Day 3 at TechEd 2005 was just as busy and exciting as the other days for most people. Surprisingly after two full days of sessions and the exhibition hall, late nights at the Jam sessions at a few local pubs, nightclubs, etc., people were still excited and interested in the event.

There were still lots of SWAG to be had at the various vendor exhibitions and lots of people were still checking out the various products. Whether you can buy products or not, the exhibitions are a great way to see how third party products solve problems, maybe get some ideas on how you can integrate something into your applications, maybe see something you want to ask your company to buy.

It's also a way to support the conference. It's not just your registration fee, because without the vendors, the conference wouldn't take place.

This was more of a day that Andy, Brian and I spent some time talking about the site, so we didn't get to too many sessions. We did see an interesting talk about statistics in SQL Server. Some nice improvements, 32 column limit, the change counter is not per column and not per row, the auto update can be kicked up asynchronously.

The BI Power Hour

A brilliant, IMHO, session put on by Bill Baker, VP of the BI unit for SQL Server. It was a large auditorium that contained a few hundred people and a dozen of so of Bill's team. The announcement that there would be a smartphone given away probably didn't hurt.

Bill told us there were only two slides, one on each projector that said to "fill out a survey".

He announced that the session was just demos and feedback, which was greeted with lots of enthusiasm. No lectures, just demos and feedback. They were giving away shirts, Frisbees, and hats, mostly throwing them out. The first thing was a competition to see who in the BI team could throw a shirt the furthest across the room. They did all right and a similar launch of a sample ball and Frisbee luckily resulted in no injuries to the attendees.

The session was lots of fun and a good model for a quick way to learn about a few different topics. If they can make the demos available, then it's well worth the time. We saw reporting services build a report from an XML URL, Integration Services build consume an XML source and find a count of certain terms, Notification services send e-mail based on an event, all client driven, and more.

Andy had gone to the data caching session that showed how you can "subscribe" a middle tier cache to a set of data. Then if the data changes, the middle tier is notified so it can go get the new data. It's a great idea, though one that has me worried about scale.

This should be the last big announcement from TechEd as tomorrow the SQLServerCentral.com crew is manning the cabana area, answering questions for people, so we won't likely get any time to see sessions. Friday I'm heading home around lunch, so nothing much there. We'll shoot for some pictures tomorrow.

If Andy doesn't break anything else.