The first session today was "Real-time OLAP" as delivered by Aaron Solomon from Hitachi Consulting. A really great session - I learned alot about pro-active caching, SSIS tasks & components that integrate with Analysis Services, AS partitions and various other cool stuff.
As I said to Aaron, I'm worried about varying query performance from a user perspective when doing pro-active caching based on whether the data is residing in a ROLAP partition or a MOLAP cache. I compared this to the inherent problems with HOLAP in AS2000 which can create massive variances in query performance. I have to say Aaron didn't really put my mind at rest so I’m still really worried about this. Fancy technologies that do clever stuff are all well and good but we all know that the user is king and if they don’t like it – the coolness of the tech is irrelevant.
The other cool thing that I particularly liked about Aaron's session was that even though we were basically talking about Analysis Services features...all of the demos were in SSIS. This thing just doesn't know where it stops does it???!!!
Last session of the day was "Architecting a large scale data warehouse using SQL Server 2005" by Ryan Clay, again of Hitachi. This covered partitioning in SQL2005 which is MUCH improved. There was also some good new stuff around covering indexes which I didn't know about. I'll hopefully remember to elaborate later. One more thing...the demos were in SSIS. Again. I can't get away from it!!!!
I've also been to a Microsoft round table discussion where people were talking about their pain points with SQL Server 2000. It was mainly full of DBAs so I couldn't identify with alot of the things that were said but we were reassured that it was all going to get fed back to the product team. We shall see!!!
If you're reading this and you're at PASS don't forget to try and get along to Christian Wade's presentation on SQLCLR on Friday. He's got the graveyard shift unfortunately but if you're still around - don't miss it!
-Jamie