SSIS Junkie : SQLBits

Reflections on SQLBits XI

jamiet — Thu, 16 May 2013 22:03:50 GMT

Its been a couple of weeks since SQLBits XI happened in Nottingham and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts for posterity.

First the venue. I think its fair to say that the overall consensus was that the East Midlands Conference Centre was the best SQLBits venue these has been so far – I’ve been to more than half of them and based on my experience I would agree with that sentiment. The hotel especially was top quality – I was pleased with my room and the breakfasts were way better than the Travelodge standards I’ve become accustomed to at such events. Perhaps the great weather over the weekend helped lift the spirits but I’d say the bar has been set high, I hope future SQLBits conferences are at similar standard venues.

You may have noticed that many of my blog posts over the past year have been related to SSDT and my SQLBits sessions this time around followed that trend. I delivered a session on the Friday, jointly with Craig Ottley-Thistlethwaite, entitled “Real World SDDT” and also delivered my first ever day-long pre-conference seminar on the Thursday entitled “SSDT Database Projects from the ground up”. Delivering a pre-con was slightly petrifying and I spent a large part of the three months previous preparing for it; I hope it was worth it. I had 30 attendees which I was delighted with (especially given this was my first pre-con) and we established that the furthest anyone travelled was from Romania, though I’ll assume it wasn’t just so he could come to my pre-con . I had some pleasant feedback via Twitter afterwards from some of the attendees and I’m crossing my fingers that the official feedback is in a similar vein.

The session I did with Craig went fairly well I thought. I did the first 30minutes where I covered the basics of SSDT deployment from a high level before Craig ratcheted the complexity up a few notches by demoing some interaction between SSDT, MSBuild & Git – really great stuff for those who like to get into the nuts and bolts of this stuff. I was delighted that Craig was willing to do the session with me (in fact it was his idea) as this was his debut public speaking gig and I’m hoping its given him the desire to do more in the future.

On the Saturday my wife’s uncle, John Milne, came to the conference. John has been working in customer service for years but of late has decided that he wants a change of career and to that end has been studying an Open University course in IT. He told me he had particularly enjoyed the database-focused modules of his course and hence I suggested he come to the free Saturday of SQLBits to try and get a flavour of what the industry is all about and perhaps learn about some real-world experiences to add to his academic travails. By the end of the day John told me he’s had a fantastic time, learned a lot, and was hooked. Mission accomplished I’d say. John lives in Leeds so I introduced him to Chris Testa-O’Neill who helps to run the Leeds user group and John should be going along to some user group events in the near future – if you happen to meet him there please welcome him into the fold!

All that remains for me to say is a massive thank you to the SQLBits committee who do such an amazing job, all voluntarily, in putting this all together. Thank you Simon Sabin, James Rowland-Jones, Chris Webb, Darren Green, Allan Mitchell, Tim Kent, Chris Testa-O’Neill & Martin Bell. I also want to thank all of the volunteer SQLBits helpers that worked tirelessly on the weekend to make sure the whole thing ran smoothly.

Bring on SQLBits XII!

@Jamiet

Get the SQLBits agenda on your phone, now and forever

jamiet — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:02:33 GMT

Regular readers of my blog might have realised that I am a huge advocate of subscribable calendars and the data format that underpins them – iCalendar. On 8th Feb 2012 I wrote a blog post entitled SQLBits now publishing all SQLBits agendas as an iCalendar where I told how the SQLBits committee had published the agenda of the forthcoming SQLBits conference in iCalendar format allow with instructions of how one could view the agenda on their phone. Back then I said:

…any changes to the SQLBits agenda (e.g. a room change) will automatically flow to your own calendar service and if you have that calendar service (e.g. Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar) synced to your phone then the changes will automatically show up there too … That new SQLBits subscribable calendar lives at http://sqlbits.com/information/SQLBitsCalendar.ashx; note how it is not specific to a particular conference - subscribe to (don't import) that calendar and the agenda for future SQLBits conferences will automatically flow to you too.

Sure enough I took a look at the calendar on my phone today and saw this:

(That “Real world SSDT” session at 14:40 is being presented by Craig Ottley-Thistlethwaite and myself by the way. Hope to see you there!)

