Post-First Dev Con post

Well the first Keynote address of Dev Con 2008 was eventful enough for a blog post.  The first speaker was Britt Johnson and he talked about the history of database technology.  He then addressed the new and exciting features of SQL Server 2008.  Real world examples of SQL Server 2008 in use were given, with its use with Pan-Starrs given the spotlight.  Apparently, our existence as a species is dependent on this system as it observes the whole sky and alerts us to oncoming asteroids.  The Pan-Starrs satellite system collects about a terabyte a data every night and SQL Server provides the backend ability to accommodate this data.  Britt Johnson also highlighted Visual Team Studio Team System 2008, but his main focus was on SQL Server 2008.  The top 5 lists of usable SQL Server 2008 features were broken down into two categories, Developers and IT Professionals. 

List: For Developers - 1) Policy Based Management 2) Resource Governor 3) Query Plan Freezing 4) Backup Compression 5) Performance Data Collection

For IT Professionals - 1) Spatial Data Support 2) Report Builder Enhancements 3) ADO.NET Entity Framework 4) Change Data Capture 5) Table Value Parameters

The next presenters Demoed Spatial Data Support using Mapping with SQL Server 2008 as the backend database.  The most impressive part of this demonstration was the ability to query data points of map without having to instantiate the database.  The Schema Developer ability in SQL Server 2008 gives developers the ability compile before deployment.

The next part of the keynote speech focused on Business Intelligence (BI) with search collaboration content management, Excel, and Performance Point.  SQL Server 2008's improved Reporting Services was demoed and provided many new features to assist developers and IT pros.  A new technology called Tablix (Table + Matrix) is included on Report Designer for SQL Server.  A demo with Tablix using Report Builder 2.0 (includes Office Ribbon Integration) showed how collaboration with Model Data, Query Data, Free Data, SQL Services (SQL Data Services is the foundation), and Cloud Services (Windows Azure) have incredibly improved Reporting Services while allowing for more detailed data reports.

All in all, it was a good keynote address and many new and exciting things with SQL Server technology have emerged or are emerging.