Can you say it out loud? You might have known the capital was Boise, but if you pronounced it Boy-zee, you were wrong. I was there last Wednesday for the kickoff meeting of the Boise SQL Server User Group, and was told that if I didn't pronounce the name correctly, everyone would know immediately that I wasn't from around there.  The correct pronunciation is Boy-sea, or as I was spelling it when writing to my friend there: Boycee.

We had over 30 people show up for my presentation, in which I compared the two different concurrency models that SQL Server 2005 has available. I didn't dive into a really deep level discussion about the internals of locking and snapshot isolation, because there were people there with all different experience levels. I tried to stick to the behavioral differences and the costs involved with both choices.

It was a very enthusiastic group, with lots of good questions. There was also lots of good food, much than we could eat! We had about 20 pizzas, 3 coolers full of cold drinks, several bags of chips,  and also several bags of cookies.

I get a lot of requests to come talk at User Groups, and usually I am open to it when I am in town teaching a class. This was the first time that I actually traveled by plane to go somewhere just to give a free User Group talk, and I did it because my good friend Cindy Gross, who works for Microsoft in Boise, asked me to.  And Cindy made it well worth my while, giving me a wonderful guided tour of the Idaho capital, and a fabulous breakfast on Thursday!

Hopefully, I'll make it back again and Cindy has promised to take me rafting down the river. That sounds great, if I get back before the Winter!

~Kalen