On Jan 18 at the Westin Galleria in Dallas, better than 950 SQL Server professionals attended the 1-day free event at the Westin.  Bill Baker gave the keynote and said that SQL Server 2005 would ship this Summer and to also consult the calendar on when Summer officially ends.

I attended breakout sessions on Security, Data Warehousing Enhancements, High Availability, and Internals.  Of course, there was a strong marketing message from Microsoft, but not all of the speakers were MSFT employees.  The main focus was 2005 and the neat features coming your way.

Perhaps the thing that I enjoyed the most was catching up with some folks that I have not seen in a while.  Networking with other professionals is perhaps the biggest benefit of events like these.  Thanks to everyone who dropped by the booth to say “Hi“.  I enjoyed meeting you.

There were about 12 exhibitors.  SWAG was OK.  It seems like most exhibitors are going for the one big giveaway instead of the everyone gets something approach.  This is OK, but I'd like to win sometime. ;-)

As a reminder, PASS will be at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine this September.  Hope to see you then!