[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]

TechEd is next week!  May 16-19 to be exact, in Atlanta.  Unfortunately I won’t be there – I was at InterOp earlier this week in Vegas (I’ll send a recap of that in the next few days) and I’ll be sitting this one out to catch up on some work and to start work on an idea for a cloud application that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

My colleague, Tharun Tharian, will be there so I encourage you to say hi if you see him.  He’ll be joined by the SQL Azure, DataMarket, and OData engineering teams delivering the latest on the respective services and technologies, and also manning the booth to answer your questions.  You’ll find them hanging out at the Cloud Data Services booth if you want to chat with them during the conference.

For those of you going, below are the SQL Azure and OData sessions that I encourage you to check out the sessions listed below – either live or over the web.  I encourage you to attend either Quentin Clark or Norm Judah’s foundational sessions right after the keynote to learn more about how to bridge on-premises investments with Windows Azure platform, and how SQL Server “Denali” and SQL Azure will work together in both the services offered, and updates in the tooling and development experience.  You may even hear some new announcements about SQL Azure and other investments in cloud data services.

Enjoy the conference!

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Foundational Sessions:

FDN04 | Microsoft SQL Server: The Data and BI Platform for Today and Tomorrow

Speaker(s): Quentin Clark

Monday, May 16 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room: Georgia Ballrm 3

FDN05 | From Servers to Services: On-Premise and in the Cloud

Speaker(s): Norm Judah

Monday, May 16 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room: Sidney Marcus Audit

SQL Azure Sessions:

DBI403 | Building Scalable Database Solutions Using Microsoft SQL Azure Database Federations

Speaker(s): Cihan Biyikoglu

Monday, May 16 | 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM | Room: C201

DBI210 | Getting Started with Cloud Business Intelligence

Speaker(s): Pej Javaheri, Tharun Tharian

Monday, May 16 | 4:45 PM – 6:00 PM | Room: B213

COS310 | Microsoft SQL Azure Overview: Tools, Demos and Walkthroughs of Key Features

Speaker(s): David Robinson

Tuesday, May 17 | 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM | Room: B313

DBI323 | Using Cloud (Microsoft SQL Azure) and PowerPivot to Deliver Data and Self-Service BI at Microsoft

Speaker(s): Diana Putnam, Harinarayan Paramasivan, Sanjay Soni

Tuesday, May 17 | 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM | Room: C208

DBI314 | Microsoft SQL Azure Performance Considerations and Troubleshooting

Wednesday, May 18 | 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM | Room: B312

DBI375-INT | Microsoft SQL Azure: Performance and Connectivity Tuning and Troubleshooting

Speaker(s): Peter Gvozdjak, Sean Kelley

Wednesday, May 18 | 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM | Room: B302

COS308 | Using Microsoft SQL Azure with On-Premises Data: Migration and Synchronization Strategies and Practices

Speaker(s): Mark Scurrell

Thursday, May 19 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Room: B213

DBI306 | Using Contained Databases and DACs to Build Applications in Microsoft SQL Server Code-Named “Denali” and SQL Azure

Speaker(s): Adrian Bethune, Rick Negrin

Thursday, May 19 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Room: B312

DataMarket & OData Sessions:

COS307 | Building Applications with the Windows Azure DataMarket

Speaker(s): Christian Liensberger, Roger Mall

Wednesday, May 18 | 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM | Room: B312

DEV325 | Best Practices for Building Custom Open Data Protocol (OData) Services with Windows Azure

Speaker(s): Alex James

Thursday, May 19 | 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM | Room: C211

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-Steve