Allen White

Hitting the Wall at TechEd (Thursday)

In a session on Monday Richard Campbell mentioned that TechEd week was like a marathon. Of course, my thought was "you're not a marathon runner, what do you know about what a marathon is like." Well, it's Thursday afternoon, and I've hit the wall. ("Hitting the wall" is a phrase we use in marathon running when you've reached your physical limit, usually somewhere after about 19-22 miles. After that it's pure determination to get to the finish.) I was sitting in Gert Draper's presentation on Visual Studio Team System for Database Professional (Part 3) and absolutely nothing was sinking in. I decided to take a rest and headed back to the hotel for a bit of R & R before tonight's Fenway Park extravaganza. Of course it's now raining in Boston and I hope that doesn't ruin the party tonight.

This morning in session DAT329 Dr. Greg Low gave a great presentation on CLR integration for DBA's. It's tempting as a DBA to not trust anything that a developer will want to load into a CLR assembly, because that code will execute within the SQL Server space. (We all know how much DBA's trust developers, don't we? Dr. Low presented the process clearly, and showed some real benefit to using CLR assemblies within SQL Server.

The next session today was DAT331 - Monitoring SQL Server with SQL Server Business Intelligence tools, presented by Lara Rubbelke. Now, I've been a DBA for 14 years, but I've never been able to pick up the whole "cube" thing. I see how people who know what they're doing can get some amazing information using them, but I just haven't been able to wrap my brain around it. I figured this session, being a DAT session not a BIN session, would finally allow me to get a handle on things, focusing on analyzing performance data, which I'm always looking to learn more about. Well, things went well for about 5 or 6 slides, but then she jumped to light speed and I was lost. I understood the performance results she was returning, but didn't have a clue as to how she got there. I'm going to be checking out her blog and downloading her examples to see if I can make any kind of headway.

Now it's time to get some rest before the big gig tonight.

Allen