On Friday, February 15, the Nashville SQL Server Users Group had its first meeting. It was actually the 
very first meeting of the rejuvenated SQL Server group that had more or less dissolved over the past few years. But a few of us got together and realized that we wanted to have a user's group that we could attend here locally, and so the group was reborn.
Turnout was spectacular for a first meeting of any kind really, with the meeting being held at the offices of Robert Half International in downtown Nashville. Approximately 100 people were in attendance, which for one thing meant that the pizza was pretty much all eaten by the end of the meeting, but also meant that this was a tremendously well received 
first meeting for any type of group, much less a SQL Server user's group that had floundered away a few years back. Hungry for pizza, hungry for knowledge.
Luckily for our first meeting, we brought out a very popular speaker, and a coauthor of mine, SQL Server MVP Kevin Kline, who gave an excellent rundown of the Top 10 Features that are coming in SQL Server 2008.
As you can see from the pictures, almost every seat was filled, which is quite a big deal, since in most conferences/user groups, there is a strict, unenforced "chair-between" policy.
Kevin's talk covered:
- SQL Improvements
- Developer Improvements
- Reporting Services Improvements
- Compression
- Datatypes (like the new Date and Time types)
- Security Improvements
- Resource Governor
- Auditing
- Analysis Services Performance Improvements
- Multi-Server management
You can download the slides from here, along with a white paper that Kevin had written up on this for his employer, Quest.
Our next meeting will be on April 4th, 2008, a Friday at 11:30 (location to be announce) where Joe Webb, another SQL Server MVP from here in Nashville will give a presentation on Tips & Tricks for Writing Better Queries. Joe is a great speaker so please come on down (or up, depending on where you live and where the meeting ends up,) and here him speak. We will also have another member of the group present another tip or trick that they have up their sleeve.
If you are interested in attending, watch http://nashville.sqlpass.org for updates on the exact location, and register if you want to get updates sent to you. If you are interested in speaking, send an email to shelton.dickson@decisionsource.com. He will get you hooked up.
Of course, I am presenting a very pretty mighty perfect picture of the day, and for the most part, it is true. The only real snafu of the day was that the first (and only) projector that was used wouldn't work. In the picture, notice that the only thing out of focus (more or less) is the picture on the screen. Despite having the collective audio visual clubs of half of the schools in Nashville from the past 20 years in one room, not a one of us had the ability to get the projector going (even though some tried, and others shouted out helpful tips like "see if the lens cap is off"). But thanks to some Southern hospitality, another projector was acquired from a company in the same building and we were off and running.
See you on April 4!
Note: I apologize for the quality of the pictures. For future meetings I will be toting along a far better camera than my Motorola Q phone camera so I can provide blogs and pictures for the website.