Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Kevin Kline, current President of PASS and author of SQL in a Nutshell was giving out free, autographed copies of his book at the Exhibit Hall Reception.  Several people waited in line to get theirs and were happy to have a free book.  I was still begrudging him the way the conference started that morning that I didn't bother to get a copy.  Besides, it is more general SQL and not just SQL Server T-SQL, and I have the entire Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reference Library, so figured I was pretty well covered in that area.

On Day 2, Veritas was giving away a free book:  Tools and Tips for SQL Server Performance Management.  Even though I probably learned everything I need to know from Graz's presentation, I picked up this free book anyway.  Their keynote was pretty good, so I thought I'd take their book.

Several vendors were giving out demos of their software.  I meant to spend some serious time checking out each vendor, but by the time I carved out some schedule space to do it, the exhibit hall was being shut down.  Damn!  I didn't check the time schedule very well on that.  Fortunately, when I picked up the book at lunch, I also wandered by Embarcadero's booth and picked up their demo CD and saw a very quick demo of ER/Studio.  This looks like it just might be the tool I'll need for my next project, so that was foturnate.  (Hey, if any of y'all have stories to tell about using ER/Studio, I'm interested).

Of course, there was also the Business Intelligence Resource Kit and SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 with its Resource Kit from Microsoft, so that's a big plus, too!

All-in-all, not a bad few day's collections.