10:30am - 12:00pm

Either through a technical glitch, or an oversight when I was signing up, but I was registered and confirmed for both tracks (despite impossibly concurrent times for several of them), so I went straight through from keynote to 4:30pm, catching all of the SQL Server track, and one of the Visual Studio events. Obviously I'm intently involved with Visual Studio, however I thought the SQL Server track would be more focused and interesting.

For this session we moved over to the other room - a smaller room, half filled with chairs, featuring 2 large, albeit unfocused, ~9'x11' screens and 2 smaller ~7'x9' screens, and a beautiful, tattered green carpet covering. After some very annoying intro music the session got underway, competing with the sounds of transport trucks and low flying aircraft.

This was a great session. Presented jointly by Barnaby Jeans and Damir Basinick, it was a great overview of some of the new administrative features and changes with SQL Server 2005. From the transition from Enterprise Manager to Management Studio, to a side talk about the Toronto SQL Server Users Group, to examples of some of the new administrative reports available in Management Studio, it was a really great crash course in the advantages that SQL Server brings. Strangely the crowd was largely non-responsive, and Barnaby's attempts at getting feedback largely fell to the floor with the thud. Quite a few in the crowd were playing with their cellphone (one I believe was using the new live video functionality). The banter between Barnaby and Damir was awkward and forced, and often out of sync.

At one point Barnaby asked who in the crowd had looked at the technet blogs, and the response rate was enormously low: While this could be attributed to the malaise of the crowd, I think it was actually a pretty valid response - Most corporate developers and IT workers aren't involved in blogs, online forums, or some of the other things that many of us think are the norm nowadays. I don't say that judgementally or derisively, but as a simple matter of fact: For many this career has stabilized to being more like traditional careers, and few accountants, as a similar example, are out reading the KPMG or government auditor blogs every day. Or ever, for that matter.

Some of the other great examples were the xml showplans, filtered views in Management Studio, shared xml profiles, the database engine tuning advisor. The changes in the profiler look fantastic, including the ability to display time synchronized performance monitors (so you can correlate events with CPU saturation, for instance), and xml plans in profiled events, integrated SMTP mail (rather than the infernally terrible MAPI), sqlcmd. Great stuff. Even if you've played with it yourself it still gives great context and focus to know where to really pay attention.