This is the value of subscribing as opposed to importing. The agenda for next week’s conference has already flowed to my phone without my having to do anything. This isn’t the same phone that I had a year ago either, by subscribing to it in my Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) Calendar those subscriptions are stored and flow onto any new phone as soon as I type in my credentials.

I have stated before that I believe subscribable calendars to be a transformative technology and this is why, I only had to subscribe to the calendar once and data that didn’t even exist back then simply flows into my calendar and thus onto my phone. If this interests you then maybe read how I think the same technology could be used to deliver BI data too at Thinking differently about BI delivery. And if you want to subscribe to the calendar yourself go and read the aforementioned blog post, that link again: SQLBits now publishing all SQLBits agendas as an iCalendar.

@Jamiet

My SQLBits Pre Conference Seminar - SSDT Database projects from the ground-up

jamiet — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:44:52 GMT

Over the last year or so it will not have escaped my regular readers’ attention that much of my blogging has centred around SSDT database projects. SSDT (and its variously named forebears) is a tool that I have been using in some way, shape or form since 2007 and in that time I have built up what I feel is a sound body of knowledge and experience; I shall soon be sharing that knowledge in my first ever day-long seminar as part of the SQL Bits 11 Training Day on 2nd May 2013. I have titled the seminar SSDT Database projects from the ground-up; here is the abstract:

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) database projects bring SQL Server development into the modern era. Come along and learn how SSDT database projects can accelerate your SQL Server development and deployments. You will learn about declarative database development, code navigation, refactoring, automated builds, database unit testing and, most importantly, how you can make these tools work to your advantage.

If you come to my seminar you can expect lots of interactive demos for which I will share all the source code prior to the event; this means that you can go through the demos as I present them live – that’s a great way of learning new techniques.

As stated this is my first day-long seminar however I have been presenting publicly for some years now and have previously shared my speakers scores for public analysis. My most recent speaking engagement was at SQLBits 10 where my speaker scores were well above average:

The qualitative feedback included these comments:

The hour passed very quickly. Very good, interesting speaker.
This was a great session – I really like Jamie’s laid back presentation style
Informative session. Nicely showed off the new features and ways of working

That’s my short sales pitch over. I hope this piques your interest and if it does please sign up for my seminar when you register for SQLBits and I look forward to seeing you on the day.

@Jamiet

SQLPeople at SQLBits

jamiet — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:05:00 GMT

Ever heard of SQLPeople.net? It is a website set up by Andy Leonard to showcase members of the SQL Server community by asking them the following questions:

Everyone’s an accidental DBA (or database professional) – what’s your story? How’d you become a SQLPerson?
What’s your favorite part of your current gig?
Complete this sentence: “If I could do anything else, I would…”
Complete this sentence: “When I’m not working I enjoy…”
Complete this sentence: “I think the coolest thing in technology today is…”
Complete this sentence: “I look forward to the day when I can use technology to…”
Share something different about yourself. (Remember, it’s a family blog!)

Prior to the recent SQLBits X conference I asked Andy if I could extend the idea by posing the same questions to some of the conference attendees under the auspices of SQLPeople and film their responses, he graciously agreed. I managed to capture thirteen such videos and you can view them all online right now at http://vimeo.com/user3251268/videos/search:sqlpeople/.

You can find all of these people online at @troublewithdata @mattmasson @john_welch @ctesta_oneill @workerthread @al_eardley @Varigence @davebally @gavinpayneuk @JimmyBoo @sqlsophist @Technitrain

SQLBits now publishing all SQLBits agendas as an iCalendar

jamiet — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:36:00 GMT

Three weeks ago I published a blog post Get the SQLBits agenda in your phone's calendar where I said:

If you want to get the SQLBits calendar onto your smartphone then the easiest way to do it is add my calendar [containing all SQLBits sessions] to whichever calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google) you have got synced to your phone and let technology do its thing.
I will keep the calendar updated with any changes to the agenda so, assuming you have subscribed, changes will just propogate to you without you having to do anything.

