After getting a little lost from the rail to the hotel, I finally got to sleep Sunday night after a 10+ hour airplane/airport travel time. Well worth it especially after seeing LSU whoop up on Florida in Tiger Stadium on Saturday afternoon.

Started by meeting Robert from BCBS to have an early registration and breakfast and the networking started at 7:30am with a gentleman from New York and another from California. We chatted about performance tuning on SQL Server as well as Sybase. Rob started to see what I meant about the value of PASS right away. He went to Brent Ozar’s SANs and Virtualization Pre-con and I hit Rob Farley’s 1/2 comedy/music show and Advanced TSQL for query tuning.

Lunch break had Robert and I at a table with Ryan and David from Dallas talking about SQL Saturday’s. We also had some new friends for lunch to chat about different companies we worked for.

The second half of the day was more Rob Farley and TSQL. He was able to explain some property window information about query plans. Never realized sometimes you have to read the plan from left to right to really understand them. WHERE and HAVING clauses were explained in more detail. The highlights was a new term for me: Residual Predicates. You really need to read up on this to understand advanced query tuning.

Rob even helped promote my 3rd Normal Talk on Friday.

The evening was a well organized Networking dinner that Andy Warren and Steve Jones put together at Lowell’s. The food line moved at a good pace for outside conversations, but the food was served fast and it was good. Saw @SqlDiva from New York and Kathy K from Microsoft. Idera was there with Dave and Heather.

Robert and I called it a night at 10PM CST (we are on Pacific time, so it was 8pm), but we were both tired.

Tomorrow is all about networking with Virtual Chapter leaders, local user group leaders and SQL Saturday organizers. Should be interesting.

Here are some links:

Rod Farley Residual Predicate - http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2011/03/22/probe-residual-when-you-have-a-hash-match-a-hidden-cost-in-execution-plans.aspx

Lowell’s in Seattle - http://www.eatatlowells.com/

24-Hours of PASS DB SOP - Standard Operating Procedure for Normalized Database Design

God Bless,

Thomas LeBlanc