This past week at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Convention Center in Las Vegas, November 11-12, SQLServerCentral.Com held its first SQL Server track at SQL Server Connections. The track’s three speakers presented nine different sessions to 373 attendees.

The SQLServerCentral.com track was one of four educational tracks held at SQL Server Connections, which is part of the greater DevConnections Conference, which drew about 2,500 attendees overall. While there were no official number provided, it appeared that there were about 300-400 DBAs attending the SQL Server Connections part of the larger conference.

Joe Celko, author of many books, including SQL for Smarties, made three presentations focusing on database design and SQL fundamentals; including “Darling, Your SQL is Sooo Last Season”, “Database Scales, Measurements, and Data Encoding Schemes”, and “Naming and Modeling Data Objects.”

Grant Fritchey, SQL Server MVP and book author, including SQL Server Execution Plans (download it free); focused on performance tuning, presenting sessions on “Scouting Out Execution Plans”, “MUQT: More Unnecessary Query Tuning”, and “DMVs for Performance Tuning”.

Brad McGehee, SQL Server MVP, and Director of Education of Red Gate Software, spoke on “Optimizing temdb Performance”, “Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Performance Data Collector”, and “Free Software for SQL Server DBAs”. You can download the presentations from Brad’s sessions here.