Conferences and Classes

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

If you’re going to the Professional Association for SQL Server summit in Seattle, let’s meet up!  Here’s my travel info: Flight in: Houston to Seattle, Continental 1767 – arrives Sunday, 11:41 AM Hotel: Sunday to Tuesday night, Hotel 1000.  Rest of week, Sheraton. Flight out: Seattle to Houston, Continental 223 – leaves Saturday, 6:10 AM…

I love my job! When a new version of SQL Server comes out, database administrators want to know what features will make an immediate difference in their lives.  They want a very fast recap of what they need to do first, what they need to plan for, and what to tell the rest of their…

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) group holds an annual summit for their members.  I attended last year, and blogged about some of my experiences: PASS Summit 2007 Day One Notes PASS Summit 2007 Day Two Notes PASS Summit 2007 Day Three Notes While I was there, I remember thinking, “Man, I wish they…

Bill Baker: Keynote on Office PerformancePoint 2007 Bill’s a fantastic speaker, and this is an interesting product, but our organization’s BI isn’t mature enough to take on this product yet. The product has a lot of potential; in a nutshell, it combines the flexibility and agility of Excel with the data safety & consistency of…

Tom Casey: Keynote Tom covered basic SQL Server marketing slides about the BI stack. Yawn. Good presenter, but couldn’t overcome the dry material. Then he handed it off to a Dell woman to announce that they’ll be selling packaged BI solutions with hardware, software, storage, etc all in one bundle. They’re targeting customers in the…

My notes on the sessions I’ve attended so far: Ted Kummert: Keynote on SQL 2008 I’d already seen most of this PowerPoint deck during a South Florida SQL meeting at Microsoft, but the demos kicked butt.  Finally, we have Intellisense in Management Studio!  Woohoo!  There was other fun stuff, but I’ve already forgotten it. One…

I splurged and forked over $180 for a first class upgrade for my flight from Miami to Denver. It’s been years since I’ve flown, and it was scheduled to be a four hour flight, so it seemed like a good – albeit decadent – option. Turned out to be a lucky gamble: the plane was…

I’ll be attending the SQLpass Summit 2007 in Denver in a couple of weeks.  It’s an annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server database administrators with seminars like “Managing Large Data Warehouses” and “Plan Cache Analysis in SQL Server 2005.”  I’m excited because this is the first national SQL conference I’ve been able to attend. I’m…