Made a quick exit from SQLPass in Dallas, hopped on a plane, and 4 planes later (plus a stop at home to get things together) I’m in Hong Kong.
I enjoyed SQLPass immensely and by the sounds of it, so did the folks that were in my two-day long pre-con on SQL Server 2005 for developers. We filled up the room they allocated and, by the end of the day, folks were sitting on tables in the back. We did away with the traditional “lecture to a large crowd” format and I accepted questions at any time, “did requests” for demos, and generally made a free-for-all out of it.
As usual when trying to cram 5-6 days worth of material in 2 days, we went overtime; in fact the second day they had to physically extract us from the room at the end of the day. There were shouts of “just keep going” but there was a meeting afterwards in the room. They kicked us out.
People looking for the “extended demos” on the SQLskills website (where I said they’d be) may have to wait a few days while I co-ordinate things, but they ARE available on the SQLPass site now. As are the XQuery tutorial demos.
The XQuery tutorial spotlight talk was pretty well attended. The explanation was that there were way more DBAs at the conference than devs, but…surprise the language tutorial was *supposed* to be for DBAs too. If you think you’ll get away without using XQuery, DBAs, have a look at the output from DDL triggers and event notifications.
BTW, I did defer one question and never got back to the questioner, so here goes…regardless of whether you use the “old or new” BULK INSERT syntax (ie the statement or the BULK provider) you need “ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS” and INSERT on the table in question, and some of the options may require ALTER TABLE on the table in question.
Thanks to the SQLPass conference folks and the attendees for a good time.