This is not the first time I have published a subscribable calendar (I did it for the 2010 World Cup for example, I also curate a calendar for my home town) nor the first time I have opined about them. The reason I bang on about subscribable calendars (aka iCalendars) all the time is that I truly believe that they are a transformative technology. In my humble opinion the world would be a better place if it ran on iCalendar and I'm not the only one who thinks so, Scott Adams (yes, THAT Scott Adams) says the same (but in a much more coherent way) in his blog post Calendar as Filter.

My super-smart former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying work smarter, not harder and, to me, subscribable calendars are the epitome of that mantra. Why should many people do the same work of downloading .ics files and importing them to their own calendar service when the content owner can simply make that information available to anyone? That is my motivation for publishing these subscribable calendars - I want to motivate the content owners to publish this information for themselves.

With that in mind I am delighted to tell you that the SQLBits organising committee have taken this on board and published the SQLBits agenda as an iCalendar. One benefit of that is I don't have to go through the rigmarole of keeping my own calendar up to date but more importantly any changes to the SQLBits agenda (e.g. a room change) will automatically flow to your own calendar service and if you have that calendar service (e.g. Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar) synced to your phone then the changes will automatically show up there too. Very cool!

That new SQLBits subscribable calendar lives at http://sqlbits.com/information/SQLBitsCalendar.ashx; note how it is not specific to a particular conference - subscribe to (don't import) that calendar and the agenda for future SQLBits conferences will automatically flow to you too. Want to subscribe to that calendar yourself? Click one of the following links:

If you use Hotmail, click here
If you use GMail/Google Calendar, click here

N.B. I am assuming that Hotmail & Google Calendar covers the majority of folks that are going to be reading this. If you use a different service (e.g. Yahoo) then perhaps you could find out what the appropriate link should be and it as a comment below.

You may also want to unsubscribe from my calendar because I am no longer going to keep it updated.

My thanks go to the SQLBits committee for doing this; more accurately the thanks should go to Simon Sabin because it was he that made this happen.

@jamiet

P.S. If you agree with me that iCalendar is a transformative technology and would like to get involved then take a look at Jon Udell's Elmcity project (FAQ) to curate your own calendar for your home town.

UPDATE: Some folks are saying that the link to Google Calendar produces the message: "You do not have access to <the calendar>". The exact same problem was reported with the calendar that I produced three weeks ago so I am assuming that the problem is at Google's end. The workaround is to subscribe to URL http://sqlbits.com/information/SQLBitsCalendar.ashx in Google Calendar by clicking Other calendars->Add by URL.

Get the SQLBits agenda in your phone's calendar

jamiet — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:36:00 GMT

For SQLBits 8 in April 2011 I published a calendar containing all of the sessions from the conference; anyone could subscribe to that calendar on their phone or calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google Calendar).

For the upcoming SQLBits X conference I have done the same again by adding all of the sessions to that same calendar. If you are already subscribed to that calendar from SQLBits 8 then you have nothing to do - all the SQLBits X sessions will automatically flow to your phone/Hotmail calendar/Google calendar (go take a look now - they should already be there).

If you want to get this SQLBits calendar onto your smartphone then the easiest way to do it is add my calendar to whichever calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google) you have got synced to your phone and let technology do its thing.

If you are on Hotmail this is dead simple – just click this link: http://calendar.live.com/calendar/calendar.aspx?rru=addsubscription&url=webcals://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/calendar.ics&name=SQLBits
If you're on Google then you will have to subscribe to URL http://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/calendar.ics in Google Calendar by clicking Other calendars->Add by URL.

I will keep the calendar updated with any changes to the agenda so, assuming you have subscribed, changes will just propogate to you without you having to do anything. Remember, to save yourself work in the future make sure you subscribe to the calendar as opposed to importing it.

Hope this is useful

@jamiet

UPDATE: I have just discovered an even easier way to subscribe to this SQLBits calendar using the Google Calendar service - simply click this button:

If Google Calendar reports that you do not have permission (as it seems to be doing for some people) then follow the instructions that I provided above. I promise you, the calendar *is* publicly available so if this button doesn't work its Google that is doing something wrong.

