Denver is a great location for a conference. The convention center is two blocks from the 16th street mall - must be 10-12 blocks of shops, restaurants, etc. I stayed at the Courtyard Marriott, small rooms, but directly on 16th St, and nice enough. Only downside is the airport is about a zillion miles from town, runs about $50-60 if you tax in. This time of year is perfect too, great weather. I imagine more years than not the conference will be in Seattle to leverage the MS presence, but they should plan to return to Denver again sometime soon.

Keynote this morning wasn't bad, usually spin and backstory before they got to the demos. SQL 2008 gets the ability to manage servers via the equivalent of Group Policy, long overdue! Spatial data types and indexes look interesting and the demo they did wasnt bad, though was slow in one case. They also finally are providing a way to throttle queries, sort of. You can create different buckets that get x resources, then use a function to specify which bucket a connection falls in to. It works great if you can put MainProductionApp.exe in a bucket and give it 30%, and let anything else run in the "other" bucket and give it 40% or so. In that case even if someone runs the proverbial cross join in the other bucket the MainProductionApp is unaffected. In practice most applications expose search or similar functionality that can often be pretty tough, though not as bad as a cross join. You can get the same results by executing those queries with a different connection string so that they fall in the "other" pool, otherwise one user running the query from hell can still affect all the other production users. They explain it better than I did, and its a great improvement, time will tell if its enough.

Spent more time today just talking shop with old friends and new. Had the chance to spend a good bit of time with Greg & Jeremy from Edgewood. We go back a ways and are about the nicest guys in the business. They also run http://www.mssqltips.com/ which is nicely packaged and pretty useful, worth looking at when you have time. Finished up the day at the SQLSentry party, who are also nice guys - they work hard, have a good product, and always played fair back when we were selling them ad space on SSC. And no, no vested interest in either of them, other than nice guys deserve some recognition from time to time!

Lots more discussion about PASS chapters today, in the next couple days I'll finish up my wish list. Not as big as you might think and I think most of it would be easy to do. Then again, it's easy to say easy when you're making the list and not executing it.