Nothing technical in this blog post for a change, just some info about the first trip of the year for us. We're in China for two weeks, teaching classes at the Microsoft campuses in Shanghai and Beijing. We flew in Sunday afternoon on a direct flight from Vancouver, Canada which was just wonderful. When I came to Shanghai in September 2006 for TechEd I flew to Tokyo first and then on to Shanghai but the direct flight is great. We flew Air Canada and their business class beats the crap out of United's, which we usually fly - much bigger seats with much more legroom.

Last time I was here I stayed at the Le Meridien She Shan which was about 20 miles outside the city center. This time we booked a room at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai which is right in the middle of the city. The hotel is amazing - it starts on the 53^rd floor of the Jin Mao Tower in Pudong - the new side of Shanghai. Our room is on the 77^th floor looking out over the Huangpu River and over towards The Bund. Here's the view from our room this morning - pretty stunning! (Click on it for a bigger version)

The space-age looking tower on the left is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower - now a famous Shanghai landmark.

Today was our only free day in Shanghai so we decided to sleep in, have breakfast, and then take a private half-day tour of the city. We had a great guide (Marco) who took us round a few cool places and was a fountain of knowledge about Shanghai and Chinese culture. First up was the 400 year old Yuyuan Gardens in the old part of the city (built by a government official as a present to his elderly parents) and then on to the Jade Buddha Temple (built in 1882 to house two solid jade statues brought back by a monk from Burma) - quite different to the Hindu temples we'd seen on our dive trip to Bali at the end of 2006.

Later in the week I've got some good blog posts lined up on new 2008 features. For now, it's dinner time so I'll leave you with a shot of Kimberly and I just before heading into the Yuyuan Garden. (Again, click for a larger version)

In the mail today I received notice that my first software patent has been granted by the US Patent Office (after being filed 3.5 years ago while I was still writing DBCC CHECKDB code!) It's basically a way to run DBCC CHECKDB on a database stored in a backup without actually having to restore the whole backup. This is really cool for people with VVVVLDBs as it means you don't need to restore the whole backup to verify that the database stored within it is valid. Anyway - I'm pretty pleased!! I hope the SQL team gets around to implementing it at some point in the future.

If you're interested, you can read it here (warning: some of the legalese is pretty dry...)

Next - some people have been 'complaining' that we haven't been posting recently - we took a break last week to grab some winter sun and some total downtime but we'll be back into blogging in between parties over the holidays.

Finally - to all of you who've followed my blog (the old MS one and my new one here), attended any of our conference sessions or workshops, sent us interesting questions, and just generally been part of the SQL community I love - THANKS!! I hope you and your families have a great Festive Season (whatever you celebrate) and a prosperous New Year!

Best wishes - Paul.

As many of you who follow our blogs (and we've met at conferences) may know, Kimberly's Dad has been very ill for some time. On November 28th he passed away peacefully at home with us after a long and brave fight against cancer. He'll be missed by many friends and family. Kimberly has a longer blog post from us here.

Thanks

With the class we taught yesterday in Zurich for Microsoft, Kimberly and I have just finished almost three weeks of continuous travelling and presenting at conferences. Now we're taking some time off to relax and recharge. My blog will be silent until Monday 26th November, when I'll start posting some cool articles with example scripts showing how to recover from various disasters. Thanks to everyone who's responded to the last few weeks worth of posts, and to those who've sent in questions regarding discussions we had at the various conferences. I will definitely reply to each of them, but it may not be until next week.

If you're in the US, have a great Thanksgiving! See you soon...

After all the build-up over the last few weeks (putting finishing touches to decks and demos), we're finally off to the last set of conferences for the year. First up is SQL Connections in Las Vegas, with over 5000 attendees!!. We flew down yesterday from Seattle to hang out for an extra few days before the conference, as unbelievably after 9 years in the US it's my first time ever in Las Vegas.

It's a kind of a weird place - you're flying along over desert and mountains and suddenly there's a city in the middle of nowhere. The first landmark I could see that positively ID'd it as Vegas was the distinctive black pyramid of the Luxor hotel - we're actually looking down on it from our room in THE hotel (totally pretentious name but nice rooms). Looking out at the Strip, it seems like every second or third car is a limo of some description.

Now that we're here, we're making full use of the extra time to take in some of the sights and sounds. We had dinner last night at Mix with our good friends Gert Drapers and his wife Karen, plus Michele Leroux Bustamante and her husband Andres. The food was great - I had calamari risotto plus beef tenderloin with foie gras and truffles - and Andres chose some really nice wine for us all. Unfortunately, Kimberly didn't enjoy her entree at all - but she did digress from her usual shrimps and scallops choices (her appetizer was a stunning scallop dish) so I wasn't totally surprised. Actually I tried some of her dish too - cod with sweet crumbly pastry over capers, eggplant, olives, and lemon - not how it was described on the menu and totally not something I'd recommend - and I *love* seafood. Tonight we're heading out again with Michele and Andres to see Elton John playing at Ceasar's Palace. Tomorrow the work begins...

So given that we're doing a pre-pre con tomorrow (see my previous post here for all the details), we needed to head over to the conference centre in the Mandalay Bay to pick up our speaker-shirts and badges. After walking for what seemed like miles through casinos and corridors - Vegas is *busy* - we arrived. Here's the sight that greeted us - a small army of conference crew stuffing bags and finalizing registration details.

This is a pretty exciting conference for us - it's our first as a married couple! Almost all of our sessions are together and for the few that it's only Kimberly speaking I'll either sit at the back and heckle or maybe try my hand at blackjack or some other cunning way of giving all our money away very quickly. I suspect Kimberly would rather I heckle

Seriously though, we *love* presenting together, which is why I left Microsoft in the first place and other the next few weeks we'll certainly be doing a lot of it - with TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona straight after SQL Connections and then a TechNet Deep-Dive on Database Maintenance in Zurich the week after that. When we're done we can finally crash for the year as the next work trip isn't until mid-January when we head to China to teach some more classes (Kimberly's turn to experience somewhere new).

One thing we're definitely going to do while we're on the road is blog lots - at least one of us will post every day with some tidbit of info or answer to an interesting question that came up during a session or workshop.

Hopefully we'll see you at one of these events - stop by and say hi!

Today I finally managed to hook-up with SQL Server MVP and Regional Director Greg Low so he could interview me for his podcast show - we'd spent the last few months juggling schedules and time-zone differences (he's 17 hours ahead of Redmond) but today the stars aligned and we made it. You can download the interview at www.SQLDownUnder.com - show #24. Thanks Greg!

Ok - this is really geeky, but I love making models, and especially the harder Lego models. Lego is one of the coolest toys ever and I've been a big fan since I was a small child. Lego announced in the Spring their biggest Lego model ever - a large scale Ultimate Collector's Millenium Falcon^TM with 5195 pieces (check it out here on the Lego site). I pre-ordered mine right away!

Kimberly was away teaching for Microsoft in India the first two weeks of October this year. So what does Paul do when Kimberly's away? Well, apart from feverishly blogging on my new blog, I made the Falcon, which arrived the day before she left. I reckon it took me about 25-30 hours total time over the course of two weeks.

Here's a picture of the finished model, with a Diet Pepsi can alongside to give you an idea of the scale (click on it to get to a hi-res image you can scroll around to see the detail). Below is a bit of detail blow-up featuring my nick-name-sake Chewie.

      Pretty cool eh?