I am not addicted to text messaging. I was talked into using FaceBook and found out that two of my high school teachers are more active on the site than I am.

I love getting cards or real mail. I don't own a game system except for one that was passed down to me and is currently sitting unplugged, unused.

We have one T.V. with no cable, just PBS over the antenna.

It's not that I am slow to adapt, or painstakingly deliberate – I just don't feel the need to be inundated day in and day out with information, much of it which has little to nothing to do with the decisions I need to make.

Why bring this up? I'm not going to bore you with a personal diatribe about modern technology, but rather make a point about information systems and how we need to be careful in our decisions.

One of the points I get clients to hammer out detail on when putting into place any level of reporting/analytics is how they will respond to the data once they get – what are the methods and governances you will have around the metrics once you start seeing them? One of my favorite stories is of a call center manager who was set to fire half of his staff due to returns or exchanges of computer products, until we pointed out to him he needed to look at the year over year context to understand that this was a normal consumer cycle and that they were actually doing better than the year before.

This is a cogent point all the more given our current economic state – we are not required to have an immediate reaction to every action that occurs. We (the market and our government) did not have a planned method for response to these events – if you do not have a plan or understanding of why the needle tips, and what to do when it does, then you put yourself in danger with any immediate response to that moving gauge.

I get a small chuckle out of everyone misquoting Milton Friedman when it comes to the Great Depression and trying to fit his statement into current context.

He did place a lot of blame on the Fed for contracting the money supply during a time when banks needed liquidity, but if you understand more of Friedman and his advocacy for a free market, then you cannot place his thinking next to the decisions guiding the "bailout".

Friedman was a very deliberate person and a brilliant economist (gross understatement). With all the information we now have at hand, much more data and coming in much more timely, there is the opportunity to pick a more measured path for the economy.

So what does this have to do with being old fashioned? Maybe it's just my weird thought pattern for the day, but I believe that we haven't learned as a society what to do with, and how to react to the amount of information we are given every minute of the day. Stocks fluctuate intraday for no apparent reason other than they have a high "news" index on Google or Yahoo!; an industry becomes hot overnight because it gets featured in some trade publication for some minor purpose, and then the story copied over and over -- or, one of my favorites about United Airlines and a mistake in publishing a story that plunged the stock over 75% in one day.

I guess that I am old fashioned in that I like to get all the facts before making a decision – it's not to say that I don't make up my mind quickly on a great many things, but often I can rely on either experience or an accumulation of points before that juncture that allow me to pick (hopefully) the best option before me.

I think something I'll use to underline this point: is there any day trader (technical investor) out there that can compete with Warren Buffet (value investor)?

It is important that we, as I/T professionals, push our clients to consider the facts, plan for excellence, plan for the long term, and to do this, we need to help them understand the repercussions of the information they will be receiving from the systems we put in place.

Thoughts, examples? Please feel free to comment or e-mail me.

Sitting in on one of the partner sessions, Microsoft has put together a new web site specifically aimed at SQL Server enthusiasts, http://www.sqlserverexperience.com, or http://www.microsoft.com/sql/experience/.

If you are a partner and have a login, you can also go to http://partner.microsoft.com/bi. Look for many new resources and a contest to be posted here in November.

Day two kicked off with a lot of energy and I'm running to my next session, but I'll give everyone a quick preview of two of the big annoucnements by Microsoft at this morning's session. 

As a lot of you have read, Microsoft has made a lot of acquisitions the past few years, and this is due to their vision for the data platform and where it will be able to take and support their customer base and those of us that implement for their customer base.

The first, and one of the exciting new projects, is an implementation of SQL Server, now and future versions, that will be aimed specifically at data warehousing and in supporting large data stores. The project, code named "Madison", will be integrating technology acquired form DatAllegro. Just to give you an idea of where this is headed: the demo run a 24 node cluster with 150TB warehouse and 1 trillion rows in the central fact table. I'll have more on this later.

The second is project "Gemini", which is aimed at supporting the end user -- trulying amazing in the capabilities that they will be supporting -- and aimed at total integration with SharePoint, Office, Analysis Services and SQL Server, but taken to an entirely new place that is not currently available -- very exciting.

I'll be sure to post more tonight, for now I am off to find out more about Blue Ocean.

It's hard to go to Seattle without stopping by Pike's Place public market or dropping in to get coffee from the original Starbuck's (I did both and have overpriced coffee mugs to prove it):

Shot from the Sunday meet and greet; pretty large crowd, but the bulk of the attendees should be there tomorrow for the keynote address.

Lots of good sessions this year, so I had some tough picks on which to attend, and I may still change my mind on some of them; check back for progress on this great event as I will be sure to post more as the week progresses.

I almost overlooked the early registration myself, but luckily one of my fellow Catapult colleagues is on the ball and sent around a reminder to all of us.

For those out there interested in attending, you can register here for the 2008 BI conference. Microsoft just extended the early registration discount to August 22^nd from this Friday, August 8^th. It is a $300 dollar difference, so well worth the extra planning.

BI Conference 2008 Tracks:

• Microsoft BI Platform and Infrastructure
• Microsoft BI Clients and
• Deployment and Best Practices
• Customer and Industry Solutions
• Business Value of Business
• Partner Training Track

Tracks and sessions are listed, but no specific times yet for the individual sessions.

Anyone else going? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Right after I published my post Analysis Services and Storage Options, I noticed one of my bookmarks that might be interesting to those of you out there looking at more frequently updated Analysis Services scenarios.

It is a whitepaper by Paul Sanders published in April of 2005 titled Real-time Business Intelligence Using Analysis Services.

For anyone considering low latency BI, particularly pay attention to proactive caching in Analysis Services 2005 and 2008. It is a partition specific feature and can really come in handy given a well laid out partition scheme for your cube.