strategy at Microsoft, kicked off the symposium with a keynote. After the keynote the symposium was divided into three blocks: Breakthrough insight with SQL Server 2012, Delivering Mission Critical Confidence to the Modern Enterprise and Building the Modern Enterprise with Hybrid IT.

A view at the stunning Media Plaza during the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 symposium.

As BI Architects we were mostly interested in the block concerning business intelligence, Breakthrough insight with SQL Server 2012. This block included a keynote from Marcel Westra, technology specialist BI at Microsoft NL, explaining the vision behind SQL Server 2012 and demonstrating the new features like PowerView and the integration of Hadoop (Big Data).

All of the speakers outlined five points off improvement for SQL Server 2012:

• Greater availability. Deliver the required 9s and data protection with AlwaysOn, delivering added functionality over CTP3 that allows customers to experience multiple, readable secondaries for distributed scale of reporting and backup workloads and support for FileTable and FILESTREAM which brings first-class HA to complex data types.
• Blazing-fast performance. More effectively govern performance in multi-tenancy environments like private cloud. Resource Governor enhancements include support for 64 resource pools, greater CPU usage control, and resource pool affinity for partitioning of physical resources and predictable resource allocation.
• Rapid data exploration. Empower end users with new insights through rapid data exploration and visualization. Discover new insights at the speed of thought with more feature/functionality in Power View, the highly interactive, familiar browser-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for end users.
• Credible, consistent data. In addition to CTP3 functionality delivered for Data Quality Services and Master Data Services, customers can better support heterogeneous data within Data Warehouses through new Change Data Capture (CDC) support for Oracle.
• Optimized productivity. Optimize IT and developer productivity across server and cloud with the new SQL Server Data Tools, a unified development experience for database and business intelligence projects, and cloud-ready capabilities within SQL Server Management Studio for snapshot backups to the Windows Azure Platform. Additionally, SQL Server 2012 offers a new version of Express – LocalDB. SQL Express LocalDB is a lightweight version of Express with all its programmability features, yet runs in user mode with a fast, zero-configuration installation and short list of pre-requisites. For more information and to try it out, go here.

There are three main editions planned for SQL Server 2012: Standard, Business Intelligence (new) and Enterprise. Business Intelligence adds better reporting via PowerView, PowerPivot for SharePoint Server, Data Quality Services, Master Data Services, and an In-Memory Tabular BI Semantic Model.

For more information about the new features go here.

All of the keynotes will be posted online by Microsoft,  keep watching this blog to find out were you can watch them!

Update:
The videos aren't online yet, but Microsoft sended the presentation to us in the PDF file format. Download the 15 MB zip file from this link.