So, Microsoft has a number of internal technical community gatherings.  One of these is around the folks who are especially interested in storage.  Now, while I haven't worked on storage for a while, I love these topics and like to hang out with folks working on storage... it is always fun to think about the issues of the entire stack of file systems, data representations, data access, and all that stuff.   Last month (June 19th), I presented my talk "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: and Apostate's Opinion"
 and received a wonderful mixture of responses from "Of course, we figured this out and are leveraging these ideas in this project" to "Jeez, you're completely full of crap!"

So, this month was the first anniversary of the Storage Community and we had a "Soapbox" contest with 11 different talks each of which was five minutes long.  There were no rules about the content and the audience was armed with PopShotz foam-pistols and LOTS of ammunition.   Having (years ago) started the tradition of having rowdy presentations to armed audiences, I could hardly complain!

It occurred to me that the audience would be full of my old friends who (in many cases) are still in denial and love their SQL language.  I simply had to get in THEIR faces...

I gave the following presentation and won the award for "most enthusiastic" presentation!

It was a lot of fun...  ;-)

- Pat