Connections Pre-Con

While here in Vegas at the Dev Connections con, I was able to attend a pre-con that was led by Allen Whit (Blog | Twitter) and it was great. Allen has done some amazingly cool things with powershell to help make him a  better DBA. And now he has shared some of that with me. A lot of what he covered I had read from his blog already but he showed off some things that I had not seen yet and some things that I had not thought of trying. His work on perf counter collection is great. I do not have a huge use for it right now as my company purchased a third party tool for monitoring, but it is still just great work and I can see how a consultant would find it invaluable. I hope to share a thing or two of what I learned in that pre con in my SQL Saturday 131 session. I will not be sharing his work but I have some thoughts on things that I would like to try after attending his session, so I hope that I can get it working and share it with you. One thing that I got out of it was a demo on installing and running SQL Server on Windows Core. This is something that I have been interested since the announcment of the Core edition of Windows Server but as you know it is not supported until SQL 2012.