So, today was the first day of the main conference and suddenly there’s 4x the number of people around.
One thing I do have to say straight off, congrats to the conference centre for actually having the wireless network working on the 1st day of the conference. Has to be the first time this has happened in the years I’ve been attending.
The keynote wasn’t as interesting as it could be. No real surprise, there’s no product announcements, no astounding features to demo (other than stuff that’s been seen before), no launch to be done. It was a discussion of where we’ve come from and where we’re going (including into the cloud) and then some demos of R2.
Bob’s level 500 session was a good way to start the conference. Maybe not as deep as the memory internals last year, but good, solid info. Useful stuff there.
The “Birds of a feather” lunch seemed to go down well. I chatted about execution plans for over an hour. Didn’t really get too deep into exec plans, other than discussing the difference between estimated and actual plans (none other than the run-time information) how statistics affect plans (I’m doing a full hour-long session on that on Thursday). Anyone interested in reading exec plans, see my blog series here or Grant’s e-book (available from SQLServerCentral)
After lunch there was a session on PowerPivot (formerly known as Gemini) and on scaling SQL beyond 64 processors. Interesting to see what kind of changes were needed to the SQLOS to handle that.
How’s these for servers?
