On Wednesday, 7 March Microsoft is holding a virtual launch event for the newest version of Microsoft SQL Server to be released on 1 April.  You want to be there.  Yes, even you data architects, business analysts, project managers, enterprise architects and other IT professionals working in the upper rows of the Zachman Framework.  Why?  Because there are many new features in SQL Server 2012 made just for you:

• Master Data Services
• Data Quality Services
• BI Semantics
• Self Serve BI
• Hadoop integration
• New Data Tools
• New datatypes, database objects and other design features like ColumnStore Indexes.

MVP Lovin’

You’ll have access to SQL Server MVPs who will be standing by to take your questions and chat about the new features we are most excited about. I’ll be working at these Topic Pods:

• Application Development, Beyond Relational, Connectivity at 6 PM ET / 3 PM PT
• Business Intelligence & Enterprise Information Management at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT

If you register for the event, you can stop by and chat with some awesome SQL Server MVPs and me about some of the newest features of SQL Server. 

Prize Love

Unlike that other launch that is happening tomorrow, at the SQL Server Launch you can earn some really great prizes: cash gift cards, SQL Server Gear, and Xboxes.  So the more you watch, the more you engage, the more you can win.  Cash, Swag and Gaming.  What more could you want?

Lovin’ Just for You

While I think non-DBA types can get a lot out of the overviews of all the new features, I think developer and  data professionals will find these agenda items the most applicable:

Blazing-Fast Performance: A Technical Best Practices Tour with ColumnStore Index
Go behind the scenes with SQL Server engineers for a quick technical tour of the ColumnStore Index feature and an introduction to best practices for achieving astonishing performance with your ColumnStore Indexes.

Blazing-Fast Performance: Explore FileTables, Full-Text Search and Semantic Search for Faster, More Meaningful Results Across Unstructured Data
80% or more of the data produced and stored are so called unstructured documents and are often not stored in the database, but often need to be managed in conjunction with relational data. In order to facilitate the storage and management of unstructured data, SQL Server has evolved from storing blobs to providing a sophisticated integration with the Windows Filesystem and provides rich services over such data to provide an interesting and compelling application development experience. This presentation introduces the new unstructured data processing capabilities of SQL Server 2012 that provide full Windows application-compatible file management over files stored in SQL Server as well as the services to unlock the information in such data such as the extensions and improvements to Full-Text Search and the introduction of semantic similarity search.

Organizational Compliance: Using the New Security Features and Audit Enhancements to Increase Compliance Policies
Introduction to new security features in SQL Server 2012 such as User-Defined Server Roles and enhanced Auditing to increase organization compliance.

Peace of Mind: Quick Tour Through the New SQL Server Migration Assistant
In this session we will review SSMA modules that automate assessment, schema conversion, data migration and testing of Oracle and Sybase migrations to SQL Server 2012.

Unlocking the Value of Big Data with Microsoft Business Intelligence
Klout is a ground-breaking company that extracts signals from social networks to determine which people are most influential. Hadoop is a core part of how Klout captures and processes over 3 billion signals daily, however translating and analyzing these signals into meaningful information requires a scalable and cost effective business intelligence solution. That’s where Microsoft SQL Server 2012 comes in, delivering “speed of thought” ad hoc queries, with response times of under 10 seconds on 35 billion rows of data. Learn more about Big Data and BI best practices in this session.

Rapid Data Exploration: Empowering End User Insight Through Rapid Data Exploration and Visualization with Power View
Introduction to Power View, the new thin, self-service ad hoc reporting tool. In this session we will highlight its main features, scenarios, show a demo, and discuss its relationship to other products in the BI stack (SharePoint, Excel).

Rapid Data Exploration: Powerful Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot
Get a taste of what’s new in PowerPivot, the self-service BI experience that enables information workers to build their personal and team BI applications within the familiar environment of Excel: This session will provide a quick introduction to PowerPivot, followed by demos highlighting the top 5 new modeling features delivered with the release of SQL Server 2012.

