Tonight I went to the SQL Server User’s group at the Microsoft Office in the Twin Cities. As always they had the pizza and beer (hmmmmmmm beeer).
Anyways, there were two presentations. One on NAnt for automating SQL Server deployment, and then one given by Itzik Ben-Gan on analytical functions in SQL Server 2005 (Yukon) and comparing the results to SQL Server 2000.
The NAnt presentation was ok, but not really anything I would use. I really don’t understand scripting out script. Why not just write the script out in the first place?
The Analytical functions presentation was more interesting. It went over ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK, and NTILE(x) functions in SQL Server 2005 and how you can use them to speed up some things that you might be doing in SQL Sever 2000, etc. One thing I can see is automatically ranking team wins and losses by sorting by the wins and losses and adding a RANK column. Pretty sweet.
Finally, we stopped at the Granite City Food and Brewery in Maple Grove for a beer to see how it compares to the one in Saint Cloud. Pretty nice, but kinda crowded.
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