Tech*Ed here in Barcelona is progressing well. Richard and I did the TSQL session yesterday for 500 people as well as recording a .NET Rocks show on Agile Development with Roy Osherove and Kate Gregory.

After we went drinking at the Norway party. What happens at TechED Europe is that each country put on a party for their attendees. Since there is a TechEd in the USA there is no party for Americans. So the Norwegians took pity on us speakers and invited us. Thanks again!

After the party we went to Football!

Today was an XQuery session and now we do the last of the Speaker Idol contest, today at 12:30 pm we see:

Bart De Smet

Dennis Doomen

Luigi Crispo

At 14:45 we do the final round and name a winner!!!

Microsoft is releasing the SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Community Technology Preview November 2006.   The CTP release is scheduled for Tuesday, November 7^th.  

Some bullets:

§  Support for the upcoming Windows Vista.

§  Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007, which enables data mining functionality from SSAS to be used directly within Excel 2007 and Visio 2007.

§  SSRS integration with MOSS 2007, which allows integration with the Report Center in SharePoint providing seamless consumption and management of SSRS reports within SharePoint.

§  SSAS improvements for Excel 2007 and Excel Services relating to performance and functionality. 

Heterogeneous Environments (Interoperability):

§  Oracle Support in Report Builder. Users will now be able to use Report Builder on top of Oracle data sources.

§  Hyperion support with SSRS. Organizations will now be able to use SSRS to build reports on top of Hyperion Essbase cubes.  

Performance/Enterprise:

§  Data compression (varDecimal), which is important for data warehouse scenarios and is specifically important for SAP BW scenarios. This requires less disk storage of decimal data which increases overall performance.

§  Manageability enhancements. Based on customer feedback, SQL Server provides enhanced management capabilities for DBAs such as improvements in database maintenance plans, enhanced management reports and a new copy database wizard. 

SQL Server Express Edition

§  Management reports have been added to SQL Server Express Edition enabling customers to get insights into the performance of their Express Edition and SQL Server Compact Edition databases.

§  SQL Server Management Studio Express Edition now enables management of SQL Server Compact Edition databases. 

SQL Server 2005 SP2 will ship shortly after the launch of Windows Vista and Office.  You can find more details about the features in SP2 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=71711.

The first wave of the Speaker Idol Contest is today at 19:00 in the expo hall. Come see:

Anthony Harris

Andrew Godleman

Evangelos Hadjichristodoulou (yes that is his real name)

They will all compete for 5 minutes in front of the judges (myself included).

So I lost to Lance Armstrong in the NYC Marathon yesterday. Oh well. I am now in route to TechEd in Barcelona!

We return to Barcelona for TechED 2006!  Of course I will be doing some sessions (see below) as well as judging the “Speaker Idol” contest.

See you in Spain!

SQL312 T-SQL Querying: Tips and Techniques

Stephen Forte , Richard Campbell

Wed Nov 8 10:45 - 12:00

Take your queries to the next level! This interactive session focuses solely on advanced querying techniques to get the most out of your SQL Server. See a series of real-world examples to extract data from your databases in ways you've never seen before. Techniques demonstrated include an ultra-fast way to do crosstab queries in SQL Server, running totals and ranking. Along the way you'll get some insight into how SQL Server works and the new capabilities in SQL Server 2005.

SQL407 XQuery Deep Dive: How to Write and Optimize Your XQuery

Stephen Forte

Thu Nov 9 09:00 - 10:15

SQL Server 2005 provides deeply integrated native support of XML. Besides storing the data as XML, it provides XQuery support as the key to unlock the information stored inside the XML document. This session gives you an introduction to SQL Server's XML and XQuery support and it demonstrates how to write and optimize your XQuery expressions. In particular, it discusses the use of XML Indices and how to read XQuery generated query plans.

SQLWD04 The Query Governor: SQL CLR in Action

Richard Campbell , Stephen Forte

Thu Nov 9 17:30 - 18:45

See how .NET takes SQL Server 2005 to a whole new level! In this Whiteboard Discussion learn how to build a query governor, a set of tools for evaluating whether or not a query should be run. Most query governors are simple limiters, automatically cancelling queries when they run too long or aborting queries with too high of a cost. The CLR makes it possible to programmatically evaluate the cost of a query without executing it! Combined with some techniques for determining the state of the server, you can build a governor is flexible and smart. This interactive Whiteboard Discussion makes it easy to explore different applications of this technology beyond the query governor.

Check us out in Bulgaria on .NET Rocks.

Check out Martin's great blog post here.

I will be speaking at the NY Metro SQL Server Users Group on Thursday at 6pm on XQuery in SQL Server. Hope to see you all there.

Topic:	Using XQuery to Retrieve and Manipulate XML Data with SQL Server 2005
Speaker:	Stephen Forte, Microsoft Regional Director
Date:	6:00 PM on October 26, 2006
Place:	Microsoft Office in Manhattan
	The Axa Financial Building
	1290 6th Avenue, NY, NY

Due to new security guidelines at the building, you will have an easier time getting in if you confirm your attendance via email to joelax@dbdirections.com. Otherwise you'll have to wait till someone comes downstairs to sign you in. Also remember to have a photo id with you.

Blogs, Web Services and general interoperability have proliferated the use of XML in recent years. With all of that XML out there, there needs to be an easy way to incorporate XML data with SQL Server relational data.

This session will look at how to use XQuery to retrieve and manipulate XML data inside the database. We'll start with a look at the new XML datatype in SQL Server 2005, then the ability to validate with XML Schema (XSD) and then creating XML indexes for use with XQuery statements. After a brief look at the W3C XQuery specification we quickly move to SQL Server’s implementation of XQuery 1.0. We'll incorporate XQuery in SELECT and WHERE clauses to retrieve information as well as see how to manipulate XML data with XQuery DML.

Pizza and refreshment will be served at the meeting, and there will be a drawing for several giveaways.   

Our next meeting is Thursday. Because of security you now have to register for this free event! Register here.

Thursday, October 19, 2006 CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory
Subject:	Microsoft Pattern & Practices Team’s Composite UI Application Block (CAB) and Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) ease the development of modular, extensible, and maintainable smart clients. Starting with a general, theoretical overview of smart clients, we’ll quickly move into a deep examination of CAB centered on working code. We’ll dig into the anatomy of CAB/SCSF, uncovering some key design patterns used in the toolset: Model-View-Presenter, Publish-Subscribe, and Dependency Injection. Throughout the talk we’ll share best practices and consider design decisions for achieving modularity and extensibility in your own smart clients with the CAB/SCSF tools and guidance. By the end of the tour, those new to CAB should find their learning curves greatly reduced. Intermediate-to-advanced CAB hackers will take away some hard fought tips-toward and tricks-to taking their composite smart clients and plug-in architectures to the next level.
Speaker:	David Laribee, President, Xclaim Software David Laribee is President of Xclaim Software, an ISV offering document, claim, and policy management software for the commercial property and casualty insurance industry. He has 10+ years experience designing, developing, and architecting enterprise applications with Microsoft technologies. David has worked with the .NET Framework since the zero-day in internal IT, product development, and rapid prototyping contexts across a wide variety of industries. He writes about agile practices, software architecture, and the business of software on his blog at http://laribee.com/.
Date:	Thursday, October 19, 2006
Time:	Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:30 PM
Location:	Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor
Directions:	B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

 

Bulgaria has great food, beautiful women, and great rakia. Learn more from Carl.