My colleagues keep asking me if I had a nice holiday.
I’m getting tired of explaining that it’s serious business and therefore decided to post some pictures of a bunch of us engaged in the best SQL Server training event around….

Our Dutch chapter was honoured by a visit from the SQLCAT team. Lubor Kollar and Thomas Kejser from the SQLCAT team even brought Sameet Agarwal and Amit Shukla along who are from the Core Engine team for SQL Server.

The evening was hosted by Henk van der Valk who works for Unisys. Our chapter meets every month at various locations, we depend on the generosity of company’s who sponsor our user group meetings. Unisys has become a true “friend of PASS” in the past years having sponsored a number of meetings already, largely due to fellow member Henk who runs the Performance Test Centre of Unisys in the Netherlands.

The setup of this evening was pretty simple but sure did the trick. Lubor introduced Thomas, Amit, Sameet, himself and explained what the SQLCAT team is and does. After that Sameet explained what his Core Engine team is and does. The rest was up to us, we were free to ask questions after that. Following a silence of about 20 seconds was a 2 hour Q&A session. The questions were quite literally about almost everything. Complaints, feature requests or scalability / maintenance tips and tricks. You could ask pretty much anything and you would either get an answer or notice that Lubor was making lot’s of notes.

The cool part is that you can do this too. The SQLCAT team members can be found at many conferences like SQLBits, the European PASS Conference (more on the 2010 edition soon) and of course the PASS Summit. And let’s not forget to mention that they share a wealth of knowledge through white papers etc. via their website www.sqlcat.com !

Lubor showed proof at the end of the evening that you can literaly run into CAT team members anywhere by showing a picture of Kenneth Willhelmson, himself and yours truly from the SQL Server Open World conference in Lalandia, Denmark.

Or maybe showing this picture on the screen in front of 50 chapter members was a trick to get me to be quiet. Like Sameet calling me a trouble maker was not a strong enough hint. Well, they did say that you could say anything, even complain about something or request features

It was all in good fun of course and I would like to thank Lubor and Thomas from the CAT team, Sameet and Amit from the Core Engine Team, Henk van der Valk from Unisys and of course everyone who showed up from our PASS Chapter for this excellent Q&A session !

We actually only watched about 8 hours of PASS.

The plan was to do around 10 hours but it took 1 hour to figure out that while a HDMI delivers a great picture, Windows Live Meeting only wants to play sound through the headphone connection. And we lost an hour because we used the wrong link….

Which actually made our setup only look more geeky, because I had to use a speaker set from a pc.

I encourage everyone to invite some geek friends over next time PASS does this. The discussions and sharing of ideas was excellent ! The presentations / presenters kept on throwing ideas into the room and the informal setting made everyone bounce ideas into the group.

Besides Henk, who is just showing off, remote connecting to his 96 core box

I’m kidding of course !  At some point Thomas Grohser’s (=tg=) backup and restore white paper was mentioned. A print-out is laying around somewhere between the pizza boxes. And we debated on various backup and restore methodologies for a significant portion of the evening.

Thanks PASS, please do it again !