Yesterday (Monday 12/12/2005) was the annual year end Atlanta MDF wrap party where we look back at our past successes and where we look ahead to our future successes.
Before I go any further, everyone needs to take a moment or two to thank Douglas McDowell, our fearless UG leader, for the incredible amount of work that he puts into planning the user group and making everything happen. Brendon and I try to help out where we can, but for the most part all we do is run the meeting if Douglas is out of town. Douglas plans the meeting presentations and sponsorships months in advance, secures the location for the group, handles the newsletter, and generally makes his expert subject matter knowledge available for the rest of us. Thanks for being there for us Douglas!
We did some meeting planning in terms of possible future subjects. Here's the list in no particular order:
- Upgrade from 2K to 2K5
- Data Mining
- WMI and SQL monitoring
- Encryption and certificates
- Application/database/enterprise architecture
- SQL Express
- Hardware/Capacity/Availability (SANs, 64 bit, etc)
- Disaster Recovery
- Dimensional Modeling
- Data Warehousing 101
- PSS panel - what, why, how
- SSIS
- SSRS
- OO Programming for Relational People (an intro)
- CLR/TSQL improvements for more performant queries
- Score Cards
- Management Views + System Tables = monitoring beyond the GUI
- Service Pack 1 (not yet released)
- Partitioning
- Development with VSTS
- Microsoft Certifications
This is what the 30 of us present came up with in the 15 minutes we brainstormed. What we're looking for is to have some of these topics presented by subject matter experts we bring in from outside the group (like most of our meetings last year) and some of the presentations should come from within the group membership. We heard some complaints that we might be getting too vendor-heavy in terms of our presenters
-- Matt Ranlett