Reflections on SQLBits 8

jamiet — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:33:52 GMT

Its the day after SQLBits 8 and after a busy day at home I now have time to sit down with The Masters on in the background (come on Rory) and reflect on the last 2 days. Its been said many times before I am sure but there is no doubt in my mind that this was the best SQLBits conference yet. The superb location coupled with amazing weather for the time of year means that I’ll forever remember SQLBits 8 as “the one where we ate lunch on the beach, bathed in sunshine”. The view from my room was rather nice too

I presented two sessions; on Friday I showed off some of the forthcoming features from SSIS in SQL Server Denali then on Saturday I repeated my SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning session from SQLBits 7. The denali session went well I thought and there was some clear excitement about forthcoming features like server based logging and, yes, undo. The Perf Tuning session I wasn’t quite so pleased with particularly partly because one of my demos didn’t go quite to plan but I still received some kind comments afterward so maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought.

If you have been following my tweets over the past few days you may know that I have been shooting lots of informal videos and posting them on YouTube (tagged as SQLVids), here is the full list:

Tweeting has of course been a big part of SQLBits and I have set up an archive of all tweets from SQLBits 8 (using the #SQLBits8 hashtag) at http://archivist.cloudapp.net/jamiet/10

I want to make mention of the addition of Lightning Talks sessions to the agenda; in these sessions attendees were invited to come up on stage and share a small snippet of SQL Server knowledge. I attended the first such session along with approximately 50 other people which I would count as a resounding success. We had 6 or 7 different presenters and I am looking forward to this becoming a very popular session at future SQLBits conferences.

Lastly I’d like to take this opportunity to offer a massive thank you to Simon Sabin, Christian Bolton, James Rowland-Jones, Martin Bell, Darren Green, Chris Webb, Allan Mitchell, Tim Kent and Chris Testa-O’Neill; collectively better known as the SQLBits organising committee. These guys do make a tremendous time-consuming effort on behalf of SQLBits attendees and I really can’t thank them enough for the work that they put in.

Roll on SQLBits 9!

@Jamiet

Some other folks’ thoughts on SQLBits 8:

SQLBits 8 – That’s a Wrap by John Sansom
SQLBits by the Sea a.k.a. Nerds on a Beach! by Ashley Burton
SQLBits 8 in Photos by Alex Whittles
SQLBits Attendance Breaks Previous Records by Brad McGehee
Quick Recap of SQL Bits 8 by Aaron Bertrand

SQLBits 8 - SQLVids

jamiet — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:36:44 GMT

Below are the videos that I have been shooting at SQLBits 8. Please keep checking back here throughout the next two days as I continue to update this post.

N.B. The rendering of videos isn’t great here on SQLBlog so to to view them in full fidelity click through to YouTube.

Backstage

Bob Duffy analyses IOs using Excel

Gavin Payne talks about Coeo's giveaways

Dave Ballantyne talks custom components in SSIS

Simon Sabin up close and personal

Ian Archibald demos Attunity CDC for Oracle

Thoughts of Darren Green, Chris Testa O’Neill & Simon Sabin

Mark Souza, SQL Server General Manager, does Kinect

John Tunnicliffe says hello

Quest demo of Spotlight

SQLSentry demo their wares

Tom from Red Gate demos SQL Prompt and SQL Source Control

Andrew Fryer demos PowerPivot

Allan Mitchell talks StreamInsight

Allan Mitchell on coffee stains

James Boother shows us PowerGui for Visual Studio

Alex Whittles demos a cool way to document cube design

Alastair Aitchison talks SQL Server spatial

Alex Whittles shows us his SQL Server Management Studio colouring book

Vincent Reinardi talks advanced dimensional modelling

Mark Souza backstage

Neal Atkinson and Dan Gaze talk spatial

Dave Morrison talks intelligent indexing

Brighton Beach

SQLVids at SQLBits

jamiet — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:39:43 GMT

At SQLBits 7 in October 2010 I took it upon myself to wander around sticking my video camera into people’s faces and asking them to say something profound for the watching ~~millions~~ tens – you can see those videos at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=01617594AB55E450 or on my accompanying blog post SQLBits videos (distinctly amateur).

