Wednesday was a very long day, but a good one.
Al Comeau of Microsoft presented a session on security best practices in SQL Server. Most everything he mentioned I already knew, but it's a really nice checklist to have handy for setting up new servers.
Dan Jones' session on SQL Server 2008 Managability Overview provided a look at the new policy-based method for managing not just one server at a time, but groups of servers. This to me is really exciting, because it's the first time we'll have tools to manage servers the way we're expected to by our companies. You establish categories of servers, financial, web, manufacturing, etc. and define a set of server properties that are appropriate for each category. Then, when you're deploying servers, you define which category the server falls under and it is installed with that set of properties. When databases are created and are accessed, the ways they're used must comply with the rules set up for that category of servers. Another feature coming with Katmai is the automatic collection of performance statistics - it will be interesting to play with this feature to see how they capture and more importantly, how they use this information.
After lunch I attended a session on how Microsoft IT manages its databases. They already have an automation tool for their backup and maintenance strategy like I built (and described in my series of Simple-Talk articles), and that felt good. They use MOM (and now SCOM) for monitoring performance metrics.
A side note - during the afternoon, starting with the IT presentation, a severe thunderstorm came through Orlando, and the rain on the roof of the convention center was so strong it was hard to hear the presenters. Wow.
The next session was a chalk-talk on T-SQL enhancements in Katmai. There are new data types, including Date (yes, just date), Time, DateTimeOffset (for time zone management) and DateTime2 which can track a date/time value down to 100 nanoseconds. I got to this session a bit late and had to sit on the concrete floor, which made things "interesting" trying to get back up after an hour or so, but I made room next to me for Itzik Ben-Gan. Itzik's questions during the presentation were as much fun as the presentation. The new MERGE statement will be a nice feature to have in T-SQL, and will save a lot of code down the road.
The last presentation of the day was back with Kimberly Tripp with another demo fest, this time for disaster recovery, and I got to see how to get a table partitioned in place with the application still running. This was pretty amazing and I will be trying it in my test lab as soon as I get home.
The Microsoft Influencer party was held at Margaritaville, near Universal Studios. Because of the rain, and the long walk to get to the restaurant, I was soaking wet when I arrived. After getting some food (and a margarita, of course) we found a place to sit and eat. By the time we finished eating it seemed like the place was clearing out. I'm not sure if the weather kept attendance down, but I'm guessing that was a large part of it.
Time to go - another big day Thursday.
Allen