2014 PASS Summit Day 1 Keynote: Evolving Microsoft’s Data Platform – The Journey to Cloud Continues

The Keynote Speakers were T.K. "Ranga" Rengarajan, James Phillips and Joseph Sirosh.

Data is changing the way we work and live. There will be 40% more data year after year. We can lead this change of data culture where we harness more data types, tackle big data and deliver solutions faster.  The Microsoft Data Platform is a no compromise platform where there is no side of technology which is best. Everything just works together from scale up to scale out and from unstructured to structured data. It is a solution that scales with needs with no restrictions.

The aims to capture diverse data, achieve elastic scale, maximize performance & availability and simplify with cloud. Microsoft want no boundaries, be able to maximise the customer experience and make it easy to run. 

A recap on services

• Capture diverse data with Azure DocumentDB (NoSQL DB Service which is schema free), Azure HDInsight (100% Apache Hadoop service with HBase and Storm), Analytics Platform System (Polybase SQL and Hadoop appliance) and Azure Search (Fully maanged search service for moblie apps).

• Achieve elastic scale with 3 options SQL Server 2014 with Windows Server 2012R2, SQL Server in Azure VMs  and Azure SQL Database. Combines simplicity and power in scale out with the best tool for the job. We are at the beginning of amazing possibilities

• Maximise performance and availability with Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2014.
• Simplify with Cloud using Hybrid scenarios with SQL Server 2014 and Azure as a data lake to store big data in its natural form. SQL Server benefits from the cloud as well and one engine can handle all workloads. Some assets however will always be on premises

We need to think of data differently.  There will be an upcoming preview of Azure SQL Database which will include major changes to the platform.

• TSQL compatibility
• Larger index handling
• Parallel queries
• Extended events
• In-memory ColumnStore for data marts

All technologies are converging to make one solution.

Taken from:  http://bit.ly/1qq05bo

There is a need to understand the past, analyse the present and predict what’s next. The tools available are Azure Data Factory, Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Machine learning. Microsoft announced Free Machine Learning azure.com/ml

Azure Data factory is like SSIS for orchestrating across the cloud without installing anything and is fully managed. Azure Stream Analytics is for data in motion and Machine learning for driving predications.

The last section of the keynote covered Power Pivot and Power Query to allow you to get the data easier, model, cleanse and then transform it for upstream use.  Power BI SaaS offer simplifies deployment and reduce time to solution. Q& A natural language query in PowerBI allows users to ask questions of the data by typing.

Live operational dashboards will be available in Power BI to drive business insight.