Bill did a GREAT job presenting on new features in Profiler in SQL 2005.  He definitely looked more comfortable and in control this year.  Of course last year he was fighting a cold which didn't help.  This year, his session was so popular that it was standing room only and they literally turned away about 30-40 people who couldn't fit in the room.  PASS has asked Bill to present it again tomorrow so those who were turned away will have another chance.  That's quite a vote of confidence in Bill.  Congratulations!

The one down-side to Bill's session was that there were several people who were asking really nitpicky questions about their own personal issues with Profiler and wanting Bill to tell them if that was fixed in 2005.  Perhaps they were confused and thought that Bill was an official representative from Microsoft, which is where their questions should really have been directed.  I felt bad for Bill, but he handled them well.  And I have to give him credit for having the guts to open up his presentation and invite people to ask questions all throughout rather than asking them to hold their questions until the end.  That took a lot of guts because a situation like that could backfire and turn ugly in a hurry.  On the other hand, when it goes well, most people enjoy it.

The two things that stood out to me in this presentation were the Deadlock Graph, and the Performance Monitor stats.  You used to be able to trace deadlocks, but from the comments I heard by other users, it could be a real pain in the backside to filter through all the stuff that was recorded in the text.  Now, there is a Deadlock Graph which will show you the two SPIDs involved, what SQL statement each was running when the deadlock occurred, and it even crosses out the graphic of the SPID that got killed.  It was pretty cool and definitely easy to read.

The Performance Monitor Stats lets you tie together the SQL events that were taking place along with Perfmon stats.  The visual display for this, which allows you to zoom in, also allows you to click on one chart and the corresponding section of the other is highlighted.  So, for example, if you saw a really tall spike in CPU processing, you could click on that spike in the Perfmon data and it will highlight the SQL statements that were executing at the time.  Now that's pretty damn slick.

I believe Bill is planning to make his slides available on his web site and/or on the SQLTeam web site.  I suggest you get them and check out these features for yourself.