Managed Self-Service BI: End User Created, IT Managed
Introduction to the BI continuum – IWs using the familiar tools like Excel, IT retaining control and governance of the workbooks. We will show how IT can manage the system in SharePoint, and how self-service BI solutions transition to managed corporate BI solutions.

Credible, Consistent Data: Going Under the Hood with the New BI Semantic Model
Introduction to the BISM, position tabular and multidimensional types of models. We will show how easy it is to create a model in PowerPivot, show how Power View is leveraging it, and highlight how easy is it to go from an individual workbook to the enterprise IT governed BI solution.

Credible, Consistent Data: Improving Data Quality with the New Data Quality Services
No matter how brilliant your BI tools are, it’s garbage-in-garbage-out. This session will give an overview on the new Data Quality Services product in SQL Server 2012. Come watch this important scenario to learn how to position, sell, and demo the new DQS product.

Credible, Consistent Data: Empowering IW / Data Experts to Efficiently Manage Important Data with the New Master Data Services Add-In for Excel
Introduction to the improvements and new functionality in the SQL Server 2012 release, empowering IW to curate the organization’s important data, maintaining it accurate and relevant through its lifecycle, via easy model creation and validation.

Credible, Consistent Data: Introducing New Team-based Data Integration with Integration Services
There are plenty of new features for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in SQL Server 2012 that make it a very compelling release for your customers. This session will cover some of the highlights of the release, including the new Change Data Capture functionality. We will demonstrate how to bring together key components needed to build an effective ETL framework using SSIS. This reusable framework will show off the new functionality and productivity enhancements for existing users, and present a compelling story for customers who have never seen or used SSIS before. We will cover the end-to-end lifecycle of an SSIS solution, including how to maintain and manage the framework once it has been deployed into production.

Scalable Analytics & Data Warehousing: Fast Track for SQL Server 2012
Fast Track for SQL Server 2012 has significant improvements, leveraging exciting new enhancements in SQL Server 2012 like the new ColumnStore Index feature. You will also see how Fast Track partners are working with the SQL Server team to transform the latest enhancements in server and storage technology into highly optimized data warehouse Reference Architectures.

Big Data Analytics with Apache Hadoop and SQL Server 2012
In this session we will explore Apache Hadoop on Windows Server and Azure and powerful insights we can generate integrating with SQL Server.

There are more sessions, so be sure to check them all out.  I hope you register and learn how you can Love Your Data with SQL Server 2012.  See you there.

You can get real experience with new SQL Server 2012 features such as:

• AlwaysOn, SQL Server’s new High Availability feature.  I have to say this is fun to play with.  Pull the plug and watch SQL Server gracefully fail over.  Like nothing happened at all.  Monitor the status of all the AlwaysOn components.  Very cool stuff here.
• Master Data Services, SQL Server’s new feature for managing reference and master data.
• Data Quality Services, a new feature for helping you Love Your Data even more.
• Sparklines and Data bars, new data visualization features.
• Columnstore Indexes, SQL Server’s new feature to make queries just fly.
• Spatial and Location Services for mashing your data up with location based services.

While you are running the VM set up, register for the SQL Server 2012 Launch events coming in March in the US.  I hope to make it to one or two of those.

On day 2 of the PASS Summit, I had a supporting role in Lara Rubbelke’s ( @SQLGal ) keynote demonstration of new features of SQL Server 2012. Lara is a Principal Program Manager for Microsoft. She demoed the new Column Store features and Data Quality Services that will be available in SQL Server 2012.

There’s my avatar next to a comment I made about slow reports and data quality:

SQLClippy ( @SQLClippy ) also had a role:

And in case you missed the faux comments from attendees at SQLPASS:

I think you can see that Lara picked the snarkiest of PASS members, don’t you? Love that she said that I’d comment on the database design.

What was the data problem she was showing?  Location data that left some businesses underwater:

You can watch the entire keynote at http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/Live/LiveStreaming/LiveStreamingThursday.aspx (registration required).  I recommend downloading instead of live streaming, as that gives you the ability to rewind/fast forward during the video. Data Quality Services starts at about 38 minutes into the video.