The name may sound familiar to you as he is a longtime PM on the SQL Server Engine team at Microsoft. You may have come across shows featuring him either on the Microsoft site or featured on SQL Down Under Show.
While it is now 2007 and his talk was on SQL Server 2005, he provided the audience with insightful details on the transparent benefits of SQL Server 2005 and some fun facts.
For example, one of the improvements made in 2005 over 2000 was instant file initialization. So what was happening before when your db was auto-growing, you would then go out and allocate a new chunk of space. Before any writes could be made (i.e. an insert), the entire allocated space had to be zero'd out. In 2005, it only zeros out what you're about to write to.
Along with this, he also highlighted several improvements made to the query optimizer. (i.e. predicate implication across equi-joins, improved constant folding, simplification of expressions on a single column, indexed view matching improvements). With the latter one, you will be able to observe the effects after you construct your queries by viewing the query plans.
While you will still always want to follow best practices and produce efficient queries, it is nevertheless interesting to learn about the different improvements and optimizations that SQL Server does for you invisibly. All in all, it was definitely a worthwhile .NET Developers Association meeting to attend.