Well, after a reschedule part 6 is complete as is the Q&A. We're definitely on the home stretch here! Thanks for the great questions and I'll see you in the next session.

Last Sunday (Sunday, 11 September 2005), Brian A. Randell and Kimberly L. Tripp (me :), delivered a full day preconference workshop at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. I was only down at the conference for the workshop but burried once I got back. Unfortunately, Brian and I didn't get our resources list together until this weekend. Sorry for the delay but I think you'll be happy with the final list of resources!

This is a much needed and much overdue blog entry... In 8 Steps to Better Transaction Log throughput, I mentioned a customer that was helped by TWO typical optimization problems I see. In that blog entry, I said I would write two blog entries - that one on transaction log optimization and another on common tempdb optimizations. Well, I forgot...until I was reminded with an email this morning (thanks Marcus!).

Part 5 is done and we're half way through the series. Another great series of questions from part 5 of 10 in the series titled: Effectively Designing a Scalable and Reliable Database. Looking forward to another session this Friday! Have a great holiday weekend/Monday (for those of you/us in the US)!

Well...another custom Immersion Event ends........ four days, 12 modules, nothing but SQL Server 2005: internals, availability and tuning. This week I delivered a four-day course titled: Building Highly Scalable, Available and Reliable Systems with SQL Server 2005. The course was delivered for the SQL Server customer team - to a few of their top TAP (Technology Adoption Program) customers who are really pounding on SQL Server 2005. These customers have some of the largest implementations and/or some of the more interesting architectures - with high volume activity and/or large data warehouses. The course was quite intense, running from 9-5 each day with guest speakers starting at 5 and then evening events that started at 6:30/7 on Monday/Wednesday evening. We covered High Availaiblity Architectures, Recovery, Transaction Processing and Logging, Piecemeal Partial Database Recovery, Partial Database Availability, Partitioning, Online Index Operations, DMVs and much, much more! Everyone is in transit today...class was Monday through Thursday.

And - speaking of "evening events," Wednesday night was quite fun (except when I crashed the Kart). Despite the crash...I'll be back. It was great fun! Turned out that for the evening Ron took first, James took second and my good friend Gert took third. I'm pretty sure that Gert and I will be going back again soon as I want to creep up that scale and knock him off that stack. Despite the crash, I did have a few good lap times :). We'll be back!

Check out a picture of our group at the end of the night of Karting: ChampsKarting.JPG (243.31 KB)

So, all in all - it was a great week! Even more amazing, I think this group will stay in touch! We all learned a lot from eachother.

So - this blog entry is more of a "thanks" entry! A thanks to the excellent questions and all of the excitement around SQL Server 2005...it's getting close! And the architectures are real, working and in production...in fact, one of the customers in the class this week went live at 2am on Wed and a few others are already live.

Stay tuned! More SQL Server 2005 features to highlight and details about the upcoming launch and maybe I'll even blog a bit about Upgrade issues.