Author: Brent Ozar

George Box said, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."  Donald illustrated this point with a brief history lesson.  Early models of the universe said the sun revolved around the earth, and with that model, marvelous things were possible in architecture, celestial navigation and science.  Even though the model was wrong, it was still extremely useful.  Data modeling holds to that same statement: your models will never be right, but your key is to figure out which ones are useful enough.

Updates

It's Friday, it's 8:30 AM, and it's time for another keynote.

PASS Board Election Results Dribbling In Andy Warren is in!  He talks about it on his blog, and I got a huge chuckle out of this part: I didn't have any idea what my chances were, I really didn't do a lot of campaigning (hard to figure out a way to do it that didn't…

I'll be liveblogging this morning's keynotes at the PASS Summit.  Refresh this page for the latest news. 10:02 - Tom's focusing on the ROI of BI, and suddenly I get it.  The database engine works great.  Now we're bolting things on top of it to make every end user in the company see the value…

Aside from my liveblog of Ted Kummert's keynote this morning and Jimmy May's presentation on partition alignment, a few other things caught my eye today. I talked to JC Cannon about his SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide.  I've written here about it before, but it bears repeating.  If you're not here at PASS, and you…

I'm liveblogging the keynote this morning on here and on my Twitter feed.  Go to this page and refresh it periodically to get the latest news as it happens.  Updates are at the top of the page to make reading easier during liveblogs, and I'll reverse it tonight for easier reading later.

10:08 - And that's it!  Done.  See you at PASS!

PASS Election Update
I'm seeing a theme on the interwebz: lots of endorsements for Andy Warren and Tom LaRock:

Andy Leonard posted his vote on Twitter for Andy Warren, Lynda Rab and Tom LaRock (SQLBatman).
Brian Kelley posted his endorsements on SQLServerCentral for Andy Warren and Tom LaRock.
Steve Jones posted his endorsements on SQLServerCentral for Andy Warren, Louis Davidson (DrSQL) and Tom LaRock.

Great SSIS Boot Camp by Brian Knight
Brian's a fantastic presenter - really funny, really engaging, and can answer questions on his feet.  The one-day presentation was a great way to get started, and I ordered his Professional SSIS 2008 book to answer my questions as I start digging into SSIS.

One indicator of a good presentation style: people follow along and ask questions, and the presenter's answer is, "I'm glad you asked.  We're talking about that next."  That happened again and again in Brian's presentation.

Yesterday, Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss announced that their Wednesday 3pm class on SSIS scripting will cover Twitter integration. In today's SSIS Boot Camp by Brian Knight, I spoke with some DBAs about the Twitter idea.  The initial reaction has been, "Why would you want to do that?  Twitter is so unreliable."

True: us database administrators are conditioned to working with extremely reliable tools, logged transactions, mission-critical uptime, yadda yadda yadda.  Twitter is none of those things - so why would we rely on it?

I flew in yesterday and spent some quality time with some other folks who were lucky enough to fly in early, and by "quality time" I mean eating and drinking.  I only got a handful of photos.
Listening In on DBA Conversations
The funnier momentos were the things we overheard.  If you follow me on Twitter, "OH" means "Overheard", and we type that when somebody won't want to be identified by the quote.  Some examples:

PASS has posted the list of candidates, but there's no bio info yet.  Fear not - the community is doing a great job of not just keeping up, but getting ahead!  I love communities in the age of social networking.

TJay Belt is doing a great job of centralizing information about the candidates for PASS Board. Check out these two posts:

When I was a DBA, before I got this "rock star" job, I didn't have the time to get involved enough with the SQL Server community to really know the people running for the PASS Board.  I had a "real job", and when I cast my vote, I was basing my decision off a paragraph or two of information about the candidate.

What if you could sit down with these guys and ask 'em any questions you wanted: Tom Casey, Microsoft SQL Server BI General Manager. Tom's giving the Thursday keynote about SQL Server's business intelligence strategy beyond SQL Server 2008.  My guess (and this is only a guess, not based on any behind-the-scenes info) is that…