I've been elf'd!
They're an interesting bunch over in Adelaide. I spoke at the SQL User Group over there today & was duely Elf'd by UG leader Rob Farley (thx Rob!)
http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=47dfff6ef46bcba36bd3033G06121318
I always have an interesting time in Adelaide - I lived there for a few fun years ~18 years ago & just love going back whenever I can. This time I bumped into three people from Melbourne, including my first teenage flame Judy whilst getting off the plane at Adelaide. We caught a cab into town & caught up after many, many years. After delivering the User Group session, Rob, Brett & I bumped into Dave Glover from Microsoft in Rundle Mall & had coffee for free on Bank West who were buying everyone in Rundle Mall freebies (I guess they can afford it!). On the return plane trip, I also saw James Cathro who gave me my first job in the IT industry many years ago at DEC Melbourne! It had been ~ 10 years since I last saw James, but I thanked him for getting me started (c:
The User Group presentation was fun - I spruced up a general performance tuning presentation and enjoyed delivering it. There were a couple of good questions from the floor; one that stands out was why not just use ITW / DTA to do query tuning, which I'm brewing up some thoughts on for a future blog / article. One poor girl in the audience caught the lift down with Rob & I after the session and told us that she was a work experience student with no database background but her boss asked he to come along. Poor thing - I wonder what she was thinking about when I was blabbing on about waitstats & query optimisation..