From The SQL Server Connections Conference, Final Report
Chris Shaw reports from the conference as things are winding down…
When you live on the West coast, then go to the East Coast for a conference, 8:00 AM is really early in the morning! On Day 3, I can tell you that many attendees are feeling it. A number of the attendees, as well as speakers, are starting to feel the lack of sleep. Along with this, the knowledge that we have taken in is starting to reach that critical mass point. The DevConnections crew sure does a great job putting together the conferences – and many are working the continuing conferences next week for Windows and Exchange. They really pack a lot of great content into these two weeks here in Orlando.
There were a number of good sessions today, and the best part in my opinion is, many of the speakers are seeing that the attendees are starting to get tired. Mathew Roche shared with the audience during his session on SSIS Deployments a number of charts that accurately showed his profanity levels in relation to the technologies. The interesting one was Vista, which only accounted for 5%. The end result was great applause for putting together the unique presentation and his take on things.
As I write this I am talking to two gentlemen in the speaker room who are using the word “DUDE,” and trying to determine the proper use for those of us over 30. I think the end result was that we should really try to avoid this statement on the whole. I’m not really sure how we got on the topic in the first place, but we can probably chalk it up to the lack of sleep and overflow of new information from sessions.
Mike White was showing some great examples of Pivot Tables and how they are used with Analysis Services. It was great to see the power of SQL Server 2008 in area’s that I normally don’t get to work on a day to day basis. Mike will finish up the day with a session that shows a peek behind data mining. Clearly there will be a lot of different hooks for Analysis Services and the different Office integration points. We’ll have some experimentation and learning to do here with how these new integration points will impact supporting the databases out there.
One interesting thing was that during the SQL Connections conference, there was also a sales conference happening in the venue. I believe it’s for a potato chip company. In several of their sessions, they’ve been cheering, sounding horns and such as they do their motivational talks. One of the Microsoft speakers was quick on his toes and had his audience start clapping every few seconds so that we could return the favor. It was a great response and everyone had a good time with it.
It’s been an excellent conference, with a lot of exposure to the new features in SQL Server 2008. I’ve seen some solid examples of how to apply these new changes and am really looking forward to testing and using several of the new features.
As I head to the airport, I spent a little time talking to the friends that I have had for years and the new ones I made this week and we are already making plans for the next conference.
Video Program: SQLonCall
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