Today's keynote was from Tom Casey, called Bringing Greater agility to your business.
The number for the day is 20%. Fewer than 20% of the people that we help every day as data professionals, have access to BI tools and technology. I wonder if that's true. In many places I'd think it was lower, but I do agree with Tom that we have to do better. We have to find ways to better bring data to our customers.
And educating them. Helping them not only to see data and use tools, but also how to understand patterns in data. That requires some business and knowledge growth from us as well.
Microsoft continues to work on traditional BI tools and technology, and continues to increase their investment. They also support PASS, with 2 dedicated BI tracks and over 50 BI sessions. 31% of the people attending chose DW and BI as their tracks. It's good to keep in mind that Microsoft cancelled their BI conference, so they have sent a lot of people here. I hope they continue to support BI at PASS, even if they revive their own conference.
Or maybe PASS would sponsor a BI conference?
A customer success story from Premier Bankcard, 9th largest M/C issuer in the US. They're likely a good BI customer, needing to analyze lots of data and understand trends. They supposedly feed information from the data warehouse to all employees. That's like saying all users receive information from the financial system because they get a pay stub.
As much as I like the idea of showcasing customers, I hate that things are hyped up and unrealistic. We believe in MS technology. You don't need to hype, BS, or excite us. We're already there. Give us real details and reasons along with realistic issues that have to have occurred.
The MS vision, BI for everyone. It's good that they're recognizing that there are all kinds of information, stored in all kinds of formats. And you can't force it all to be in databases or cubes. We have to find a new way to bring information together in new ways, and giving that power to more users.
The DIY guy, the guy, or gal, that needs to get things done. You assemble the information yourself, in Access or Excel. You build an application that's effective.
And it's done fast.
And as more people start to want your data, because it works, your application becomes a problem. It doesn't scale in Access or Excel.
It IT we've tried to squash that guy too often. We complain about them, but they're effective. Microsoft I think is giving up on fighting this guy and instead embrace him and give him more tools. I agree with that, and PowerPivot is a tool designed to work with this guy.
Gemini has become PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for Sharepoint. Amir Netz, who is a great speaker, is doing a PowerPivot demo. I saw some of this yesterday in a press briefing, and talked to a TAP customer whose data they are using for the demo. It's pretty cool.
One very interesting thing in the Powerpoint demo is the amount of compression they get. I saw 101,000,000 rows in an Excel, PowerPivot table. It's 20+GB raw, but it's compressed to 133MB. It sorts and scrolls fast, faster than it used to take for 65k rows. The demo is impressive. I might need to get Red Gate's Data Generator and give this a try and see if it really works on my desktop.
The way it works is there is an instance of SSAS running in-process in Excel. I hope it scales well, and doesn't crush the average desktop machine when it's running Outlook, etc.
There are some enhancements to the formula engine in PowerPivot, using Excel type expressions, but bringing more BI type functionality. The formulas now work with tables, not just scalars.
The thing I worry about is the refresh/recalculate of Excel being used to requery data, or recalculate things when someone hits a button or opens an XLSX. That could cause quite a load on the system. It's a good idea in practice, but I start to see the potential mesh interconnections of these XLSXes with more systems. It could cause more problems.
The idea is that users will integrate with Sharepoint and upload their spreadsheets there. There are new skins to present the documents in new ways instead of just a list of names. That is cool. Eye candy for the information worker. Not a bad thing, but I can see a meeting to decide what view to present to people.
One thing I saw yesterday, and it very cool, is a set of geographical controls for visualizing data. I haven't needed these often, but when I have, it's been hard to visualize things without a good control. And cumbersome to set one up. That is a nice enhancement.
When you upload the XLSX to Sharepoint, the application uses an instance of Analysis Services on the server. That's good and bad. It gives us something to manage, but the application appears to be automatically built to power the PowerPivot functionality. That's scary for IT and I don't know what it means, but I have the utmost confidence that things will not work smoothly and DBAs will still have jobs.
The thing that it seems to me is that you have to go 2010 all the way. Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server 2008 R2. And it's a lot of 1.0 technology.
