Today is Monday, the first day of TechEd 2010 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference. A few thoughts follow the slide show below.

Wow! What an amazing experience this has been! I would encourage anyone with the interest and opportunity to attend.  There is literally something here for everyone; technical tracks, business tracks, hands on labs, certification, media, etc…

The opening keynote was started by a local Jazz band that did a good job warming the crowd for Ted Kummert to come on out.  Ted is a senior VP for Business Platforms and immediately placed his focus on ‘the cloud’ and dynamic IT.  Quite often we hear a lot about the cloud and as a DBA and Developer it was amazing to see his demonstrate this infrastructure. There is no question how Microsoft is digesting their own technologies at internet scale with their Bing, Hotmail, and MSN platforms.  Although a little Long, Ted did a great job and set a clear direction for the conference and the continued push for cloud computing.

My first session of the day was Report Parts for Reporting Services in SQL 2008 R2 (SSRS).  In short it takes the ‘web part’ concept you’ll find in SharePoint and takes it to the reporting platform.  SSRS has a host of upgrades from 2005 to 2008 and report parts is simply one of them.  Although a minor feature of on the items I’m excited about is query sets and the ability to expose, filter, and most importantly cache the sets.

Next came the session on Fast Track data warehousing. This was a bit technical even for a technical crowd because you’re getting down to the level of system design, hardware selection, spindles, LUNs, extents, etc… If these terms are not too familiar you might be like one of the many people that got up after the few opening minutes.  There were however, a number of very good data points that relate to database any systems design: know your workload when designing the system, do you best to understand potential growth, size your CPU cores/disks/arrays correctly, manage your extent allocations, use of data compression, allocate for growth upfront as possible.

The final session of the day covered StreamInsight which is an amazing technology.  It was the program manager for SQL Server who ran the session and painted a clear picture of StreamInsight as a product that is designed to handle ‘data in-flight.’  Consider use cases of web analytics, manufacturing, smart electric grids, or financial solutions where data is born digitally and must be handled in real time using event driven notification.  In short, StreamInsight is built on .Net 4.0 and offers an input adapter to get data into the stream engine and an output adapter to persist the data somewhere or simply handle it however you wish. It’s inside the stream engine where queries and additional logic exists to do the actual processing of the data event.  It was extremely impressive to hear how MSN/Bing handles half-a-billion data events being sent from their web farm to StreamInsight for the purpose of serving up targeted advertising.