SPC2011 Lab

The lab here at the conference is pretty cool.  There are a ton of great lab exercises available to run through to help you get the best out of the product.  I'm hoping to find a way to offload some of the source and the walkthough documentation so that I can use it later.

The lab at SPC2011.  This is a few of half the lab, there are just as many machines to the left of the frame of this photo.

There are quite a few machines available to use, and they even spent the effort to put some cool lighting in the room. Each machine is a thin client with dual displays, which I believe is the same concept the VP of IT at where I work is looking to go to for a lot of the associates at our company.

Disney!!

Last night was our trip to disneyland.

Dinner

Had dinner tonight with the guys from Winwire, and met lots of new people.  Had a great time, and ate lots of great food.

Dessert....  yummy :-)

Now im off to bed, tomorrow will be a long day ending in a long night at disneyland.

Winner winner chicken dinner

So at lunchtime I walked into the vendor booth area, and Quest Software was having an instant raffle to win 25 bucks, so I grabbed a ticket.  3 minutes later they announced the number and lo and behold it was mine :-) 

There was also a free book giveaway, but the line was long and i was hungry.  By the time i got lunch and came back, the books were all gone.  I'm going to have to roam that room more often to make sure i dont miss out on more free stuff.

Denali

So MS has been hyping the new sql server a lot at the confernce.  Its codename is denali, and they have been showing demos of it.  I have to say, it seems quite impressive.  It has way better failover capabilites from previous versions, and they have made it even easier to setup/configure.

You can find out more by checking out the website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions.aspx

Keynote

This morning was the keynote.  Normally keynotes are full of excitement and new announcements....  This one was not.  I'm hoping the rest of the conference doesnt fall so flat.  The setup in the main ballroom was impressive (see the pic below), and the speakers held my interest for the most part.  A vast majority of the keynote was spent tooting their own horn on how much functionality they packed into office 365.  There was one redeeming part of the keynote - they demonstrated live a SQL failover with the new not yet release SQL server.  They had a monster sharepoint farm (1 TERRABYTE of ram, 80 processors, 100 TB of disk space) and they failed over the entire farm by unplugging the primary SQL server.  The whole farm came back up on its own within 40 seconds.  Given that they had a user load of 7500 concurrent users, and a 14 terrabyte content database attached, that was extremely impressive.

Anaheim Conference Center

In a word: impressive.

From the outside

This place is huge (my feet hurt from all the walking)

Here is another pic of the place:


Looking out from the escalator

Arrival

When i arrived in LA, i started to remember why i left CA.  The smog, the traffic, and some really crazy people.  Even so, I was still very excited because In-N-Out was in my near future.

After I picked up my rental car and started to drive from the airport to my hotel, I was pleasantly surprised to see how close my hotel was to disneyland.  As I neared my hotel, there were fireworks going off in there air, and as I pulled in I realized that disneyland is literally just a few blocks from my hotel.

The hotel im staying at is awesome.  The room is a  spacious two room suite, and the entire center area of the hotel is wide open.

Inside the hotel

First floor

From the outside