Allen White

PASS Pre Conference (Monday)

On Monday I attended Itzik Ben-Gan's pre-conference session on Transact-SQL. I've attended a couple of his sessions in the past, and was looking forward to a full day session with him. I wasn't disappointed. His code to concatenate strings using FOR XML was an eye-opener, and using the log functions to create multiplicative aggregates was pure genius. Those were just two examples that jump out the morning after the session. I recommend checking out his books (www.insidetsql.com) and his blog (www.sqlmag.com).

The final article of my three-part series has also been published, and is up on the Simple Talk website. Here's the link: Automate your Database Integrity checks using SMO

Today I plan to attend Gert Drapers' pre-conference session on Data Dude (Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals.) I've extracted database projects for documentation and played with the tool a bit, but am looking forward to the deep dive to see how to really use it.

Oh, and thanks to Lara Rubbelke and Cindy Gross for some great advice. The conversation was enjoyable and enlightening.

Allen