I did my first technology presentation last night for the Minnesota SQL Server Usergroup on the new T-SQL Output Clause.  While I wasn’t nervous in the leadup to the presentation, it all sure caught up with me right before hand and for the first 15 minutes.  I kept telling myself to slow down, speak clearly, and to pace myself.  Unfortunately, my public speaking skills are fairly rusty.  The last time I did any public speaking was when I was a Wedding DJ a little over 5 years ago and the amount of alcohol in those crowds made them a bit easier than last night.

If you are interested, the slide deck from last night can be found here.

The second presenter of the night was Itzik Ben-Gan.  He went over some solutions for custom aggregations, similar to those in his SQL Black Belt article this month in SQL Magazine.  One of the solutions he showed was very elegant for concatenating strings together and used documented functionality of For XML Path versus other solutions that have been used in the past that took advantage of undocumented features; such as a function to concatentate values to variables.

Here is a version of his solution run against the AdventureWorks database:

Select    pc.[Name],

       Stuff((

                Select ', ' + psc.[Name] as [text()]

                From    Production.ProductSubCategory psc

                Where    psc.ProductCategoryID = pc.ProductCategoryID

                For XML Path ('')), 1, 1, '')

From    Production.ProductCategory pc

Itzik did mention he has four books coming out this year on SQL Server 2005, two of them are nearing publication and I’ve already pre-ordered them since I can already tell from his presentation that they’ll be packed with useful information.