The first day of PASS pre-conference sessions was great. I attended Andrew Kelly's presentation on Practical Performance Monitoring, and am very happy I did. There have been a lot of articles about gathering performance metrics, but it always seemed there was something missing in the information that prevented me from being able to gather the data. Andrew's presentation provided all the details I needed on how to get the data and a variety of ways of making use of it. Now my boss will be happy that I can provide more detailed metrics.
After the session I attended a meeting of MCT's that Lutz Ziob, DM of Microsoft Learning, hosted to hear comments about the Instructor Led Training products for SQL Server 2005. There's some dissatisfaction with the current offerings and it was great that Lutz was able to accept the honest concerns of the training providers present in the meeting. It also gave me a chance to renew my acquaintences with Fernando Guerrero of Solid Quality Learning and Colin Lyth of Microsoft, both of whom I'd worked with on the Objective Domain for the Database Developer track.
Allen