Colorado PASS Camp

What a Day! 87 attendees, 16 speakers, 2 MVPs, 20 presentations, 25 large pizzas, an XBox 360, an iPod, and an MSDN subscription all at the Microsoft officies in Denver celebrating the SQL Server community in Colorado.

It's Done

SQL Server 2005 Bible is done; I turned in the last element last Friday and danced around the house. 54 chapters. 1418 pages. A publishing innovation I'm playing with is online ScreenCasts to augment the book's text and screenshots (Wiley's been great about letting me try new ideas). These are short 2-5 minutes videos that demonstrate a specific task or concept. I've posted the first one - Viewing Deadlocks using Profiler. About 50 ScreenCasts are scheduled in all. And if you have any suggestions or requests, send'em this way.

A glutton for punishment, I just signed to write another book. This one's on another passion of mine - merging object-oriented technology with the relational database engine. I've put about a year into developing an O/R Hybrid design in SQL Server. It has polymorphism, inheritance, code generation, complex association mapping, and first class objects - all hidden behind a T-SQL façade. The book will be out at the end of this year by Manning Publications, but you can play with the code as I work through the iterations.

An exciting project is the new Advanced Design and Optimization workshop's that's been through one beta round and about to go live. I love working with a small group and I've packed all my favorite database ideas into this one workshop.

May is a busy month and if you're in Colorado I'd love to see you at the Colorado PASS Camp, May 17th. I'm giving the keynote presentation on Performance Decisions. O/R Hybrid Designs is my topic at the Front Range Code Camp. And I'm presenting Data Modeling Key Decisions and Optimization Theory at DevTeach in Montreal. If you can't make it to one of these events, visit you local PASS Chapter.

As always, if you want to talk about SQL Server or database architecture, send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.