I wonder how many people are willing to do this? I did speak with one of the TAP customers at breakfast and he likes it. It has worked well for him, and he doesn't seem to be too worried. How much of that is NDA and he can't talk about issues, I don't know. How much of it is that he's been dunked in the MS kool-aid? Who knows, but I think that it must be working well for him to be willing to share this information.
There is more information at www.powerpivot.com and @powerpivot.
After Bob Muglia, Ted Kummert came on stage. He's the senior VP of the server tools division and works for Bob. He talked about how life has changed for him at PASS and then gave us his top 5 to be at PASS
Great adoption of SQL Server 2008 in the last year. I'd love to know more about numbers here.
"SQL Server is a great thing to be a part of" - Ted Kummert.
Microsoft rolled out a vision of how to fit SQL Server into the Information Platform Vision. So moving beyond data, to now only store, but gain insight and also use the data. The vision also seeks to get users more at the center of what the product needs to do.
The four pillar strategy
Mission Critical Platform - Quality has to be there. By all measures, SQL Server 2008 is the highest quality release ever. An order of magnitude less fixes in SS2K8 SP1 than SS2K5 SP1. But more than code quality, is the engineering. Things like slipstreaming in SPs and SP uninstall.
SQL Server is also very secure, a great track record as far as security items.
Lastly, it's also scalable. Working with partners to deliver reference configurations and information to quickly and easily deploy large systems. Fast Track 2.0 announced today with IBM as a new partner. New scale up is now to 256 logical CPUs on Windows 2008 R2. Is logical under dual or quad cores? I wonder.
A customer reference is one stage. Priti Desai of First American Title Insurance comes on stage to show how one of her mission critical applications uses SQL Server. Their application, if down, can cost them US$1million / hour. That is critical!
They upgraded to SQL Server 2008. Why? Partitioning and data compression were items listed as reasons to upgrade. Lots of blah, blah, save money, run better, etc. The standard story. Not a great reference in my opinion. Twitter grabbed my interest after a couple minutes.
Empowered IT - Some concepts that came about from conversations with customers.
Data Tier Application Component as a new way to deploy applications. Dan Jones came out to show a demo of a feature complete build of deployment. This is after an early release demo of this last year.
SSMS 2008 R2, on screen. A new "utility explorer" that allows us to create a control point. That's the instance that is like a central management for a "cloud" of servers. After a control point, you start to enroll other instances. These are instances that are managed through policy, as a group. You can set thresholds for what are under- or over-utilized server instances.
Data Tier Application for existing applications? The demo shows taking an "application" or existing database, and register it as a DTA. A wizard creates a model of the logins, users, etc. in the database and stores meta data about the application/database.
There's a change request for a table. Dan sticks a new column in the table and saves it. Then changes polices for the application, deploy only to X64, TCP enabled, etc. The multiple changes are then "built" into a solution. You can click "upgrade" and it generates the "ALTER" scripts for us. That is cool, if it's easy to track/save/store/VCS.
Demo complete, things went relatively smoothly.
Dynamic Development - Key tenets:
These are the ideas that will help leverage things with the SQL Server platform. The changes coming in .NET 4 are here to support this and we get another demo. This time VS 2010, latest build. It builds on the DAC pack from the last demo. It's imported into the product.
Based on domain driven design. This is getting out of my area, but he is showing the classes for entities that you've built. This can be good or bad, depending on how you design the application and database. You can turn off class generation in VS, which is probably a good thing.
Pablo builds classes by hand, but I'm losing interest. This is becoming a bit of a long keynote, especially with a lack of code and lots of talking about how/why changes were made.
VS demos on designing classes and deploying them is B-O-R-I-N-G
ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
A complex event processing engine. Acts on information in real time for large streams of data. It will release with SQL Server 2008 R2, and while I don't understand it, it looks cool. It will have a programming surface, a nice new term.
Some examples of how it's working. NFL, using Silverlight, allows you to click cameras and see different views. The Streaminsight piece grabs the click stream in real time to see what people look at.
