Today the conference starts in earnest. Lots and lots of people here this year…crazy amounts really.  I arrived for the keynote (not on time by any stretch of the imagination, but not super late either) to find that it was packed. People were even standing up along the back wall… Now, clearly a good amount of this had to do with the fact that nerds don’t sit next to one another in conferences, but it did look really quite packed.

So I went ahead and got a choice seat to Don Box’s (http://twitter.com/#!/donbox) session on the new SQL Server Dev Tools. Really neat stuff, but it is going to be one major rift in the DBA space continuum before things change so radically.  Funniest part of the session was when Geoff Hiten (http://twitter.com/#!/sqlcraftsman) says to me something about thinking that Erland Sommarskog (http://www.sommarskog.se/) would be going nuts about something that was just said and the next voice was Erland’s.

Next I went to the Birds of a Feather table and had some interesting database design discussions about temporal databases versus data warehousing being the source of history, guid versus bigint keys, column store indexes (new for Denali, check Simon Sabin’s post here: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2010/11/10/sql-server-denali-column-store-indexes-the-biggest-thing-in-denali.aspx and get that PDF he referenced.) Interesting, not really much about how to handle relational stuff in a given way or better… oh well, usually that kind of forum is a god place for a sub-type or not argument, but not this time 🙂  One of the people at the table was from Nashville too, so that was pretty interesting… never been to our user group apparently, but was at SQL Saturday.

Buck Woody was up next discussing Database Testing, and I wish I could be a bit more like him when I speak. His talk was fun and interesting, perhaps a bit light I guess, but I got everything out of it I wanted to.  I am going to integrate testing as part of my next book and want to start forming the basis… plus it wouldn’t hurt to do more such stuff in the ol’ day job..

Was then planning on heading to Adam Machanic’s (http://twitter.com/#!/adammachanic) session on keeping up with changes, but ended up talking to my editor Jonathan Gennick for the whole time and pushing out a new outline for the next design book. Adam’s session looked interesting just based on the tweets that kept popping up as I worked on the outline.

Now I am off to a party for a bit…get a bit more chattering in before hitting the hay early tonight so I can get a good start tomorrow. I also am downloading the CTP-1 of Denali while I am out (we get discs tomorrow, but my laptop has no disc drive.  I am using my netbook for my Denali testing (mostly simple tests of constructs) to start with because it is easy to reinstall since everything I care about is on dropbox or audio/video files that I can get from my server…