Tuesday 8 November 2005

Community Launch 2005 - in the Boardroom with Shankar Pal

Last night was the Community Launch for SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio 2005/Biztalk Server 2006.


The night started of a bit slow, beginning much like our regular SQL User Group meetings. Plenty of pizza, plenty of beer and lots of mingling.


Things got under way with the "leaders" of the involved groups giving a brief spiel on their group and how people could join/attend their sessions.


After that, Greg Linwood gave a nostalgic look at SQL Server down the years showing how much it's evolved, from SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2 all the way to the current product. Thanks for the memories Greg I thought I'd forgotten the painful adminstration in SQL Server 6.5, your presentation brought it all rushing back. Greg said he'd make the VPC image for SQL Server 1.0 available on the Australian SQL Server User Group website, after all including OS/2 the image is only 26mb !!


After Greg's presentation Shankar Pal took over the microphone and called for suggestions on improving/adding to SQL Server 2005. He was graciously given 3 1/2 minutes for this and is was quickly realised that a lot more discussion would be required. So after running slightly over the allotted time we retired to the boardroom at Lvl 9, Como House with David Lean acting the part of the dutiful secretary, we set about discussing what we liked/disliked/needed from the new product. It was a very interesting session and we brainstormed well past closing time. So far past that on exiting the boardroom we set off the security alarm!!!


It was a very interesting session with a lot of very valid ideas flowing around the table and I must admit I was pretty brain-burned by the end. Just a couple of ideas that looked like very valid concepts were
- Excellent suggestion from Greg Low, Making the information captured in the DDL triggers writeable. This would open an endless range of possibilities. A couple of examples were, Workflow Tracking - were the trigger would add a "signature" to the DDL to signify the code has passed a certain point in a migration path. Standards Adherence - the DDL trigger would apply pre-determined formatting and tidy up the code, or even add things like a standard comment block if it doesn't exist.
- A central adminstration server where the information from multiple servers is amalgamated/managed. Much like the MSX/TSX concept for SQL Agent jobs.
- When deploying .Net assemblies in the CLR actually deploy the code instead of a black-box compiled object. This would lead to being able to know what's being deployed on the server and also allow the same "script" to be run on servers with different versions of the framework. The code would be compiled when the script is run to create the assembly.


I'm sure there are heaps of other ideas, if you've got one send it though to the SQL Server wishlist sqlwish@microsoft.com


While we had heaps of fun in the board room I'm sure the other attendees had an equally constructive time for the rest of the Launch party.


Anyway, enough from me I've got to shoot off to the Ready 2005 launch at the Sofitel now. I'm doing the Data stream in the afternoon.


Round Six vs Carnegie

A lovely day for cricket and obviously for other things as well as we started off two short again at the toss. Luckily we had a standby show up late and one of the other guys called in a friend.

We won the toss and chose to bat in hot conditions. I said to the openers "Sealy" and "Fearless" that I wanted to bat as long as possible and last out the alloted 36 overs. Something we have been remiss at doing so far this season. We got a good steady start and even though the run-rate was a times painfully slow, I wasn't too concerned with wickets in-hand. Unfortunately things didn't pan out as I'd hoped and wickets tumbled far too quickly and we were bundled out in 33 overs for 75 runs.

Coming out to field it was a novel situation to have 9 fielders to put into positions. Once again I opened with Adi but with a steady northerly blowing we swapped ends. My bowling was a very mixed bag with far too many short balls and the only lame excuse I can come up with is I was at the wrong end :-(

Jason turned in a much improved performance with the ball and his brother Lyndon was a nice discovery with his leg-spin. At 4/30 it looked like we were in with a chance, but with so few runs it only took one batsman to get a few runs and the game was as good as over.

Match details are in ResultsVault.