I travelled down to Manchester last weekend to go to the SQLBits conference, something that I'd heard a lot of good things about.  I'm very glad I went, as it was an extremely useful and informative event.  And free!  :)

With 28 sessions being given by 28 speakers, there was plenty of choice on what to go to...possibly too much as I missed out on a few that I would have really liked to have seen.  I decided to mainly stay on the Business Intelligence track, and went to the following:

• Data Warehouse Data Modelling Vincent Rainardi
• Instrumenting, Monitoring and Auditing of SSIS ETL Solutions Davide Mauri
• SSIS Nuggets Live Jamie Thomson
• Data Warehousing features in SQL 2008 James Rowland-Jones
• Designing Effective Aggregations in Analysis Services 2008 Chris Webb
• Data Mining and SSIS - makes sense Allan Mitchell

All of which were very well presented and pitched at just the right level.  Personally I found Davide Mauri's session the most interesting as I've been looking at instrumentation and auditing of SSIS packages a lot recently, and his innovative DTLoggedExec tool (which can be downloaded here) is something I'll be looking at implementing very soon.

I'll certainly be back next year, as I'm sure there will be a SQLBits V.  If you are a SQL Server professional then get yourself along, it is well worth it.