Gartner, Inc. has positioned Microsoft as a Leader for the second year in a row in the Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (October 16, 2014), based on ability to execute and completeness of vision for Microsoft’s complete data platform, including SQL Server and Microsoft Azure. You can read the full report here compliments of Microsoft: http://www.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft-windows?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb

SQL Server 2014 delivers a powerful set of capabilities for mission-critical workloads, business intelligence and hybrid cloud. Everything is built-in and easy to use, with a low cost of delivery.

• New features in SQL Server 2014 include:

  • In-Memory Online Transaction Processing (OLTP): Formerly known as project codename “Hekaton,” the new in-memory capabilities for OLTP built in to SQL Server provide up to 30x performance improvement.

  • Enhanced In-Memory ColumnStore: First introduced in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft has enhanced the In-Memory ColumnStore to be updateable, and provide improved compression benefits. These enhancements mean greater storage savings and improved query speeds, enabling customers to process larger amounts of data. Customers already experienced speeds up to 100x faster with the In-Memory ColumnStore in SQL Server 2012.

  • New hybrid scenarios enabled for Windows Azure, including simplified backup to Windows Azure and the ability to setup a Windows Azure Virtual Machine as an Always On secondary, providing a cost-effective disaster recovery scenario with quick recovery time. Additionally, customers that use in-memory technologies can extend their deployments to Windows Azure for cost-effective backup and disaster recovery.

Update

Thank you to the attendees who made it on the Tuesday night, it was great to meet you and get so much positive feedback about Azure ML. Please make sure you sign up for the FREE Developer account on www.azure.com/ml. I have had several requests for the deck, you can download it at the following link - http://1drv.ms/1pouawP

Hope to see lots of your models on the ML Marketplace. Also below are links to resources:

If you are in town (Sydney, Australia) next Tuesday 18th November, please join to get an overview of Azure Machine Learning and see how you can make your data work for you.

See http://t.co/DvQzLnLiHZ for the details.

Our session on Power BI from Teched Melbourne & Sydney is now available on Channel 9 - below is the link

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/2014/OSS206

Thank you for those that attended the last session on the Monday evening. Really appreciate it. Thank you for the great questions and being a attentive audience. Now ensure you go to www.powerbi.com and sign up for your free trial. Also you may have seen some of the announcements at the SQL PASS Summit 2014 - you can also sign up to get access for the preview of the upcoming changes to PowerBI -  http://solutions.powerbi.com/

Also big thank you to Fred Lecul for Scalability Experts for co-presenting and providing the demo of a real customer scenario and thank you to StormTech for letting us share their story. As a way of a free plug - if you are on a look out for architectural grates/drains please check their website - http://www.stormtech.com.au/

The Azure DCs are available to be selected see below screenshot. Australians feel comfortable to have your data in local datacenters. Start saving moeny and innovating on the cloud with the many Azure services. Go to www.azure.com to signup now.

TechEd may not have much content for the data types this year but SQL Saturday has stepped in to fill the gap!  Join us in Sydney on October 25^th at the University of Sydney to hear from experts such as Australian MVPs Grant Paisley, Julie Koesmarno and Victor Isakov on the SQL topics you can’t learn from books.  In the “big data” era your skills have never been more relevant nor likely more in need of sharpening.  Register now!