A lot of my time lately has been spent getting ready for next week and I hope to see you there.  First up SQL Rally.

On Wednesday, I will be doing a pre-con session on Database Design. I have already blogged about it here, and I am definitely excited about it.  There are still seats available, and I will be giving away a few goodies including my new design book (though it won’t yet be printed, I will get it to attendees), several of my, Tim Ford and Glenn Berry’s DMV books from RedGate, and who know what else I might have in my bag (Apress is sending me a lot of swag to give away during the conference too).

Friday (last session of the conference), I will be presenting my new session entitled Sequences (What They Are and Are Not).  This session is a great departure from my typical presentation.  I typically do 95% slides, and sometimes 100% slides.  In this presentation I currently have 17 slides, and that will only change to include a bit more  contact information.  I have a lot of code using sequences in multiple ways, including racing them against identities and different caching levels.

After the rally ends, I will hop in my yellow Focus and make the following delightful journey:

Assuming traffic is kind to me and Bing’s time estimates are reasonably correct, a bit over 9 hours of driving and a night in a Hampton Inn to be named later and I should arrive at Birmingham’s SQL Saturday event.

Sounds insane right?  Well, yeah, it kinda does.  But I wanted to make their event again this year, and it was just a couple of hours out of my way back to Nashville. You may also think it sound like a bit of vanity, and it isn’t really.  Assuming traffic is favorable, my hope is that I can arrive for the 2:00 sessions by Chris Price on Data Quality (or Kevin Boles on Column Store Indexes), Sven Aelterman’s session on File Tables as well before my 4:30 session on Sequences.  Obviously if traffic is bad it might turn out that I only make my own session, but even then I plan to hang out for the after event so it won’t be a total loss.

In any case, hope to see you all in Dallas or Birmingham next week!