Really rainy in Orlando today, traffic is horrible. We had a higher than usual number of RSVP’s for the meeting, but attendance ended up being about our usual, 19 total. Jack did the intro using the PASS chapter deck (the color/gradient on some of the slides needs some work!), and we stretched out the opening phase trying to give people time to arrive and for the pizza to get here.

Side note, for some reason when we order 10 pizzas it seems to stun the pizza place – you want them tonight? Is it just me, or does a delivery order for 10 pizzas not seem like a huge spike?

We did some light networking and some general conversation. About 50% of our attendees see an upturn in their businesses. About 50% are still using SQL 2000 for something important at work. Only 4 had business cards, and all but 2 use LinkedIn.

We were also pleased to have Rick Heiges attending. Rick is the VP of Marketing for PASS and since he was in town (though on the other end of town), made time to come up for the meeting.

Ron Dameron did a presentation on hardening servers using Powershell. He’s tasked with inspecting and standardizing 600+ SQL servers at work. Scripting absolutely makes sense for that size problem, though I’ll admin to thinking we need bigger hardware – does it really make sense to have 600 servers just for SQL? Good presentation, and I could see our members thinking about the value of his approach.

Ron also noted that a pain point for him is trying to understand the SMO/WMI object models (he noted that SMO is documented in BOL). Not sure if there is a current solution, but I can see that having a browser and intellisense would ease that pain, in Visual Studio object models are very easy to navigate. He stressed that it’s ok and expected to spend some time ‘getting it right’ and is an iterative process.

Checked in on the Livemeeting coverage, webcam not bad, Jorge Segarra mentioned that the sound cut out at times (our bluetooth mike not working, so it’s on the desk) and that he liked the room cam, a bit of a sense of being there. We need to devote a person to chatting or at least saying hello the online attendees, and I’d like to work on having one raffle item for them as well.

Afterward we stayed for chat and networking, and great conversations as usual. Jack, Kendal, and I talked for a while at the end of the evening about doing more to grow and cross pollinate the speaker pool, and I’ll write more on that soon.