Another great day in Seattle at the PASS Summit 2009. The highlight for me was getting 23 SQL Server MVPs to sign a copy of the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book just released. All royalties are to be donated to the http://www.WarChild.org charity. The book store at the conference sold all of its 150 copies. It's a great book and a great cause.
The day started with the SQL PASSion awards for tireless volunteers such as Allen Kinsel (North America) and Charley Hanania (International). The whole PASS organization is built on the volunteer model and the PASS Summit conference is a testimony to the work of those volunteers from the Chapter level up to the Board of Directors. It's a privilege to be part of PASS as an independent users group of SQL Server. If you are not a member, join now and get involved, it's free at http://www.sqlpass.org .
The keynote was by Tom Casey, General Manager of SQL Server Business Intelligence Solutions at Microsoft. He outlined the new Self-Service BI solution in Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Amir Netz gave a demo of Excel 2010 with PowerPivot, the new Add-In and showed the 100 million rows demo that is now famous. The secret is in the column compression ("Vertipaq") that limits the local file to 133 MB in this case and allows sub-second sorting and filtering. The output is impressive especially using SharePoint 2010, SilverLight 3.0 and a touch-screen on the Business Analysts machine. Excellent visualization especially with the new Carousel view that looks like a 3D Rolodex online. Very cool.
Next session was "DBA's behaving badly...Worst Practices" by Rod Colledge. Instead of walking through best practices, Rod gave us the other side of the coin which we have all experienced and hopefully, have learned to avoid. Rod volunteered to proof-read the MVP Deep Dives book mentioned above, so he deserves a lot of credit for that thankless job.
After lunch and the book signing, I attended Louis Davidson's session on Database Design. As always, Louis made it entertaining and funny, as well as informative. Normalization and Denormalization. I liked the slide in the middle entitled "Brief Laugh Break...". Everyone did laugh. I will have to use that idea.
I then took a break and experimented with the PowerPivot feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010 in the Microsoft lab room. It was a nice way to escape the hubub of the conference while still focusing on technology.
The best was saved for last with Buck Woody from Microsoft on the Data Collector and Policy Based Management for monitoring SQL Servers. Not only technically detailed but also hilarious. If you have ever attended a presentation by Buck, you will know what I mean. If you haven't, make sure you do in the future. After answering a question on Facets and why you would use the @ID property instead of the @Name property, Buck just turned around and said "Look, if we didn't have it, you'd want it so we put it in!". You had to be there. His irreverent style encourages some ribbing from the audience too - "How long did it take to come up with that awful shade of green for your screen background?" was one question. "That's your last question" was Buck's reply.
I am looking forward to the Microsoft party tonight at GameWorks in downtown Seattle where we can hang out with 2000 new friends. Should be fun.
cheers
Brian
Brian D. Egler, MCITP/MCSE/MCT 2009, is currently an instructor with Global Knowledge, teaching various Microsoft training courses. He is a SQL specialist with a focus on SQL Server, Windows, .Net and XML. Egler has been a technical instructor for over 20 years and has more than 10 years experience with SQL Server, data modeling, database design, application development including IMS, DB2, Sybase. Every year he runs the Boston Marathon for cancer research.
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