Search results matching tags 'Community' and 'SSMS'

Updated slide decks from SSMS presentation at SNESSUG

AaronBertrand — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:55:00 GMT

Tonight I spoke at the SNESSUG user group meeting in Warwick, RI. You can download the slide deck here (this is a 3.5 MB PDF with presenter notes):

http://sqlblog.com/files/folders/23423/download.aspx

If you attended the talk, please feel free to provide feedback at speakerrate.com:

http://speakerrate.com/talks/2849-management-studio-tips-tricks

Today also happened to be a birthday celebration for Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter). He blogged about the meeting and also took a picture of the cake I brought for him. :-)

SQL Saturday #33 : slide deck, recap and shout-outs

AaronBertrand — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:14:00 GMT

[Sorry I have been a little absent over the past couple of weeks. Returning from the Olympics just a little over a week ago meant some busy catch-up and a heavy lead-in to today's event.]

Today I spoke at SQL Saturday #33 in Charlotte, NC. My presentation was virtually a rip-off of the one I gave at SQL Saturday #34 in Boston: Management Studio Tips & Tricks. The goal is to have everyone in the room say "cool" or "wow" when they learn something new about SSMS; even some of the gurus who attended my presentation admitted that they picked up a trick or two. So, success!

Get used to this one; I'll be giving this presentation at least two more times this year, including at the Southern New England SQL Server User Group next Monday. Based on the feedback I've received so far, I think this will be all right. Though I'll need to update my VM to be a non-evaluation and non-expired copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 this coming week sometime. If you were at this talk, please feel free to leave me feedback at SpeakerRate; comment below if you want to remain anonymous; or by e-mail (aaron DOT bertrand AT gmail) if you don't want others to see your scathing comments. ;-) Don't worry, I have thick skin. In the meantime, I have an updated slide deck posted below.

Since I got my presentation out of the way right after the keynote this morning, I had a very nice time relaxing and enjoying the other sessions. I sat on a panel in the blogging and speaking session by Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and it was a fantastically interactive session. I also attended talks by Tim Ford (@sqlagentman), Andy Kelly (@gunneyK), Ashton Hobbs, and Jeff Schwartz. Picked up a lot of great information, and got to heckle Tim and Andy... so that was fun.

The after-party was at Mac's Speed Shop which has great BBQ but - wtf - no mashed potatoes? How can you have pulled pork (my sandwich was called "The Big Pig") without mashed potatoes? I was kind of surprised because, even though 250+ attendees were invited to join us, it was almost all speakers who showed up. Maybe next time we should have the raffle at the after-party instead of at the end of the day... that will encourage more attendees to join us to mingle (the venue was spread out so people were almost always rushing to their next session), and then Geoff might win an iPod Touch next time.

I want to give a shout out to SQL Sentry - Greg Gonzalez (@SQLsensei), Peter Shire (@Peter_Shire), Karen Gonzalez, Missy Kelly, all the volunteers (a.k.a. hall monitors), and the other sponsors (Dell, RedGate, Confio, Quest, New Horizons, Intellinet, TEK systems, and CozyRoc). All of these people made this event possible, and their hard work made it go so smoothly. Hats off! I also want to clink glasses with all my colleagues that I got to catch up with, or meet for the first time. The list is way too long to post here (this was an event very well represented by MVPs and the like), but you know who you are: cheers. And thanks to Andy Kelly for being the designated chauffeur for the event!

Management Studio Tips & Tricks, version 1.0

AaronBertrand — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:00:00 GMT

Today I presented "Management Studio Tips & Tricks" at SQL Saturday #34 in Waltham, MA. I had an audience of close to 100 (my biggest talk yet!), and unless they were stroking my ego, I achieved my primary goal for the session: to make sure that every single person in the room learned at least one new thing about SSMS.

I learned some things today too:

I am still horrible at repeating audience questions before answering them. I know before and after delivering a presentation that it's exactly what you should do, and understand that there are several reasons to do so (not all of which benefit the audience). But in the heat of the moment, I'm usually spending too much time making sure I answer the question right, when I should be ensuring that the others have heard it.
No matter how much you prepare a presentation (and especially the first time you offer the topic), there will always be things you forgot to include. Today I talked about templates as an easy way to help encourage specific coding conventions and naming standards, but Tim Ford (@sqlagentman) reminded me afterward of one of the more direct features that you can utilize via templates: CTRL+SHIFT+M. If you haven't used it, this pulls up a dialog allowing you to substitute parameters in your script, without having to do it by hand. The parameter placeholders in your script have to match a specific format (some info about this here).
I am a part of a fantastic community. At events like this there is always great interaction, both with other MVPs and with the audience in general. Unfortunately I could not commit to the entire day, but aside from my session I attended both Tim Ford's talk on DMVs and Mike Walsh's session on tuning T-SQL. While I was more of a heckler than a contributor, I kind of felt at home in every session, and am looking forward to the next one.

I'll be giving the talk at SNESSUG in March, so I'll have plenty of time to work on my slide deck, and will hopefully take what I learned today into that presentation. In the meantime, you are welcome to download the current version of the deck (I exported to PDF). Some of the bullet points only make sense in the context of the talk, but several of the slides have speaker notes that might help elaborate. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions!

UPDATE: I just signed up on SpeakerRate. If you attended this presentation, please feel free to leave me comments, either negative or positive! Thanks!

http://speakerrate.com/talks/2075-management-studio-tips-tricks

UPDATE 2: A screen shot demonstrating the multi-object action capabilities of Object Explorer Details. Click to embiggen.