Now SQLBits 8 is upon us and I’d like to take the idea a bit further. I will, once again, be endeavouring to capture people on camera but this time I won’t just ask inane questions like “What has been your favourite session?”, I would actually like people to show me something interesting.

So in the spirit of the Lightning Talks that will be running at SQLBits (12:10 on Saturday in room ‘Kings East’) I will be seeking people out that actually have something interesting to show and getting them to show it on camera. I am calling it SQLVids! The idea for SQLVids came about a few weeks ago when I watched this video on Channel 9; in the video the interviewer makes a point of actually showing the code that the guy is writing and that’s exactly what I want to do this coming weekend – get people to show some real cool stuff! Anything is on the table as long as its SQL Server related. You think you have an uber-cool script that can make a DBA’s day shorter and their lunchtime longer? I wanna see it! You think you have a cool way solving a particularly gnarly problem in SSIS? I wanna see it! You think you can solve world hunger just with Management Studio and some keyboard shortcuts? Yes, I wanna see that too!

So, if you’re going to SQLBits in Brighton this weekend and you have something worth showing please do come and seek me out. I’ll be the guy wandering around brandishing a black Flip Ultra HD!

@Jamiet

Get the SQLBits agenda on your phone

jamiet — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:15:00 GMT

The agenda for the forthcoming SQLBits 8 conference in Brighton is currently available at http://sqlbits.com/information/Agenda.aspx. Unfortunately, useful though it quite clearly is, its only a web page and that means its hard to get the agenda data out and onto something more useful. Like your phone’s calendar.

I have tried to rectify that problem by providing all of the sessions in a subscribable calendar that can be viewed, as a web page, at http://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/index.html. That calendar provides a mechanism that makes it easy to get it onto your phone; as well as publishing the data as a web page it also publishes it as an iCalendar feed (which you can think of as an RSS feed for calendar data). That iCalendar feed can be consumed in two ways:

webcal://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/calendar.ics – Published using the webcal protocol that is understood by many clients (including Outlook & iPhone)
http://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/calendar.ics – Published using http so is effectively a download link for a .ics file containing all of the sessions

Here’s how to view the calendar on various clients:

Outlook

Hit the webcal link above from your Windows machine and (if you have it installed) it should open up in Outlook and allow you to subscribe to the calendar. Subscribing is better than importing because if I update the calendar for any reason those changes will automatically propagate into Outlook.

iPhone

iPhone understands the webcal protocol too so hit the webcal link above on your iPhone and you should be subscribed to the calendar.

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 doesn’t understand webcal and also doesn’t allow you to view calendars from anything other than the accounts registered on your phone. Furthermore, whilst Windows Phone 7 can sync multiple accounts it can only sync the *primary* calendar from each of those accounts. Hence you will need to hit the http link above from your desktop machine, save the .ics file, then import it into the primary calendar of an account that you have synced to your phone (e.g. Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar, Exchange, etc...). The sessions should then show up on your phone next time it syncs. Note the distinct disadvantage that importing has compared to subscribing on iPhone & in Outlook – any changes I make to the calendar will not propagate to your phone.
Windows Phone changed in the 7.5 release to allow multiple calendars per account to be synced to your phone. Hence head to http://calendar.live.com, login with the same Windows Live ID that your phone is registered with, and subscribe to the webcal link above.

Android and Blackberry

I don’t know the best steps for getting it onto Android or Blackberry devices so perhaps someone could let me know. I’m sure the same technique as used for Windows Phone 7 will work though.

UPDATE: Phil Nolan has replied answering the question about Android. See his comment below.

Hope this is useful.

@Jamiet

P.S. I am a huge advocate of iCalendar and, if you’re at all interested, my thoughts on it are perfectly articulated in this article by Dilbert creator Scott Adams: Calendar as Filter.

Analysing SQLBits Feedback

jamiet — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:07:00 GMT

Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments.

The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot:

I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form.

I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort.

Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought.

It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive and agreed metadata associated with it but I live in hope.

