#SQLPass

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…