Right at the moment, I'm at TechEd in San Diego. I just saw Steve Ballmer's keynote, and now I'm in a session on advanced T-SQL in SQL Server 2005. Already very interesting, as it will add functions for row numbering, ranks, dense ranks and ntiles. Very cool, as this has been a sticky problem in SQL Server 2000 and prior, while ORACLE has at least row numbering built-in. I continue to feel that SQL Server is the coolest product Microsoft makes, at least outside the games group.
Now the speaker is talking about pivots. Another awesome thing. This is taking normalized data and turning it to a denormalized table or the reverse (which is unpivot.) [I hope I have that description right - if I don't, and you read this, please comment and correct me.] What's nice, is that the speaker is showing how to do these things in SQL Server 2000, not just saying, "Hey, next year you'll be able to do this stuff, but until then you're out of luck."
One problem at TechEd I've already seen is that access to my email has been impossible. Neither RPC over HTTP via Outlook 2003 nor Outlook Web Access has been available. I was concerned that it was just me, as I only recently got this laptop and set up my remote access stuff just before heading out the door, leaving it untested as I arrived onsite, but then I saw another Microsoft employee struggling with the same problem. This is broken, so I hope it will be fixed soon. I was coming to a session, but my coworker was headed to the cabana area to see if he could get some help. The "networking angels" in the wireless lounges apparently weren't trained for fixing that kind of problem. I guess later I can always try calling the help desk. This hasn't stopped me from getting to the internet, as you can see. If nothing else, I guess I'll pay the $10 for hotel room internet access tonight.
Getting down here turned out to be some ordeal. The plane was delayed 50 minutes in Seattle. A half-hour after take off, they were looking for a doctor or nurse on the flight to help a passenger. Another half-hour and we were headed to Reno, Nevada to take the ill passenger off the flight. While in Reno, a couple of wealthy but obnoxious guys in first class apparently got "unruly" enough that the flight crew had them removed from the plane. There's a lot of paperwork for removing passengers under any circumstances, plus there's the whole new flight plan to get filed, so we were in Reno for quite a while. I ended up arriving in San Diego three hours later than planned. While I was able to meet my friend Roberto and his family for dinner Saturday night, that was about all I was able to do while hoping for something more than that.
Sunday was interesting. I started by trying to wander around and meet IT professionals I could recruit to come to our focus groups on Monday and Tuesday nights. I manage to meet quite a few in the morning. Later, I took a break and went with Roberto and family to the San Diego zoo. That would have been better if I'd been wearing sneakers instead of new dress shoes. By the end of the day, my dogs were barkin'! In the evening, I met with a number of people from the San Francisco NT Users Group, including the user group president, Doug Spindler. That was a good time and it was great to meet a bunch of our customers. I think I recruited all of them to come to at least one of the focus groups, which is good since I got stuck with the dinner bill. People have no problem asking for the Microsoft guy to pay, which I guess is to be expected. Hopefully, "increasing customer satisfaction, one meal at a time" will be acceptable when I submit my expense report.
Some of the SQL topics are getting ever more interesting, so I'm going pay even more attention and stop blogging. Surely more later, even today.
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