I started Tuesday my second presentation, on how to evauate Indexing Strategies. I think the presentation went quite well, it was almost standing room only which, for a whiteboard session is impressive.
The two sessions that I attended that I enjoyed the most today were on the upcoming SQL 2008 R2, Donald Farmer’s session on Project Gemini and Matt Hollingsworth‘s presentation of the new multi-server management features in Kilimanjaro.
Donald Farmer talked about the prevalence of Excel as an analytics tool and the enhancements coming in the Gemini add-in to allow more data and to make it faster. He demonstrated sorting and filtering on 101 million rows in seconds. Also lots of stuff on slicers, filters that are aware of each other, as well as the integration with sharepoint. Looks exciting.
Matt showed the new management features of Kilimanjaro, a utility server that monitors and reports on other servers so that it’s easy to see what servers are under or over utilised. I took a couple photos of the dashboard.
The community lounge was rocking today. Literally. Some of us really shouldn’t give up day jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgjjvrBvsgI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8phK68a03oQ
The closing party was good, and good food too. Always a bonus. Kinda reminded me of the opening party last year, same kind of atmosphere.