@Jamiet

UPDATE

Putting this data in the public domain is already paying rich dividends for me. Jen Stirrup (twitter), a whizz at data visualisation (data viz wiz????) here in London, has kindly done some further analysis on my feedback scores by downloading my spreadsheet and analysing it using a software package called Tableau. Here is the heatmap that Jen produced for me:

I’m not trying to boast about my scores here, truly I’m not (but thank you to all those that were generous with their scoring – I am rather humbled), what I want to try and show is the power of data visualisation. In this one image Jen has managed to convey much more information than I did by merely providing averages; I can see the range of all the votes, how many votes there were, outliers and highest/lowest votes. Most of all I can see why my averages are changing, be they up or down. I now find myself asking questions and making observations like:

Ok, my scores improved in for “SSIS Dataflow performance Tuning” over “SSIS Nuggets Live”, but clearly more people scored “SSIS Nuggets Live” so which is more valuable?
Clearly my averages for “SSIS Nuggets Live” are negatively affected by some very low scores. That’s something that could be investigated further.
Which areas have more scope for improvement?
In both sessions highest marks were attained for “Speaker’s knowledge of the subject area”. This was not something I particularly noticed when looking at the raw averages. Visualisation makes it stand out so much more.

This is all really valuable information and will become more so as I hopefully do more presentations in the future. Thank you for doing this for me Jen, I am incredibly grateful for your work on my behalf.

If you would like to read more about the academic theory behind heatmaps like this be sure to check Jen’s recent post SQLBits Feedback Post-Mortem where she dissects her own SQLBits feedback in intimate detail, really interesting stuff that gives a flavour of Jen’s past and future presentation material.

SQLBits videos (distinctly amateur)

jamiet — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:56:00 GMT

Hi all,

SQLBits 7 is here, I’m here, and I’m walking around being very obnoxious and sticking a video camera in people’s faces. Thankfully nobody has offered me outside yet so if you’re interested in having a look at what’s going on in and around SQLBits check out my videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/jamiekth

~~Here’s a few for your delectation. more coming, I promise!!~~ UPDATE: The videos are now available as a single-click playlist at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=01617594AB55E450

Brent Ozar

SQLBits backstage - Rob Farley and Chris Webb shoot the breeze

SQLBits entrance hall - Gavin Payne, Andre Kamman, Jon Kehayias

More to come throughout the weekend so keep checking out my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/jamiekth and keep an eye on my Twitter feed where I’ll be posting them all too!

@Jamiet

UPDATE: Direct links to the videos here:

My SQLBits presentation this coming Friday – SSIS Performance Tuning

jamiet — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:43:50 GMT

SQLBits is once again upon us, this time its number 7 and it starts on 30th September 2010 in York. I’ve been looking forward to this one since it was first announced because its in my original neck of the woods so as well as going to this great conference I get to go and visit family as well. The guys, Simon, James, Chris, Allan, Darren, Martin & Chris (and anyone else I have forgotten sorry), always put on a great conference and I’m sure this one will be no exception.

I’ve taken a look at the agenda and am slightly disappointed to learn that I’m on at the same time as folks that I would really like to go and see for myself; I was especially keen to go to Jonathan Kehayias’ talk on Extended Events, sadly not to be:

Can’t wait for this Friday, hope to see you there!

@Jamiet

First sighting of SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS)

jamiet — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:47:48 GMT

I’m at SQLBits 5 today and I’ve just come out of Ian Marriott’s session where he talked about the forthcoming Master Data Services. Here’s a low-quality (sorry) photo of the screen that MDS practitioners and users are going to become very familiar with, the home screen of MDS’ web interface:

My first impressions are that this is a reskinned version of Stratature (i.e. the previous incarnation of this product) and that should surprise no-one. I didn’t see anything that I hadn’t seen already in Stratature 18 months ago but then it wasn’t possible for Ian to show much in such a short session so I’m sure there’s more to see (in fact I’ve already spoken about some of it).

I’ve nothing more to show say about this right now, I just figured some people might be interested in what this thing might look like. More to come later, I promise!

@Jamiet