Thursday was mostly a chalk-talk day. This isn't a bad thing because the chalk-talks are not recorded but the sessions are. Greg Low did a great session on SQLCLR for the DBA with some updated material from last year's presentation. After that I attended Michael Rys' session on Spatial data for SQL2008. They've implemented a system-defined UDT called Geometry, into which a variety of different sub-types can be loaded. By defining queries that compare one polygon with another and returning whether or not they intersect you can return specific data to your application. It's a new area for me and because I'm a map junkie I think it's interesting. I'll be watching this space in the future.
The next session was on Custom Reports in SQL Server Management Studio, presented by Paul Mestemaker. With the restriction that they can only be run from a client that is on SQL2005 SP2 or greater, and against a server and database running SQL2005 SP2 or greater, and the database has to be in 90 compatibility mode, and the report can have no sub reports, you can run most any report created in Reporting Services. It's not likely you'd want to run application reports from SSMS anyway, so having the ability to create your own reports to monitor your servers is very cool.
Bob Beauchemin presented an interesting session on tracking SQL Server through DDL triggers, event notifications and WMI events. I'm going to be spending a bunch of time in Books Online for this because I'd much rather have SQL Server tell me there's a problem than to have to go poking around to find one.
Lara Rubbelke delevered the last session of the day on High Performance Data Encryption, an area I still struggle with. I learned some neat techniques for finding encrypted data quickly, which can be useful in loss prevention scenarios, where you're watching patterns of behavior with sensitive data.
The Islands of Adventure party was wet (at least at the beginning) but fun. It nicely capped a great week at Tech Ed.
Allen