Another example, processing sensor data from oil industry and make real time changes to something. About as general an example as you can give and not provide information that helps us understand what it is.
One of those great terms. We want an answer to some question in the data. This is about shortening the loop for getting answers. MS is looking to efficiently manage the information and align the systems. Master Data Management is what they are working on here. Self-service BI and then share and collaborate, meaning more piss-poor Sharepoint, is their vision.
I think we have good ideas here, but I'm not sure the implementation from the MS perspective is a great one. The need to sell units seems to override the need to slow down and build better, more intuitive and effective solutions. And build more polished, properly documented products. I'm thinking about the issues with Sharepoint here, and maybe SP2010 will fix things that haven't been done well in SP 2007.
Amir Netz is on for a demo. This has been a long keynote, but I have always enjoyed hearing Amir speak. He's one of the few I've recommended as a must see, regardless of the topic. The demo is here in looking at managing data in terms of policies and if the data is being properly used. Data quality and validation are shown.
A data warehouse monster: 20 processing nodes, each with 20 processing threads. Very cool. 60million rows added to 10TB data warehouse in seconds. 60Billion rows in total existing in there. If that's true, it's pretty cool. A report was built, and all nodes peak out, scanning the rows. A query aggregated 2billion rows in about 8 sec.
Showing off Report Builder 3.0, grabbing parts of other reports to assemble onto a new report. Also some geographical information components you can use. That's cool. Often wanted some map controls to mess around with.
The End is near: about time.
This was too long, and it lost a little focus near the end. Too much "trying to impress" the people. However a few interesting items given, new scale and features in SQL 2008 R2.
SQL Azure is feature complete, and is a complete RDBMS platform. That is interesting. They'll start billing for it in 1/1/2010. So test it now while it's free.
One more demo..noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
It shows a decent SSMS like interface for SQL Azure tables and objects. That's good. Shows some management and integration of local databases with cloud databases.
OK, I'm done.
President of server tools at Microsoft, Bob Muglia, he overseas Windows Server, Systems Center, Hyper-V, and of course, SQL Server. Bob was the product manager when SQL Server was announced by Microsoft in 1988 and actually brought a box on stage of the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0. I never used that product, but I did use the product a couple years later, in 1991 as the Sybase port, when it was Microsoft SQL Server v4.2 (on OS/2).
Bob's talk is talking about how Microsoft has grown up, and is scaling up. There was a rack on stage that was mostly full. Looked like 7 4u boxes, but Bob says it's a single server, so I'm guessing lots of disks in there.
The demo shows 64 CPUs being used. There's a workload that's almost pegging the CPU. An application controls the work being done, and the CPUs. When increased to 128 CPUs, a new high, the workload goes down. That's impressive, but we know there's more. Bob's hinted that 192 CPUs are now possible for SQL Server 2008 R2. The workload increases to peg the box, but then the CPUs are raised to 192CPUs and the workload comes down.
It's staged, but it's still impressive at the high end. If you have a big workload, and a big, big checkbook, you can go to 192 CPUs. Not many people can get there, but I do think that this will mean that the 64, 32, 16CPU boxes will come down in price.
A new benchmark world record, TPC-E 2012 tpsE, an overall record and a price/performance record with x64 and IA64 Windows and SQL Server. In the data warehouse space, the record on Windows is now TPC-H 3TB warehouse, 102,778QphH. With Microsoft's own Dynamics product, with 20,000 used, there is sub-second response. Marketing numbers, but they are still pushing the limits.
One very interesting note on the release of SQL Server 2008 might have slipped by. The press release, and the slide of the benchmarks shows a date available of 5/6/2010. I wonder if that is the expected release for the product.
As memory, flash disks become more prevalent, the data professionals become more important. I tend to agree with that. So many people have worried about easier SQL Server means less need for DBAs. I think it means more opportunities because we can do more things that have greater impact. Bob mentions he sees our role expanding because data is so critical to organizations.
Data centers, traditionally are utilized < 15%, but they are well known ways to manage large numbers of servers. Virtualization is one of these. Easier management, higher flexibility in data centers and reducing costs. The database server is one of the last types of servers to be virtualized, but it will come.
