During the week of October 11, I delivered a four day “immersion” event where we focused on nothing but performance tuning - from design to indexing to optimizing procedural code. There were many states represented (CA, CT, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, MA, MI, MS, NE, NY, OH, OR, TX, UT, WA, and WI) and it led to some great conversations - even outside of SQL! For the attendees, we had long days with lots of content (the comprehensive agenda is here) and evenings in a great city (yes, Chicago is my home town). And - to end the four-day event and kick off Bill's Friday event, I just couldn't let a group of so many visitors leave Chicago without having Chicago Pizza. On Thursday night we hit Pizzeria Due:

Not everyone was able to make it for dinner but we did happen to get a nice group shot here:

Finally, a few of the attendees were able to play “tourist” for a few minutes (I don't know how they had the energy!) and here are a couple of pictures I want to share with everyone. These next two Chicago pictures were taken by Ken (he's a New Yorker who was in town for the event - but we won't hold that against him :) :) :). In the first image, Ken took nine images facing North from the John Hancock building and in the second photograph there are five images facing South from the Hancock. Both of these are the result of “stitching” the images back together. Very cool Ken - THANKS!

Facing North from the John Hancock Building:

Facing Sorth from the John Hancock Building:

A fun event, a great group and a wonderful way to kickoff of our SQL Immersion event. Subscribe on SQLskills if you'd like to hear more about our upcoming SQL Immersion events planned for 2005 as well as those planned on SQL Server 2005.