Well, it's a wrap!  Saturday has come and gone, but memories will go on.  It was great to see so much effort and planning in a relatively short time to come together in one great event.   I had a fantastic time.  If you missed it, no worries, much discussion and materials surrounding the event have already been posted on Jacob Sebastian  and Michael Cole’s blog.  More photos and presentations will be posted shortly.  We had an podcast expert on hand!  It was truly an honor to present with two great MVP's Michael and Jacob!  Special thanks to the SQLDiva herself, Melissa Demsak, leader and coordinator of the NJ SQL User Group.

Jacob makes mention of our trip to NJ.  Took a little effort to find the place (Guess I should have made a right instead of left :-).  What we didn't know as Michael's presentation was underway, is that his topic "Where in the World?" on spatial data and links to google maps was about us!  We could have used this info then.

It was a pretty good crowd for a Saturday - close to 100 sql server dba's and developers.  It was great meeting this nice bunch of folks!  Excellent questions from many in the audience.  Jacob, who came after me, gave some great speaking techniques.  Like, if you don't know the answer, tell them we will take it off-line (LOL) - he should have told me that before! 🙂  But, bookended by such talented and bright MVP's, we did a good job of trying to get all questions answered.  We even deferred to some smart audience folks who helped out as well.

Special thanks to our sponsors, Microsoft and Red-Gate, who provided much needed nutrition and some cool SWAG.  We gave away great prizes, including autographed books written by Jacob and Michael.  I was lucky enough to grab an extra copy of Jacob's book. (Hey Mike, you gotta get me your Pro T-SQL book) Prizes included, The Art of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections, by Jacob, Michael’s book Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer’s Guide, several copies of Windows 7, including a Signature Edition copy, T-shirts from Red-Gate and many more.  Also, we gave away two 3-licensed copies of my core award-winning SQL Server monitoring and alert product - SQLCentric.

Michael's presentation was very interesting and unique as he brought us great insight into SQL Server 2008's new spacial data support, and geocoding. By far, the biggest and most exciting change for developers is the SQL Server 2008 support for spatial data—a powerful addition to the SQL Server programmer's toolbox. 

I think it's unanomous that the surprise speaker of the day was in fact Jacob!  We all knew he was a great author, but now we know it is matched by his presentation skills!  He took a dry topic like 'Error handling' and turned it into one great interactive session that brought a teriffic conclusion to a terrific day!  Those of you who are planning to attend PASS next month, make sure you sign up for Jacob's presentation, and not to miss out!

Thanks to all in attendance who gave up their Saturday to be with us!  Feel free to ping me with questions and comments anytime!

I look forward to working with Jacob, Melissa and Michael again.  New York's Microsoft HQ is under construction (which brought us over the Hudson to NJ), and should be completed just in time for spring - where, we'll do it again with exciting topics on all things SQL.

Now that it's behind us, I hope to get back to a more regular blog schedule 🙂

Signing off - RP