Speaking at SQL Connections 2008

I just received news that my abstract for the session "SQL Server Integration Services Deployment Best Practices" was selected for the spring 2008 SQL Connections conference. As you can imagine, I'm awfully excited! Here's the full abstract:

"So you’ve built a set of SSIS packages to populate your data warehouse, and everything works great on your development environment – but what next? SSIS has a great set of tools, but when it comes to preparing for and executing a seamless deployment from development into test and finally into production, it’s not always obvious what tools to use or how to best use them. In this session you’ll learn how to prepare for and execute a seamless deployment of complex ETL solutions through a repeatable, testable process. If you’re tired of saying “but it worked on my machine!” then this is one session you can’t afford to miss."

I submitted a handful of different abstracts, but this is the one that got selected, and there's probably no surprise there. Many of the questions posted on the SSIS MSDN Forums are related to deployment, and when people complain about SSIS (like that would ever happen, right?) deployment almost always comes up. Hopefully before too long the SSIS team will have a set of powerful deployment tools that take away the pain of deployment, so people would look at an abstract like this and say "why would anyone ever attend a session on this?" But from what I see today it's not happening in SQL Server 2008, so you'll probably want to attend this one.

I'll see you in Orlando!