Consistent and coherent access to data is important for all applications.
A demo of Hyper-V, Win 2K8 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2K8, showing live migration of a SQL Server. Moving a virtual SQL server from one physical box to the next. The demo shows a live load on the server by running a stored procedure against it. We can see it running in the background as an app. By selecting "migrate" and then "next" and then "move" the virtual machine moves. The stored procedure continues running, with no interruption to the app running the stored proc.
Bob talks about Hyper-V being close to VMWare in performance. However I've seen people report performance issues with VMWare, so I'm not sure that this is a big deal.
Private clouds, a way that can provide a computing resource. I like the idea of clouds inside a company. A computing resource that you deploy do. Bob mentions this is a way to decrease management costs and scale out an application as needed. The example given is the "giving" application at Microsoft, a way for employees to determine charitable contributions once a year. There's an elastic computing capability that allows the app to live on 2 computers most of the year. But when needed, at the once a year time when it's pushed to employers, it can grow to 24 computers for a few days.
This is a good way for elastic computing to live. Grow resources as they are needed. Microsoft is looking to have companies build private clouds inside their organization first. I agree with that, learn to scale these things to 10s of machines. Once we know that, then perhaps public clouds are more likely. That's for businesses that need to keep their data secure.
SQL Azure is being used inside Microsoft. I'd love to see detailed case studies, with code, from them on how this is being used and in what places. The idea is good for limited scope items. Or maybe it's much further advanced than I'm aware of. I think I have some research to do.
The data we manage is at the center of our organizations. The opportunity for DBAs is to take our skill sets and leverage them to solve new problems. Perhaps problems that you couldn't solve before, or didn't have time to solve.
I think that's the "spin", but it's also a truth. If you are spending time managing the details, the minutiae of keeping a server running, you are making a mistake.
Not MVP logo items, as I’m not sure if I really want to wear those. I was somewhat uncomfortable last year at the PASS Summit when I got an MVP ribbon for my badge.
Each year as part of the MVP award that Microsoft gives to people, they also include US$150 of merchandise from their company store. It’s a secure store, and Microsoft will cover shipping, but you can’t go crazy. In fact, you can’t spend more than your $150, so it becomes a challenge to get close.
The store has lots of Microsoft logo stuff, everything from shirts to jackets to notepads. Last year I bought my son a Zune, got him a case and headphones and a couple HALO shirts. Nothing was overly exciting for me, and this year I’d delayed spending any more. Everyone here has an iPod or Zune, we have plenty of “stuff”, so I wasn’t sure what to get.
I was browsing the MVP newsgroups this morning, seeing what complicated and interesting problems they come up with when someone had mentioned they’d spent their money. So that triggered me to go look and see what was out there. I figured there was something I could get, even if it was something silly. I ended up with:
I ended up spending $143, so I have $7 left. Not sure there’s much I can get for $7, or if it’s worth me looking around, but I’ll ask my son if there’s some game he’d like to get.
Why haven't I updated the build list for SQL Server 2008 with SP1? Read on...
Today I got a press release from Microsoft announcing that Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 was available. It was late in the afternoon, I was getting ready to schedule the newsletter, and so I immediately clicked on the link. My default browser, Firefox, popped to the SQL Server 2008 SP1 CTP page.
Hmmm, I was thinking perhaps a problem refreshing with an update, so I F5'd a few times, and then got annoyed. I sent a note back to the PR person that the link was broken, and then went to the Data Platform Insider blog, the place where lots of official SQL Server news gets released.
There was a link there to the download page for Microsoft, so I followed that and checked the "New Downloads" page. Sure enough, the link was there, I clicked that, got the download page, and looked for the release notes. Clicking that link got me a 404 error. Same for the README.
At this point I think something is wrong. So I try IE 7. There I click the link for the notes and get a Live Search error. The page can't be found. Why there is a Live Search when the page isn't available is beyond me. That's just annoying.
I refresh a few times, monitor Twitter, see a few more people are having issues as well. Someone even speculates that the SP got pulled for issues. I'd believe that, but there's no sign right now that's the case.
