Wednesday at PASS is the first day of the real conference. The day started off with the usual keynote. Ted Kummert of Microsoft went through the data vision that microsoft has, complete with a whole lot of demos.
The part that most caught my eye was the demo of some new SQL 2008 features, including the resource governor with its ability to restrict resource usage depending on properties of the connection (eg application name, host name, login name, etc). The policy-based management should make policy enforcement much easier now, especially since policies can be applied across multiple servers in one operation.
The new spatial data types look cool. I can’t see immediate uses for them myself, but I do like them.
Finally, something that had the entire audience cheering, intellisense in management studio. About time. Something that I also saw but wasn’t mentioned was what appeared to be syntax checking as you type, much like visual studio has. Not sure how far that goes (to objects or just to key words) but it does look interesting.
I decided to attend Kalen’s session this morning on the costs of concurrency. It was a very informative, deep dive into optimistic and pessimistic concurrencies in sql 2005, the pros and cons of each and some problems to be aware of.
After lunch – SQL CAT talking about the implementation of SQL Server at the MySpace social networking site. That is one seriously impressive SQL implementation. Multiple servers, partitioned data, replication with thousands of transactions/sec and multiple subscribers and service broker for messaging. On one hand, I’m very glad I don’t have a system that intense, on the other, I’d love to work with something that challenging.
The middle session of the afternoon was devoted to encryption. Basically a method to both encrypt and search data, in a reasonable amount of time.
The last session of the day was a very intense, very enjoyable session from Itzik Ben-Gan on index internals and consistency problems.