TechEd Australia 2005: Day 2

Another fairly uneventful day. The sessions I went to today were XML, XML & more XML first thing this morning (I'm not much of an unstructured data kind of guy - give me a relationship DB any day) and a tour of the SQL 2005 client tools (learnt a couple things but not much since I've been playing with the tools for about a year) to top off the morning. The afternoon started with debunking security myths (it's the Jesper & Steve show - very entertaining), followed by SQL backup & recovery (I was actually a bit surprised at the number of extra backup/recovery features in SQL 2005). Late arvo/evening was upgrading to SQL 2005 (for all the components) and Jesper came back to lock down SQL 2000 security by hacking the life out of account permissions, registry ACLs, NTFS permissions & SQL system objects (mostly fairly dangerous stuff IMHO - likely to leave your SQL server rather unstable/unusable...but definitely more secure).

Lots of stuff to think about from today and experiment with. Time to build up a virtual PC, because there's going to be a fair bit of tearing apart and rebuilding methinks. And I've got to get me a copy of Jesper & Steve's book!