What a month!
A month has slipped past since my last blog, yet quite a bit of good stuff has been going on, including:
I had a really enjoyable trip to Perth to present sessions on indexing to both the Dev & SQL user groups. Both sessions were very well attended & some great questions came from the floor. Mitch Wheat put me up for the night between sessions, which was fantastic (thanks Mitch!) as I got to spend some time learning about his interest in maths & computer algorithm efficiency. I've got to admit that I was a little jealous when Mitch told me he attended Queen's last ever concert at Knebworth Park in the UK (1986). I'm a huge Queen fan but never got to see any of their live concerts so I was pretty envious on this point! Anyway, we chucked on the "Queen, Live at Wembley Stadium" DVD & sunk a couple of beers Mitch had discovered from a beautique Kiwi brewery named Macs & reminisced. Great music, great beer & some interesting discussion - thanks for the stay Mitch! (c:
After the second UG session in perth, I had to jump a late flight from Perth (a midnight shocker) to Sydney, then camp out at Mascot for a few hours before jumping another flight to Wagga Wagga (why did they name that city twice?) for SQL Down Under Code Camp.
SQL Code Camp was also a very enjoyable weekend - Greg Low & those who helped him organise the event did a fantastic job. We had a good mix of speakers & content and I'm sure everyone who attended had a great time, especially Yann's pet bird who couldn't contain his enthusiasm at times! Peter Ward sent me a couple of links to my presentations in case anyone wants to listen to them:
Designing And Managing Indexes For Performance (Audio)
Designing And Managing Indexes For Performance (Slide deck)
Performance Tuning SQL Server 2005 (Audio)
Performance Tuning SQL Server 2005 (Slide deck)
Phil Carter & I stayed on in Wagga for an extra night & drove home to Melbourne the following day. Phil's folks live just out of Albury, so we took a detour past their place & I was amazed to learn that virtually that entire area of Victoria has lost its crops this year due to frost. It's just so easy to live an isolated city life these days!
The day after arriving back, I presented a combination of the presentations from Perth & Wagga to the Melbourne SQL Server User Group. (slides here). That session will be our last at the old Microsoft venue, as Microsoft are moving office tomorrow from South Yarra to Southbank - it'll be interesting to see the new place! Kalen Delaney will be our next big act at the SQL Server User Group this month. We're planning a book launch for this event, but more on that soon..
Itzik Ben-Gan has also been in town recently, to teach his Advanced T-SQL course in Sydney & Melbourne as well as presenting at SQL Code Camp. It's always great to see Itzik, but this trip was dampened slightly because Itzik's lovely wife Lilach couldn't make the trip & sadly, Itzik's Karate sensei passed away whilst he was in Sydney. He sounded like a fantastic fellow & losing a personal mentor like that is definitely a big loss. I'm so sorry about this news Itzik.
On a more pleasing note, Itzik told me that his two new books Inside SQL Server 2005 Programming & Inside SQL Server 2005 Querying are both doing really well. Since he finished these books months ago, Itzik has also written a new intro level T-SQL course "Introduction to Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000 & 2005 (3 days)" which I also think will be very popular as many people need a solid foundation in T-SQL. We did a "train the trainer" over a few nights & I'll be delivering this class in Australia soon.
Unfortunately, I had to turn down an invitation to attend a Microsoft Learning Advisory Board meeting in Seattle a few weeks back, due to my existing commitments back home. I'm doubly disappointed about missing this a Grant Paisley went along & we contemplated the idea of a few days in Hawaii on the way home. I'd never been there, so it would've been fantastic, but hopefully you had a great time Grant & maybe next time.
Wow, I can't believe I'm still writing about what's happened in the past month, but a couple of extra things worth mentioning are that we've released a final build of our new performance analysis tool "SQLBenchmarkPro 2006" at work last week and I've also had two new DBAs join our company, welcome Stuart & Greg! (c:
I'm currently brewing up a few more technical ideas that might make more interesting reading than this loose blurb, so hopefully I'll be back with those soon!