I have the KB number, so I search for that article. Not found. I think take another KB article, change the article ID and get a 404.
I get two more emails from the PR people at Microsoft, one with a new link (the main downloads page, not even the SP1 page) and another saying that the servers are syncing up and they should be working shortly.
After about 10-15 minutes, I give up. I've had enough messing around with this, and even though I might work too much at times, I need to schedule this newsletter and go cook dinner for kids. I'm basically done working for now and need to schedule the newsletter.
So the build list won't get updated until tomorrow when I have good links and I'm sure everything is working.
Who cares about SP1 being released today? Not a lot of people. Most people need to test the final release, they don't have a schedule necessarily, and whether they download SP1 today or next week it doesn't matter.
However there are some of us, journalists like me, consultants, MVPs, writers, that need to test ASAP against SP1 to keep work moving forward. Or people that have the CTP running on systems and want to move to the RTM version of SP1.
In other words, very good customers for SQL Server PR. These are the people that influence others, that Microsoft would presumably want to please. Yet a number of these people are exactly who got annoyed today with an announcement and pages not working.
Microsoft does some things very well, but this is just dumb. There is no purpose in waiting until the last minute to update the Microsoft web site when you have an announcement coming. What harm is there if they released SP1 to their web site, gave all the servers time to sync up with the download pages, verify everything is working, and then send out a press release tomorrow?
Does anyone think that the delay of a day of SP1 affects SQL Server sales or adoption? Heck, plenty of people would notice the download on a page, push it out through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The people that really care would know hours ahead of others.
Microsoft has a chance to get an easy win, let a few people "break" the news early, and then they make an official announcement later. Instead they either tried to time things too tightly or the PR people jumped the gun. In any case, a little delay would have made this process smoother.
I have to admit, after the news of AIG bonuses over the weekend, this looks bad. In fact, it annoys me. Microsoft is apparently getting $11 million dollars for a bridge to connect the two halves of its campus.
I get that this will be an improvement to the area, it’s (I think) spanning a highway, it’s an improvement to the area, but Microsoft has no need of this. I’m a Microsoft shareholder, but with the economy doing poorly, and Microsoft making money, should the public be financing any of this?
A bad call by Steve Ballmer and company to even lobby for this.
Fundamentally as I get older, I think more and more men are pigs. There is definitely something wrong with them, as mentioned by Mr. Denny, and in the US at least, there's a Culture of Assholes, from Alan, which I blogged about on my personal site briefly. I'm not sure I can express things as well as those two gentleman above, but I'll try.
First, my apologies for the language, but it expresses things nicely, though not quite as eloquently as I'd like to express it.
What I'd really want to know is who the eff does any man think they are by coming on to a woman, in public, at a professional environment?
Really, dude, you're not that interesting. The women attending the event, the women hosting it, and even those working there aren't looking to you as a future mate or spouse. If they are, they'll let you know, but recognize that you chances are on the low side of the 5 9s. 99.999% of the women you meet don't want to sleep with you.
I'm no saint, and I'm certainly not politically correct. I recognize inherent biases, bigotry, and prejudice in myself. I think I do a pretty good job of controlling it and dealing with it, but I regularly do and say things that are inappropriate or are approaching the line where I offend or insult someone.
And I'm sure I have hurt people at times. I can only apologize and strive to do better.
I've heard numerous jokes about "booth babes" at conferences, woman hired to help attract people to booths because they're attractive, not because they're engineers that can teach you about the product, but because they are "eye candy" for men. Men seem to make up most of the audience at technical events I attend, big and small, and while it makes sense to attract them, I think in a business environment this is an issue. We see or hear something enough, have a few drinks, and somehow think we're more attractive than we are.
I'll bring up an event that I'd glossed over, but I think should be addressed. At the 2008 PASS Summit, on Thursday night, there was a large party in the main auditorium. A band was playing, lots of drinks, games, etc., but near the stage there was a motorcycle set up. You could get on it and get a picture taken, with a scantily clad young lady.
