This was the first meeting where I really lead most of the meeting. Andy Warren (@sqlandy) did the networking at the beginning and the raffle at the end while I did announcements and set the agenda. As usual, I forgot to mention something at the beginning, the Florida Microsoft Speaker Idol competition for which we had two takers (Tommy Bolhoffer, probably misspelled, and Robert Hurwitz, again probably misspelled). Exciting times at OPASS!
We started the meeting with some time to meet and talk to someone you didn’t know or didn’t know well. I spoke with Ronnie, Lisa, Rob, and several others during this 10-15 minute time. Then I went over the PASS November-December slide deck and announcements, and Andy, Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and I shared some of our takeaways from the PASS Summit to show the value in attending and encourage others to attend.
Our main speaker was Gus Gwynne (GSquared on SQLServerCentral) speaking on “Auditing and Logging”. He did a very good job. He shared reasons for auditing (Blamethrower was my favorite, though not his), different types of auditing which include passive (log reading, tracing) and active (triggers, logging within the transaction). He also shared several examples using triggers and had some good stories to illustrate how logging has helped in his workplace. One of the interesting stories was when an outsourcing company updated the last name and password for all users in a database, and, because a trigger logged the changes, he was able to quickly (within minutes) undo the update.
We then raffled off a few prizes, a Microsoft Arcmouse, Office 2007 Standard, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit were the big ticket items. After the raffle we had some good discussion about speaking, self-promotion, and personality.
All in all a good night. Now I need to find a speaker for January. If you are interested contact me, @unclebiguns (blog post here for why that’s my handle) on Twitter or via the contact me link on the blog. We are open to do a Live Meeting or having you come in person.
