PASS 2009 – Pre-con

PASS 2009 is underway!

It’s getting to the point that these conferences feel like a family reunion (where the family members are people that you like). Last night, coming to registration there was a whole crowd of people that I know from previous conferences, newsgroups, blogs and forums. I’m not going to name everyone I ran into last night, simply because I’ll forget someone.

There were a lot of insider sessions today, but the only one that I attended was the introduction. Most of the topics were ones I wasn’t overly interested in. Rather spent the day at  Adam’s CLR pre-con. CLR is an area that I’ve barely looked at and have little experience with, so it was a good choice.

Some very interesting info on CLR table valued functions. Apparently there’s no temp table/table variable involved. The CLR function streams the values back one row at a time. Might well remove the impact that the multi-statement table valued function has. Needs testing.

Late morning was spent at a Chapter Leaders meeting. Some of the resources available I didn’t know about. Things to look at when I get home. Also need, next month, to write up a report for the regional mentors on the meetings that we’ve had and what the attendance numbers look like. Something else to add to the to-do list.

Jack Corbett was at the meeting. One more person that I’ve chatted with online located. Ran into Steve and Bob right after lunch. Good to see Steve again. Will run into Bob later today and chat.

Some of the comments on CLR and Attention events was interesting. Basically, the CLR doesn’t receive attention events, so a timeout or a SSMS stop can result in orphaned CLR objects that will hang around for a while until the garbage collector comes across the object and collects it.

Very interesting sample code for collecting system performance counters using a CLR proc (unsafe CLR proc because it uses dlls that aren’t on the safe list.)

CLR Triggers. Just say no. Well, if it’s a ddl trigger with xml manipulation of the EventDate() maybe. Possibly. Perhaps.

Or maybe not. SQL DDL trigger with a CLR function to do the xml manipulation.

Some very interesting discussion of Code Access Security, Host Protection Attributes, Trustworthy and signed assemblies. It’s possible to have safe assemblies calling unsafe (external access) assemblies with the minimum amount of code marked unsafe (external access), have the database untrustworthy and still have everything working. Lots and lots of work though.

Day ended with the opening party (and the quiz bowl) followed by the SSC party. Good fun all.

Some photos from the day