Now I'm OK with men getting up there if they want. Moral standards vary and that's fine. If you can justify that with your significant other, or God, or yourself, then have fun. I have no issue with people that want to live their lives on the looser side. It's their choice, and as long as they accept and deal with the consequences, I'm OK with that.
But I thought it was in poor taste, and more, I thought it was something that would make women uncomfortable. After all, I didn't see a Chippendale-type guy up there taking pictures with girls. If they were there, my apologies, but I still think this display, which was put on by PASS and/or Microsoft, was inappropriate.
Sexual harassment seems like a joke when you see the videos at orientation for your company. Or you have to read a handbook. Or you see it mocked on some TV show.
It's not.
It's a fact of life for many women. It happens all the time, and honestly, they have no recourse. You are cutting your professional throat in many ways if you make a stink. Most men keep their distance and even casual friends pull away.
I think that men are getting more educated about this over time, but it's still a problem. It seems that too many men, married men, men that have been in business a long time, still have trouble getting their minds off sex. And they have even more issues when they drink.
Men, you aren't that interesting no matter how much you drink.
And for those of you that are offended as much as I am. If you witness something, you don't need to "protect the lady", but you should make it clear that you don't condone it.
I was re-awarded MVP status from Microsoft for 2009. Since I didn’t hear anything to the contrary in the last few days, I thought I was getting it, but you never know.
But I had the email this morning, right before I got a congrats from Allen White :). He’s my roommate for the MVP Summit in March, and he’s in Germany for the holidays visiting his daughter, so he had a head start on me.
A nice way to start 2009.
One of Google's tenets is to "do no evil" as they run their corporation. This article questions their motives as they've changed the agreement for Chrome, their browser.
I don't necessarily think that Google is evil, and in many ways I think they've learned from Microsoft in how to not appear so. They're a corporation, striving for profit and trying to do a better job, but they're going to stumble. Naturally they want to promote their own products, which makes sense, and tie them tightly together.
That's what Microsoft wants as well, though they sometimes go too far in preventing alternatives from being adopted.
It's a fine line that you walk as a corporation, trying to grow, trying to make a profit, and it's hard sometimes to know if you're skirting the line and perhaps doing something unethical. In my ventures we've tried to be fair, but there are plenty of people that have disagreed with our decisions.
Personally I think this is where capitalism fails. As entities grow larger, become more popular, they gain power, and it's hard to not take advantage of that power to grow more. I think many times the most successful companies sometimes appear evil because they continue to do what has worked for them. And those practices often shut out or prevent smaller companies from competing, making them appear evil.
There's no shortage of evil companies, however, with plenty of people willing to make decisions and engage in practices they know are illegal or immoral, all to make a few more shekels.
Steve Ballmer issued a challenge to MVPs a couple weeks ago, asking them to switch to Live Search this week and give it a chance. So I did, moving the defaults on all my browsers (IE, Firefox, and Chrome) to Live this morning.
I've been critical of Live over the last few years, but I've given it a chance. A couple times a year someone will post that they're using it and for a couple days I'll run some double searches. I'll use Google, Yahoo, and Live and compare the results.
And Google usually wins. It returns what I consider more relevant searches.
Now I'm not a power searcher. I tend to use a few terms, and none of the quotes, !, ~, NOT, and other power searching expressions. If I don't get results on the first page, I might hit the second, but not much more. Using that technique, I used to never get the things I wanted on the first page from Live, but I did from Google or Yahoo. And Google is cleaner, less stuff, so I've tended to use it.
That being said, the last time I tried Live, this past summer, it was pretty close. For example, when I search for somethng like sp_change_users_login, I tend to want BOL to come up first. It always has on Google (first page at least) and on Yahoo, but on Live I often had lots of MSDN blogs and things and not the source for reference. That seemed to change earlier this year and Live was better.
I'm not sure how well this will work, but I'm willing to give it a try. I've been a Microsoft software user for most of my career and it just works. So I'll take the challenge and see if it impacts my work.
