Today, I attended SQLBits II, a conference for developers and database administrators in the Microsoft SQL Server community.
The conference was organised along the lines of other well-established community events, such as DDD, where the delegates themselves vote for the topics they want to hear.
The event was held at the Aston University Conference Centre in Birmingham, a fantastic venue set in picturesque surroundings in the heart of the University campus.
The day itself went very well. I bumped into several people I knew, including some former work colleagues I hadn't seen in a while, so it was great to catch up with them.
There were 20 sessions in total, divided into four concurrent tracks: Developers, DBAs, SQL Server 2008 and Business Intelligence.
I stuck mostly to the developer sessions, but did go to one session on SQL Server 2008. Here's the complete breakdown:
Session 1: Transient Data in SQL Server
This session was presented by András Belokosztolszki of Red Gate Software, a company specialising in software utilities for SQL Server developers.
The presentation focused on temporary data, attempting to answer questions such as: what is tempdb, and what is stored in it? What is the difference between temporary tables and table variables? What is stored in the transaction log and how can the log size be kept under control?
I got a lot from this session; it certainly helped to fill in some gaps in my knowledge. What also stood out was András' revelation that the February 2008 CTP edition of SQL Server would not start up on 29th February.
Session 2: SQLCMD Scripting in SQL Server 2005
This session was presented by Hue Holleran, an independent SQL Server consultant. It focused on a little-known tool within SQL Server called SQLCMD, a built-in utility that can be used to write scripts to automate many common database tasks. The code samples Hue presented were very good and covered many common scripting scenarios.
I also found out that SQLCMD exists in the free Express edition of SQL Server. This is great news, as this is the version I'm currently using at work.
Session 3: Getting to Grips with Service Broker
This session was all about SQL Server Service Broker, a technology with which I was previously not familiar. It's difficult to describe what Service Broker is, but it is basically an asynchronous programming platform that allows you to send messages between SQL Server databases and helps you to build more scalable and responsive distributed applications.
To be honest, I don't have an immediate need for this, but felt it was important to get an appreciation for the sort of scenarios in which you would use this technology.
Session 4: Making More of SQL Server Integration Services in 2008
Integration Services is the new name for what used to be Data Transformation Services (DTS) in pre-2005 versions of SQL Server. Integration Services is a tool that allows you to extract and transform data between SQL Server and other data sources.
It was very interesting to see what had changed, as I had a lot of exposure to DTS in my previous job, but haven't had any experience with it since.
Integration projects are created in SQL Server Management Studio, using a solution/project file structure that is similar to that used in Visual Studio 2005. There are a wider range of sources and transforms available and another big difference is that you write custom scripts in C# or Visual Basic.Net, rather than VBScript.
Again, not a technology I have an immediate need for, but good to catch up.
Session 5: Making the Leap into Advanced SQL
This session was presented by Tony Rogerson, a prominent figure in the SQL Server community.
The aim of this presentation was to explain how to write better SQL queries using some of the under-used features in the T-SQL language, including derived tables, the CASE expression and some of the newer language features, such as Common Table Expressions.
For me, this was the best presentation of the day, though it was a shame that Tony was rather pressed for time and had to rush the last few minutes.
During the lunch break, there were also some "Grok Talks", informal short sessions lasting just 5-10 minutes each. I didn't get to see all of these, but did get catch one on the new spatial data types in SQL Server 2008, another on Analysis Services and another on LINQ to SQL, a new language feature in Visual Studio 2008, which was presented by NxtGenUG member Chris Hay.