TechEd-IT Forum : Day 1

Although TechEd-IT Forum officially started today, the fun began last night at the MCT Dinner hosted by Ken Rosen (Microsoft Learning), Mike Honig (MCT Program Manager) and Ronald Beekelaar (Proctor Owner), and sponsored by Prometric.

The picture is of me and Andy Malone who was last years IT Forum Speaker Idol winner. We spent many hours chatting about the Pro's and Con's of being a Speaker Idol and how he was feeling about presenting this year.

The keynote this morning was pretty cool. Apart from providing an overview of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 features, they organised us into sections and then handed out different colour lengths of plastic tubing which we used as musical instruments to play along with the band. Was heaps of fun.

I Was also able to attend two sessions today, "DAT201 - An Overview of the Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server" and "DAT202 - Introducing SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor", where we obviously discussed new features of SQL Server 2008, especially the Resource Governor.

There was only one thing that didn't impress me today and that was MS stretching the truth about SQL Server 2008 a little.

During the Keynote and the DAT201 session, Francois Ajenstat (Director of Product Management for Microsoft SQL Server) repeatedly stated (and I meant repeatedly!) that unlike its competitors (Oracle) Microsoft does not charge clients for added features in SQL Server 2008 so the Resource Governor was available from Express to Enterprise. Well, in the DAT202 session, Boris Baryshnikov (Program Manager of Microsoft SQL Server Relational Engine Group) stated that the RTM Standard version of SQL Server 2008 would have a limit placed on the number of Workload Groups and Resource Pools that could be created. Now, to me that means that I have to pay more for the full feature. Doesn't that completely contradict what Francois said? Still waiting for Francois to reply to my request for clarification.

Oh, tonight was also the first wave of Speaker Idol IT Forum. Although there were some great presentations, they were all powerpoint based with no demos. I found this rather strange given that all bar 2 of the Developer Speaker Idol contestants used demo's. Anyway, I've misplaced the name of the winner so will need to added this later.

UPDATE: The winner of Speaker Idol wave 1 was Peter Mendelsohn from Germany

Cheers
Jeff