Richard Campbell Blogs Too

I'm about an hour away from delivering my last session in the last time block at DevTeach in Montreal.

Its a repeat session of my Introduction to OLAP, a session I've done a number of times and can have a lot of fun with. I love the last session of the conference, its a good time for humour and lots of silliness. I did this session in the first block in the first day... 8am Sunday morning is a tough time to present, much less to attend.

The conference has been lots of fun, many of the usual suspects were here (many are already leaving)...

• Guy Barrette (thanks for setting up the great dinner, Guy!)
• Jim Duffy (believes he's funnier than I am, and may even be right)
• Sylvain Duford (behind that enigmatic smile beats the heart of an evil bugger like the rest of us)
• Markus Egger (Austrian, and not afraid to tell you about it, over and over)
• Carl Franklin (pick a card, any card)
• Cathi Gero (way too nice to hang around with this evil crowd)
• Rob Howard (enjoying his new found freedom)
• Tom Howe (the indominable, the incomparable, and my dear friend)
• Don Kiely (from Alaska, and it shows)
• Kevin Kline (its all about SQL Server, dummy!)
• Nick Landry (hey, settle down, I'd like to come back to this place again some day, I live here y'know)
• Julie Lerman (have you seen my husband?)
• Ted Neward (I call him slash-boy, ask him about it if you get a chance)
• Rod Paddock (trying to keep Duffy under control, when he isn't hassling Markus)
• Marcie Robillard (the DataGird Girl herself!)
• Joel Semeniuk (take my clients - PLEASE!)
• Rick Strahl (the dude with the hair!)
• Christian Weyer (popped his sushi cherry and is never going back)

Missed my buddy Steve Forte, who was supposed to come along and do the Oracle/Linux to SQL Server/Windows Interop session with me. I made it work solo, but its not the same. I also presented a brand new session on Error Handling in SQL Server 2005 (Yukon). While I appreciate the sentiment of giving SQL Server real error handling, I'm still debating about its relevance... how many errors occur in SQL Server that don't have to be propogated back to the client anyway? I brought this line of discussion up during the session, and I think the general consensus was that deadlocks were pretty much the only error that we really want to handle on our own.

I was thinking along the same lines and had written a bunch of test code to try catching a deadlock in a stored procedure and recover automatically... to no avail. Blame it on the beta, I'll wait for Beta 2 and see how things behave then.

Marcie (DataGridGirl) Robillard crashed the conference to catch a couple of sessions and ended up presenting one! What's up with that!

Poor Cathi Gero - we pick on her endlessly. The problem is that Cathi is a genuinely nice person, while the rest of us are evil buggers. The number of times over the course of the past three days that I've seen Cathi with her hands over her mouth, turning pink with embarassment are almost beyond count. Here's an example:

Here, Ted Neward is feeding Cathi some odd thing from our dinner at this lovely Belgian restaurant that Guy Barrette arranged for us. Somehow the feeding of Cathi became highly amusing (you can see me laughing in the background) and Cathi was red all over again... I don't know why she puts up with all of us.

After this final session (only a few minutes before I have to go set up), I'm conference free for a couple of months - a relaxing summer polishing barbequing skills and enjoying being at home. Oh sure, I'll still be working, but that's the easy part.

Next conference - Tech Ed in September, Kuala Lumpur for sure, and Tokyo a maybe!