What's heating up about as fast as Summer here in Texas, is the excitement over the upcoming EnZee World Tour.

I am especially excited this year because I've been tapped to host/emcee the Best Practices sessions in each of the cities, which means that I'll get a front-row seat to hear how the masters of the technology ply their trade and make the Netezza machine sing.

After all my fellow Enzees - you are the ones gathered 'round the grill and the ones who make-it-happen. Others of us are often in awe of the rather inspired means and outcomes you so deftly deploy with the technology, and integrate it to the technologies around you.

Of all the questions I hear at a customer site on the basic workin's of the machine, there's nothing like sharing war stories with people who pull all those things together and instantiate an operational environment. Especially when you do it by utterly eclipsing the performance of Netezza's displaced predecessor. And here's where we really want to hear the down-low on how things used-to-be versus how-things are.

In many cases, I hear that you had an easy time of bringing in the box and making it go. But making the technology go wasn't nearly as difficult as bringing-in-the-box - especially if you have to wheel it past the sneering eyes of doubters or political players who want to see it fail, or at least  - see it be not-so-widly successful as the current expectations might dictate.

But Netezza really does meet those lofty expectations, doesn't it? And one of the stories we all love to hear is that type of victory - the dark horse so to speak - championing the cause amidst the pressure of anything-but-technology. The odd thing about new, better technologies is that they are so much better than old technologies that the older technologists cannot believe their own ears. Orders-of-magnitude more power you say? Tish tosh, you must be mad.

So when we get into best practice sessions, we speak of things like scanning a terabyte, or 2 or 10, and complain that our query can't seem to cross the X-number-of-seconds boundary. Seconds, mind you. And people hear this and wonder what the complaint really is - after all we can't be working with real data because terabyte-sized table queries always take hours to run, or hadn't you heard this?

I recall sitting in on a session with a bunch of people who honestly had money-to-burn. One of them complained that they could not get up to New York often enough, and every time they went their favorite restaurant/play/whatever seemed to be oversold. One of them complained about a broken drawer in his private jet, while another complained about the drafty interior of one of his summer homes. Still other said that they had spent 150k on custom teak wood in their 140-foot sailboat, and had it all ripped out and replaced because it "didn't look right". Ahh, money to burn. People with a completely different list of priorities than the average Joe like me.

I say this for contrast, because the things we speak of as Enzees, with the power available at our fingertips in the machine, is utterly foreign to people who have never experienced the power themselves. And it's interesting in best-practice space when we talk about squeezing 9-hour processes into 9 minutes, and then hear our business counterparts wonder if we could squeeze out just a few more. A best-practice balancing act is getting to the solution without over-engineering, and some of you consider this an art form.

So Enzees, Artists and those who would kick-the-tires, gather round the grille and let's fire up those steaks, veggies and what-have-you - then the only thing hotter than Summer will be the ideas coming off the cooker -