I was unable to go to TechEd this year but I did get a chance to hit up Code Camp. It was a one day free event with 4 different tracks of 6 sessions each. I attended all of the SQL sessions and learned some good stuff.

The first session was on Full Text Search by Kent Chenery (blog | twitter). It was a good overview on FTS. I've been studying a bit for some upcoming certification exams so reviewing CONTAINS vs FREETEXT as well as FORMSOF was great for me. I didn't know about the 50 preinstalled filters either.

Next was supposed to be a session about monitoring your server for $0.00, but speaker Dave Dustin couldn't speak (literally, he lost his voice). We watched part of a powershell video from PASS 2010 instead.

Next up was Steven Wang's (blog) session on minimal logging and moving around large chunks of data. He talked about the best way to update/delete a lot of data by moving the data you wanted to keep and truncating the rest. It was an interesting talk. I want to play around with some of his ideas some more and try them out. He also covered trace flag 610, which I never heard about.

Last but not least was Leo Miller's session on SQL security. He went over how to get into SQL using just the builtin\admin group. I've actually needed to use this before so I don't think it's a terrible thing. I was new at a job and no one knew the sa password for one SQL instance. He was saying that this feature will be gone in Denali. I have mixed feelings about it. He did cover some really cool stuff on SQL injections. I never even thought about encrypting sql commands in HEX, putting the command into a variable, and then executing that variable. He also mentioned putting sp_password in your injection to cover your tracks. Overall this was my favorite presentation. I wish we had more time to go into detail and actually get to bust out our laptops and play around.

I really enjoyed Code Camp 2011. I can't wait to go to the next one. As for Auckland though, I think the next event we have coming up is SQLSaturday. Woohoo!