Tech-Ed Europe, Day 2 at the ATE Stand

We've had some interesting questions during the first day on the ATE stand at Tech-Ed in Amsterdam. These have ranged from:

1. How does the optimiser work?

to

2. Where can I download SQL Server 2005 from?

There was also quite a lot of interest around database mirroring (thanks to Gianluca Hotz, MVP, https://solidqualitylearning.com/blogs/Gianluca/, for having pre-canned demos and slide decks!! and to Tony Rogerson, MVP, https://www.sqlserverfaq.com for assisting with Q&A)

Business intelligence (particularly Reporting Services, Analysis Services) also generated quite a lot of interest. Suprisingly, there didn't seem to be a lot of hype around Integration Services although the AMD stand had a great SQL Server 2005 64-Bit demo of SSIS on the Opteron dual core processor.

I managed to attend a Notification Services HOL/session in the morning was fairly interesting. There a few nice enhancements such as the Analysis Services Event Provider but I'll blog more about this later.