Asia MVP Summit Wrap Up
The Asia MVP Summit finished last week, but my remaining days in Singapore became so hectic that I just didn’t get any chance to add to my blog.
On Day 3 of the summit I had my session on “In-depth SQL Server Integration Services”. From conversations with MVPs and observing Mahesh’s session it was pretty clear to me that the audience would be a mix of individuals with deep SQL (and SSIS) knowledge and others who were there just to find out what this Integration stuff is about. So my talk was more of “steep dive” instead of the promised “deep dive”. I started off with the basics, introducing SSIS and then doing demos that progressively went from simple integration to my favorite “Beyond ETL” ones including one showing text mining on RSS and then the package becoming the data source for a Reporting Services report (a topic for a later posting). This last demo though didn’t fully work because no data was returned by the package when it was executed during the report preview. Not sure what happened here, because the same demo had worked all morning and then has worked since. Most likely I got too caught up in hyping up the demo and did something wrong (pilot error).
All-in-all I think that it was a good session with a full room and good participation. I also got good feedback afterwards. SSIS is such a joy to talk about and show.
I really enjoyed meeting the Asian MVPs (if I met you and you read this, drop me a line) and hearing their feedback. I look forward to more opportunities to interact with them.
After the MVP Summit finished, I still had one more (unbelievably hectic) day left in Singapore.
The next day started with an early morning visit (I did a few of these during my stay in Singapore) to a customer who wants to implement the sort of data integration and cleansing scenario, combined with data mining which is unique to SSIS. Next I did a webcast for Microsoft technical sales people across Asia. I have done similar webcasts from Redmond, but the time zone difference has made it difficult for people in Asia to attend.
In the evening I presented about SSIS to the Singapore SQL Users Group (http://sgsql.sqlservercentral.com/). Sukhdev Singh who is a SQL MVP is the founder of this user group. I had expected modest attendance given that this is a fairly new user group and the low attendance for a similar event for the MSDN User Group the previous evening and the fact that it was at 6:30 in the evening on a Thursday. Boy was I wrong. This was held at the Microsoft Offices (really nice views of downtown Singapore !) in their auditorium which is a fairly large room. As I was setting up I could see a long line forming outside the room for registration. By the time I started the room was pretty much packed with about 150 people attending. I had a great time presenting first about what is new in SQL Server 2005 and then launching into SSIS demos. Towards the end Maheshp joined me (he was doing double duty presenting almost at the same time to a Student User Group) for the final 30 minutes to talk about SQL Management Tools. We got some good questions and in general a lot of interest.
To wrap up the day, around 10 PM we headed off to grab a bite at Lau Pau Sat, which is an outdoor “Hawkers Center” where a huge variety of ethnic fast foods is served. The sights, smells and tastes were totally fascinating. Around 11:00 we made our way back to the Hotel (and had a really hard time finding a cab). I was leaving the next day and so had to pack my bags and generally wrap up. The flight left Singapore at 6:00 AM and so I had to leave the Hotel by 3:30 AM. I took a quick nap from midnight to 3 and then got ready and headed off to the Airport. What a day it had been, almost non-stop action from 8:30 in the morning till midnight and then a huge long trip home just a few hours later.
It is really good to be back home now and focusing on getting CTP 15 out. I am tremendously excited about wrapping up SQL 2005 and getting it released to the user community. We have a way to go still, but we are getting closer and better by the day.