As one of those who "lives his life in BI" (to use Steve's words), I wish I was there! I'm learning a lot about the storage engine, SQLOS and Service Broker locked away in a Building 40 classroom, but MDX and DMX are some of my favoritest tools... [I'm hoping to get a bootleg copy of that DVD so that I can watch the PerformancePoint presentations.]

Even though you can do time series analysis more easily now in T-SQL with CTEs in Yukon (SQL Server 2005), it's still so much faster and more powerful in MDX. I shudder to think what regression analysis queries would do to my precious SQL Server data warehouse if I tried to do them in T-SQL!

(Steve, if you're listening before you pick your sessions for the day, be sure to sit in on one of Donald Farmer's presentations on data mining with the Excel Add-ins and one of the ProClarity sessions on PAS visualizations of your SSAS cubes.)

Once "the suits" see what they can do with Excel 2007 and the Data Mining Add-ins, there will be much more buzz (and pressure on dbas to get with the program ).

I'm glad that Steve's having fun. Enjoy the sunny side of Seattle while lasts!