SQL Saturday #66

Since the event was to be held at Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center my wife and I decided to make a day of it and pack up the kids and head down to Colorado Springs for SQL Saturday #66. We began the day early and hit the road at 6am to get down there.

At the door each person received a pass to pretty much everything in the center (go-kart, laser tag, putt-putt, etc). Once inside Chris Shaw had us jump right into a networking exercise which made everyone feel a little more familiar with each other and then it was on to the talks.

“Beyond BIDS” with Chris Randall covered the various aspects of BIDS (SSIS, SSRS, SSAS) at lightning speed. Excellent stuff and my brain is still reeling on the possibilities and the tips he outlined.

After a fun and sweaty networking/laser tag event I took in Tom Norman’s Policy Based Management talk. Learned about the terms and types of policies you can evaluate in SQL Server. He also touched on the EPM Framework (which I implemented on a test database this morning).

Lunch was then provided and it was a chance to catch up with some peers and see how the family was enjoying the Fun Center.
After lunch I took in Bill Fellows talk on “45 new 2005/2008 T-SQL Features in 45 minutes”. He blew through them without a minute to spare. I have to say there were a couple that I didn’t know about that could come in pretty handy.

Mark Halstead gave a great talk on performance tuning, another game of laser tag, then last but not least was TJ Belt’s talk on “Documentation. You know you love it” which reminded us all of how poor a lot of us do it.

The last event was the swag giveaway with some very nice prizes.

All in all it was a great day to spend learning about SQL Server. I do regret not being able to take in Steve Jones talk on “The Modern Resume” and “Securing SQL Server” with my twitter friend Gabriel Villa. But there was just too many good topics to choose from.

It was extremely nice the family could come along and do their thing in the Fun Center.
My kids had a blast!

Thanks again to all the volunteers, Mr. Biggs, and the Colorado Springs user group for putting on such an awesome event.

I can truthfully say it was the best event I’ve ever attended.