Today is the last day for the conference, and I am quite tired. To make things worse, my flight out of here is at 6:30AM tomorrow morning. Ick. I checked on some options to leave earlier, but none were viable. So, it looks like I will head to dinner with some friends, stay up most of the night, and get to the airport on time in the early morning.
After the keynote sessions, I headed over to a discussion about SQL server and SAN storage. The talk was okay, not great, but there was a decent amount of information regarding how a SAN works. And when it comes to SAN performance it is all about the spindles. Good to know. Some of the comments from others in the room were comical, and it was good to know that others have similar struggles with their SAN’s as we do in our shop.
After lunch was a session on debugging security in ss2k5. This was a very good summary of some common errors we have seen in our shop. Unfortunately, the session download is in office 2007, so I cannot open the file and I cannot see from my spot on the floor. From what I could see, I picked up a neat trick that uses fn_my_permissions to display the effective permissions for a principal (very cool). There was a lot of good material on the partial slides I did see, and I hope someday to be able to download the presentation.
The next talk was a Q&A with Ken Henderson. It was in a panel discussion format, but Ken was the only person there, along with Kevin Kline as the moderator. There was some good insight into how Ken became Ken, with how he manages his time, what projects he is working on, how he came to write books, and how did Microsoft manage to screw up the initial release of SP2 for SS2K5. Good times.
The last session of the day was on Data Protection Manager 2007. From what I could tell, this product is being presented as an alternative for database dumps as well as backups to tape. I need to learn more about this, because I am not certain I would want to switch to use DPM for database dumps. Then again, maybe I would. The product looks interesting enough to me that I want to learn more. One question was asked about DPM being dynamic enough to know if a new database had been created. The answer was no, which immediately made me think of maintenance plans.
That concludes the conference for this year. As always, it was a great week. Lots of content, some networking, good food, and great friends. Thanks to everyone for helping to make it a success.
