Yesterday I attended a pre-conference session with Kimberly Tripp and Bob Beauchemin on High Availability solutions for SQL Server. It was a great session (how could it NOT be?) and I learned about some options I have on a VLDB application I have that will help me manage a table that's about 90GB.
Today's keynote was entertaining, with Christofer Lloyd coming out with the DeLorean from the Back to the Future series. The presentation was informative, if a bit rushed. It looks like Windows Server 2008 will have some great scalability features that will be useful in our environment.
Gert Drapers presented a session on Data Dude, and it helped me figure out how to solve a vendor software upgrade problem I've got, so I'm looking forward to getting back to take care of that problem. I attended Itzik Ben-Gan's presentation on Inside T-SQL. What that man can do with Transact-SQL never ceases to amaze me!
The highlight of the day was David Campbell and the SQL Server team presenting the overview session on SQL Server 2008 (Katmai). The new datatypes that allow you to intelligently store location data could have immediate impact on my company's trade-show attendee tracking, if we chose to implement it. I can see pricing booth space based on actual attendee visit data, collected via RFID tags on their badges. How cool is that?
Fernando Guerrero and I had an interesting conversation about how Solid Quality Learning has been growing, and the direction they're headed in the future. I wish them all the success in the world, and they deserve it.
Bob Beauchemin presented a chalk-talk on PowerShell and SMO, which I found interesting as well. Bob approaches SMO from a programmer's perspective, while I view it from an administrator's perspective. We had a good conversation about that after the talk.
I also met with Tony Davis of Simple-Talk.com and got my Author's shirt, and a very nice pen! Very cool. I'm really looking forward to joining him and a few others for a beer downtown Orlando tomorrow night.
You know, it's the people that I've met (and continue to meet) at TechEd as much as the technical content that make it worthwhile coming here each year.
Allen