It’s only day two of the four day conference, and I am already exhausted from attending sessions from 8:00 AM to 6:15 PM, and walking, literally miles, to get back and forth between sessions. The New Orleans convention center is about .6 miles long, and it can take 10-15 minutes to walk between session rooms. Crowding and human traffic jams are still a major problem, and the more I observe, it appears that most of the problem is related to poor design of the convention center itself.

It was announced today that 10,500 people are attending TechEd, which includes attendees, speakers, Microsoft employees, and staff, making this event much larger than the 7,000 that attended TechEd held in Los Angeles last  year.

If you read my blog post from yesterday about TechEd, you probably remember me complaining about not enough seating for many of the BI sessions. Fortunately, TechEd management listed to my complaint, and the complaints of others, and started to offer repeat sessions so more people can attend them. I complement them on listening to feedback.

Unlike yesterday, I was fortunate today to find and attend some sessions that really had some technical meat in them. Most of the sessions I attended were related to high availability or virtualization, and were presented by people who really know the technical side of SQL Server.

The last session of the day was also the highlight of the day. It was presented by Buck Woody, the “Real World DBA”. While Buck is an expert DBA, writer, and presenter, he actually missed his real calling, that of being a comedian. Following a “Don Rickles” approach, he fires joke after joke at the audience, all based on spur of the moment wit, keeping the audience fully engaged in his presentation. In fact, there were eight SQL Server MVPs (Buck’s groupies) in the audience, the largest group of MVPs I have seen at any session so far. If you ever get a chance to hear Buck speak, be sure to not miss it, as you will certainly miss an entertaining presentation.