Comments on: Microsoft Launches SQL 2012 – It Ain’t Nothing But A House Party

By: What SQL2012 Feature Are You Excited About the Most?

What SQL2012 Feature Are You Excited About the Most? — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:15:39 +0000

[…] Launch Event last week. There was so much interest in the event that it actually brought the website down. There’s still time for you to catch the keynote, enjoy all the other sessions from the event and […]

By: Something for the Weekend – SQL Server Links 09/03/12

Something for the Weekend – SQL Server Links 09/03/12 — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:23:37 +0000

[…] Microsoft Launches SQL 2012 – It Ain’t Nothing But a House Party – Thomas Larock (Blog|Twitter) on this weeks party that took a while to get started. […]

By: Julie Koesmarn

Julie Koesmarn — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:50:00 +0000

In reply to R. G. Price. Thanks for the feedback. we're in Australia don't get the privilege of having a Special Ops Tour, so the virtual launch is beneficial for us. I hope SQL Saturday ANZ tour will bridge the gap between Virtual Launch and Special Ops Tour.

By: ThomasLaRock

ThomasLaRock — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:24:00 +0000

In reply to R. G. Price. That is great feedback that I will make certain gets passed along to the right people, thanks!

By: ThomasLaRock

ThomasLaRock — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:23:00 +0000

In reply to Hoder. I suppose I just know the right 45 people.

By: Hoder

Hoder — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:13:00 +0000

45 people is an epic party? Dude you need to get out more.

By: R. G. Price

R. G. Price — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:43:00 +0000

I “attended” both the virtual launch yesterday and the live Special Ops tour. I’d say that I was greatly disappointed with the virtual launch on a number of levels, but very pleased with the Special Ops tour.

First of all, having your launch website fail the way they did provides a huge credibility problem, since a part of what they are promoting is cloud computing precisely to be able to handle such circumstances… Not to mention I had gotten 5 employees, including the CIO into our largest conference room to watch the launch, and needless to say that was problematic.

But more importantly the content was less than stellar. #1 we were, rightly or wrongly, expecting at least SOME *live*, content. I honestly thought the keynote was going to be live…. Maybe I’m an idiot…

Secondly, the topic presentations were mostly not very polished and WAY TOO high level. For a 20-25 minute presentation I was expecting some meaningful demos. The PowerPivot demo was the best IMO, but ironically PowerPivot isn’t really a SQL 2012 feature, its a Excel 2010 feature…

The presentation on Hadoop was very disappointing. I was expecting 5-10 minutes of high level overview and 10-15 minutes of real demonstration. What we got was 20 minutes of high-level overview…

The Special Ops tour was great though, exactly what I was looking for and I was very impressed with the “Always On” functionality. Yeah, you can almost get to the same thing now with 2008, but the implementation in 2012 is so much nicer.

I’d give the Virtual Launch 2 out of 5 stars and the Special Ops presentation 4.5 out of 5.