Well I managed to spend a week in Las Vegas and not gamble once. To be honest Las Vegas is not my idea of a good time. I would rather take a hike in a National Park over Las Vegas any day. Anyway, we have been assured that next years TechWave will be on the East Coast, rumor has it that Washington D.C. might be an option. This years event was hosted at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

My schedule was very full as I followed the Enterprise Modeling track. Sybase's focus for the Enterprise Modeling track was on Enterprise Architecture modeling and they were demonstrating the new functionality in PowerDesigner 15, currently in Beta.

The Plenary, an introduction to the Enterprise Modeling track, covered new features in version 15 with David Dichmann, PowerDesigner product manager, covering the theory behind Enterprise Architecture. Followed by Matt Creason, PowerDesigner Principal Systems Consultant, demoing the product. For a customer perspective, Bodo Saar, Senior Consultant, Methoden & Qualitätsmanagement in der Softwareentwicklung, demonstrated how he used PowerDesigner to implement Testing Use Cases into the development life cycle. This was accomplished by customizing PowerDesigner behavior via the use of Extended Model Definitions.

Multi-Level Database Design Techniques with PowerDesigner

- introduced the new Logical Data Model in version 15.

Using PowerDesigner for Business Analysis

- was a high level presentation on using Business Process models, Conceptual Models and High level UML diagrams to perform Systems Analysis

Succeeding with PowerDesigner in object oriented modeling of business processes and system processes

- Bodo Saar, who also spoke in the Plenary, further detailed out their implementation of PowerDesigner using primarily UML diagrams to model business and system processes. An interesting twist was their use of UML Class diagrams to document their data requirements, this was selected to ease the linkage between other UML diagrams and also to keep the notation consistent. In their environment there is no requirement to generate DDL.

Process and Data Alignment - A Model Approach with PowerDesigner

- explored techniques for working with Business Process and Conceptual Data models.

Creating and Using Production Ready Scripts for Automating Manual Processes in PowerDesigner

- Customer demonstration of effective use of scripting to automate many functions in PowerDesigner.

Platform Independent Modelling domain, from business process to implementation

- Customer presentation on the use of PowerDesigner in a large Telecom environment.

Modeling Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture by Example

- This was a more in depth look at the new Enterprise Architecture Model and diagrams added in PowerDesigner 15.

The only PowerDesigner Extended Education course offered was Data Modeling with PowerDesigner, since I have taught this course many times, I decided to learn some more about SQL, so I choose the Mastering Transact-SQL: Advanced Tips and Techniques. This was a very good class even though they are cramming a 4 day class into an 8 hour slot.