I was only able to get to two sessions today, DAT210 - SQL Server 2005 Database Engine: Six Months After Its Release, led by Sameet Agarwal and Rob Reinauer. My favorite quote was when Sameet defined the Plan Forcing option of Plan Guides as the "shut up and do what I'm telling you" option.
Roger Wolter did a great job explaining some of the complexities in DAT315 - Building Reliable Service Applications with SQL Server 2005 and Service Broker. There are a lot of pieces to Service Broker, and figuring out the proper sequence to set things up can be confusing, but he makes it seem very straightforward, and it's evident there's a lot of power waiting to be tapped. (I think I need to build a presentation of this product so I can understand it fully myself.)
I spent some time in the TLC area chatting with Rick Heiges and watching Fernando Guerrero talk about the relevance of stored procedures with all the power available in ADO.Net 2.0, and I went through a very cool developers lab on Windows Vista, demonstrating its focus on running applications in the lowest necessary privilege levels. (The red backpack was a very nice bonus.)
Most of my time was spent going through the practice tests, preparing for my 70-431 exam. I don't feel real confident because there's a lot of focus in the exam on aspects of SQL Server I don't use, like replication and Service Broker, and a number of questions on XQuery, which goes against my personal feeling that XML removes the "relational" from relational databases. I got pretty annoyed, though, when on one of the practice tests I answered a question that described setting up backup schedules for full backups on one schedule, differentials on a second schedule, and transaction log backups on a third schedule. I answered that you run the Maintenance Plan Wizard multiple times to set this up. (I know this is true, both from my work with the product and from my work at Microsoft on the 70-444 exam. The practice test told me I was wrong, that it can be done with a single execution of the Maintenance Plan Wizard. Come On! Doesn't Microsoft review these practice tests for accuracy?
Well, enough of my ranting, I need to get some sleep so I'm ready for tomorrow.
Allen