This day was sort of like a trip to Six Flags amusement part. It started a little rough, then got better before some crisis got me spun up again. Especially with kids, it seems that almost I almost never have a smooth trip on a day off.

Getting up at 7am Eastern time after a fairly late night, and being 2 hours behind on Mountain time didn't make for a great start. Still, I struggled down to meet Brian and head out to the convention center. We had to take some spare SQL Server Standard magazines to give away on the floors, and carrying heavy boxes of magazines in the summer Florida sun doesn't make for a great smelling day. 🙁

So I took it easy, walking slowly through the heat to make it to the exhibition hall.

The Keynote

First up today was the keynote given by Paul Flessner, the EVP of the server systems. I must have arrived with deodorant still intact because the seats around me filled in nicely. Brian commented a little on Paul's speech and announcements, so I'll just a little color commentary.

We noticed that Paul looks a little like Al Bundy, but with none of the bad attitude from that sitcom. He's an engaging speaker, more enjoyable than Steve Ballmer. The MC made a little joke about him shutting down some disk drives early in his developer career and he admitted to accidentally shutting down a bank of mainframe disk drives one time that caused a major outage. Nice to know that Andy and I aren't the only ones to mess up.

One of his demo's showed the fault tolerance of Database mirroring. While running a benchmark test of 64-bit SQL Server, a small robot, modeled after the battle bot robots came up and destroyed the network switch with it's battle ax arm and a small fireworks display. Fortunately the other server picked the load right up and the benchmark, while causing a bit more stress, continued to run.

Donald Farmer, one of the main Integration Services developers came out and did a quick, but impressive demo of the DTS replacement. He looks and sounds a bit like Braveheart, which we gave him a hard time about later. His demo was great, however, and I'm working on getting a copy to put on the site and walk people through.

Database Mail

Andy and I have learned more from speaking with individual SQL Server developers, so we headed over to the cabana area for the small Q&A talks. The first one was on Database Mail, and since that's a topic that often gets asked about, I decided to see what I could learn from that one. The speaker was late and had hard drive issues, so fortunately Euan Garden showed up to fill in. If you've never seen Euan speak, he's good and enjoyable, though a little high strung.

He explained some of the differences between v7 and 2000 and how things have changed in 2005. I'll write up a more detailed look at this later, but it's an interesting change. SQLMail will continue to run in 2005, but will be removed in future versions, so this is the time to move off of it.

The new system will be SMTP based, but could be extended to other protocols and has a host of other new advantages, including cluster support. I know people will really appreciate the changes being made here and look forward to them.

The Rest of the Day

Much of the rest of my day was helping Andy out with a crisis at work, so I drove around Orlando with him to his office. We tried to ping Euan on his problem, a particular stored procedure that seems to change it's plan and run hundreds of times slower than usual. Euan suggested recompile which we'd already done, so he admitted we stumped him. I've known him a number of years, so this was quite impressive that he was stumped.

We fixed Andy's problems and then thanks to the horrible wireless connectivity in the conference center, I was very slow to get this stuff out. Still it was a good second day and some good information in sessions attended by friends.