Day 1

The Steve Ballmer keynote was the big event to kick off TechNet 2005, and while interesting it wasn't spectacular. There was an interesting demo with Windows Mobile, looking at remotely managing mobile devices, PDAs, cell phones, etc. If you have a large enough infrastructure and can deploy the Windows Mobile devices, this will come with the next SP for Exchange 2003 and it's a nice step for security. If the device is lost and the user enters incorrect passwords however many times you specify, you can have the device wipe itself. Good for security, but it certainly makes some things easier for the thief. They get a new wiped device :). Not to be too cynical, but this solves one problem, the loss of the device and the information, but how many calls will be generated by people who enter their password incorrectly? It's not a password reset anymore, but a device reload. As with most security, it's a good idea, but it will cause some new issues.

There is some talk about the New World of Work, connecting people easier to information, but it seemed that Outlook/Office 12 and the new MSN search were the focus. I've seen Bill Gates speak 2 or 3 times and he is definitely a better speaker, more polished and more interesting. Ballmer seemed more business focused, less amusing, though certainly willing to make fun of himself. There had to be 4 or 5,000 people in the keynote with a line to get in and more of a line to get out.

I'm sure with Paul Flessner tomorrow, we'll see more SQL Server. There's rumors of the next CTP being announced this week, so we'll see what happens.

The facility is huge, if you've never been here. Breakfast had tables from one end to the other. I'm guessing that easily there were tables of 8, each spaced about 4 or 5 feet apart, and taking up 30 or 40 football fields (NFL or World Cup). Truly a huge geekfest. Geeks of every shape and size, most everyone with the official TechEd shirt or hat and definitely the bag. And that's just at meals!! The exhibition hall is larger and there are still more spaces devoted to breakout sessions where people can speak.

One thing that is true at TechEd and the PDC, not necessarily other conferences, is that you will never go hungry or thirsty. There are bins of sodas, water, coffee urns, etc. through out the conference hall. There's not a moment when you probably can't find something to drink, or eat for that matter with fruit, snacks, etc. always available. Some vendors even sponsor latte or smoothie carts where you can get a little fancier drinks. All for free! Well, not free, your admission pays for this, but Microsoft isn't looking to make money at this conference, so they go all out.

And if you need a break, there's a gaming zone with a dozen XBOXs or so and a whole LAN gaming party setup. I noticed right after the keynote about 50 people all connected for some FragFirst game, where they were all running around in the jungle trying to kill each other. Looked like fun, but Andy wouldn't let me go 🙁

One annoying thing was that the wireless connectivity in the exhibition hall is not working very well. Even getting an IP took 2 or 3 tries and then the connectivity to the Internet is limited and sporadic.

Working with SQL Server with VS2005

This was one of the sessions that I attended, seeing as how the use of Visual Studio 2005 is not only tightly integrated with SQL Server, but also will really be required learning for DBAs that wish to work with many other features in SQL2k5.

This sessions really was more for developers and focused more on SQL Server Express. For those of you that haven't worked with the product, it's replacing MSDE, is free, and while cut down, it has much more power than MSDE. It's the same engine as SQL Server but is single processor, a 4GB limit, and some of the add ons (Analysis Services, etc.) are not present. But the CLR is there and you can build CLR Objects, so you can deploy the same .NET code on the local desktops. One neat thing here was the session was broadcast on the Internet at the same time with a few volunteers that answered questions as the session was presented.

There was some good time spent on discussing the CLR v T-SQL for tasks. Mostly it's computational tasks or cumbersome T-SQL tasks that the CLR is used for. The benchmark was if you can express things in a single DML statement, use T-SQL. After that, you need to think about it a bit and decide if this is something that fits better in a CLR function. For DBAs, I suspect that you will need to learn how VS2005 works and be prepared to argue with developers on where logic should reside as well as the form it will take.

I'll have to dig into some of the new features and get some content out here. Probably not this week, but look for something soon. Or if anyone else wants to help the DBAs get up to speed on the new CLR development, drop me a note or send a draft to articles@sqlservercentral.com.

One nice thing is that the tool looks at the assemblies that are on the server and gives you a list of those references. That's nice to be sure that you're not adding in things that aren't on the server. It remains to be seen how well this prevents issues on the servers, but it's a good thing to see. I'm sure there's a way around it, but at least a developer has to make a conscious decision to do it.

Diving Into Mars

Not the planet, the new feature in SQL Server 2005 that allows multiple active result sets, hence the name MARS. Andy and I were looking for something to go see in the afternoon and we noticed this session at the community cabanas. Since Andy is more of a developer and this was an interesting new technology, we walked over.

It was led by one of the lead storage engine developers of SQL Server 2005 and since no one else showed up at first, he, Andy, and I sat around talking. He explained a little history of how SQL Server 2000 works and then talked about MARS.

I don't want to paraphrase too much, and I got his email for some followup questions (look for an article soon), but suffice it to say that the talk was very eye opening. It was surprising to us to find out that all the requests you submit will run under a single thread. So there isn't an parallelism going on here. We're not sure of all the ramifications, but be careful if you decide to work with MARS and definitely learn more about it.

Conclusion

Overall it was a pretty good day. The expo is huge and being experienced guys, we didn't look for too much swag. Most of our time there was greeting our vendors and saying hello.

I have to say that the scale of this thing can be overwhelming and there are so many sessions that you are bound to run into conflicts. Still, this is a great conference for the IT guys and if you get the chance, you should come.