But I'm not likely to switch permantently. Not because I love Google, or dislike Live, but I think MS has a fairly large monopoly on lots of software. I like competition and I want to see alternatives. I buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble because I want both to succeed. I want both around for a long time, even if B&N becomes a place I can download books to my Kindle.
I think Google is as likely to make monopoly mistakes as MS, and so I want Live to continue to be used, but I don't want it to dominate like IE did for awhile. Maybe I'm overthinking this as we now have choices (Firefox and Chrome), but I like doing my part to balance thinges in the universe.
I heard during last week that the 2009 PASS Community Summit will be back in Seattle, on Nov 3-6 next year. I think that's great and if you have plans to go, or are planning to go, or get get budget approved now and register at a discount, be sure to use our SSC6 code. You'll save $100, and get to come to our great party. A big writeup on that coming soon.
I think the Summit should be in Seattle every year. As much as I think Seattle in November is a miserable place, the Summit fits there. With Microsoft just across the water, there are literally hundreds of developers that come over to the Summit to interact with you, the customers, and find out what you think. They are always walking around and willing to answer questions.
Just don't ask them why SQL Server isn't available on floppy disks. Andy tried that one out on a few of them and got one guy backing away like he might be a little crazy and potentially dangerous, which is what I'd expect. Another guy tried to give him the solution of using WinZip or WinRAR to split the SQL Server DVD across floppies, apparently thinking Andy was serious.
In any case, outside of TechEd, this is the largest concentration of SQL Server people and that alone means it's worth having the Summit in Seattle. I'd prefer the Microsofties don't speak, just answer questions in the exhibit hall and outside sessions. That way we get less marketing stuff. :)
I went to Seattle most years for a conference and I think it was 4 or 5 years before I ever saw the sun outside, so Seattle isn't on my list of places to be in the winter. Still it's a nice city, and I had a good time over the weekend with my son touring various museums and things around Seattle.
There is some talk that if PASS continues to grow then the Washington State Convention Center won't be large enough to host the conference and it would have to be held elsewhere. If that's the case, then I have a solution for you:
Cap the Seattle conference at 2000 people, or some number that makes PASS money, but ensures it will sell out. Keep it in Seattle in November and have Microsoft really support it.
Then have a second, smaller conference in Orlando in the spring. Plenty of people on the East Coast would prefer that, they'll go, you can still make money there as well, and I'm sure Microsoft will give you some support. With hundreds of people submitting sessions for this Summit that didn't get to speak, I'm sure that you will have plenty of speakers and it would be the chance to have two successful events a year.
If you are a member of PASS, be sure to give them some feedback. I'm not sure how they decide where to hold the Summit (it's been in Chicago,. Orlando, Denver, and Dallas), but I think Seattle is the best location.
I am actually stunned. I knew that more bandwidth makes a difference, but having way more bandwidth is truly amazing.
My daily upload routine, which actually ends up being anywhere from twice to 5 times a week for video, is to start uploading one video while I render another one. This way I have time, about 15-20 minutes, while one video uploads to get the second one rendered. Depending on what's happening at the ranch network, things usually go smoothly without me waiting too long. However there are times I log onto the MSN Zone to play a quick game of backgammon while waiting for things to finish.
With my trip to Seattle for the MVP Summit, I was a litle concerned about upload bandwidth as I've had issues in various places. I expected downtown Seattel hotels would be pretty good, but I was still nervous. I'd uploaded a couple future videos, but I had planned on shooting some off the webcam in my laptop while I was there and uploading those each day.
Today I came over to the Microsoft campus for the day and got on the guest wireless network. I processed and edited a video near the end of the day, entered the various data I needed a Podshow, clicked upload, then went to get things ready on the site so I could copy and paste the URL in when it finished. I hadn't finished with the metadata when the sound started and I clicked back to the Podshow tab to find my MP3 uploaded. It was less than a minute for a 5MB file to upload, which was amazing. I wondered about the 30MB video file, but it went in a couple minutes as well, way faster than I could process them.
I'm sorry I only had three videos on the laptop to upload. Could have saved a bunch of time if I'd done more before I came.
