The turnout at today’s event had an overwhelming response today. A big thank you to everyone who attended today’s event. An overwhelming response… So thank you everyone who attended and made this UG meeting a grand success! This was our very own version of introducing SQL Server 2014 to the SQLBangaloreUG community!

We had a brilliant line-up of topics… Just to re-cap the day.. Here is a short summary..

The day started off with a keynote session from Anupam Tiwari who is Business Program Manager and closely works with the team that supports developer technologies at Microsoft. He talked about where IT as we know it today is headed tomorrow.

Sourabh Agarwal [Blog | Twitter] covered the performance enhancements in SQL Server 2014 and explained why this version is bigger, faster and stronger!

Then I had the opportunity of explaining the new enhancements in backup and restore in SQL Server 2014. I talked about backing up to a URL i.e. a storage account in Azure, managed backups to Azure and encrypted backups. The slide deck from today’s presentation is available below.

This was followed by Pinal Dave’s [Blog | Twitter] session on “Performing an effective Presentation” One key takeaway from this session is that the art of story-telling can weave out a presentation which can keep the audience hooked! He demonstrated this during his session and kept the audience awake after lunch!

Then we had Balmukund Lakhani [Blog | Twitter] talking about InMemory Enhancements with SQL Server 2014. You can follow his SQL Server 2014 learning series to gain in-depth insights into the various enhancements that he talked about.

His session was followed by Vinod Kumar [Blog | Twitter] who talked about the Some more lesser known enhancements with SQL Server 2014 where he talked about managed lock priority, delayed durability and more.

And last but not the least was Kane Conway – (Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft) who talked about Power Packed – Power BI with SQL Server. If you have not played around with PowerBI, then you should start now! Presenting data with compelling visualizations just got a new definition.

It was a house full event and I had to put in two pictures to showcase the turnout today! It is not possible to have a successful event without the audience participation. We personally want to apologize to folks who came in late and had to return because the hall was overcrowded and the seats were full. Please do come in early for next UGs for sure.

A special thanks to Microsoft GTSC for giving us the space and the support till date. Also a special thanks to SQL Server Product Marketing team for sponsoring this Launch Event. Finally, a special thanks to team Pluralsight for supporting the UG till date and giving us numerous gifts as giveaway at the event.

The presentation that I used at the event today is available below: