This morning’s keynote was opened with a SQL-themed song (written by Rob Farley) performed by the dynamic duo, Rob Farley and Buck Woody.

Here are links to videos:

Thanks go also to Wayne Snyder (@SQLWayne) who, as immediate past president of PASS, rolls off the board. Rick Heiges introduced the new roles on the board.

Nov 6-9 2012 is the next PASS Summit in Seattle, and Charlotte will be the host city for 2013. Early registration rate is available for PASS Summit 2012.

Dr. Dave DeWitt, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, is today’s keynote speaker. Subject:Big Data. He explained where big data comes from: sensors, web clicks, twitter, and it’s deemed too important to go away. “This is the golden age” for database professionals, made possible by cheap storage. Old guard: eBay has 10PB on 256 nodes. New guard: Facebook 20PB on 2700 nodes, Bing 150PB on 40k nodes.

NoSQL – what is it? It really means not only SQL. Some data is not worth storing in SQL. jSON provides greater flexibility in data model. Trade consistency for availability (opposite of traditional data management).Provides faster time to insight.

Update: Quite frankly, all of this information was coming at me so fast and furiously that I gave up trying to live blog. It was, however, quite fascinating. Prior to the keynote, I wondered how relevant the topic would be for me, but given announcements by Microsoft earlier in the week regarding Hadoop support and also some statements made by Dr. DeWitt, I can see now that developing BI skills for Big Data and BI is going to be a requirement. Dr. DeWitt makes the case for why we as data professionals should care about Big Data, even if it’s not directly part of our job focus today. Here are some links that you might find useful:

  • Dr. DeWitt’s slide deck
  • When available, I’ll provide a link to the keynote itself – it’s well worth making the time for it! I certainly plan to watch it again.