Search results matching tags 'SQL Saturday' and 'SQL Server'

See you in Columbus Saturday?

drsql — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:32:45 GMT

Assuming all goes as planned, I will be in Columbus, OH this Friday night and Saturday for SQL Saturday 75. I really love SQL Saturday events the best of all of the events because they are very intimate in nature. As a fairly antisocial person, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the size of other events, even the SQL Rally was just barely in my comfort range. Here the number of people and size of rooms just feels like home, like you are shooting the breeze with a group of friends.

My session will be at 9:00 AM (full schedule), so don’t be late!

Characteristics of a Great Relational Database
When queried, most database professionals would mention normalized as one of the most important characteristics that tell the difference between a good and bad database design. I won't disagree in the least, but there is so much more to be considered. Even if you did a great job of normalization, poor naming, poorly implemented keys, too many or too few indexes, and so on can derail your design. In this session I will present seven primary characteristics of a design that differentiates between an ugly design that will have your colleagues nitpicking you to death and one that will have them singing your praises. Characteristics such as comprehendible, documented, secure, well performing, and more (including normalized, naturally) will be discussed.

It is the second time I will do this presentation, and the first time where I can see the faces of the recipients, so it will be nice to gauge how people like it. It is a lot of fun actually, though no matter what I am talking about I want to talk more about normalization, which I believe is the key to improving the databases of the future. So many of the session that are given at these things are geared towards systems that are already screwed up and limping along, and I really want to evangelize the merits of doing it right. That is where this presentation fits in, the time period between design and performance tuning, where you determine the future work that is done with the system. Is it well performing, understandable, easy to maintain and use? Or does it take a crew of ten thousand DBAs doing nothing but putting their fingers in the leaks to keep the thing running?

And don’t forget all of those BI sessions too… The better you do with the relational database, the easier the dimensional designer/implementers have it too.

Anyhow, I hope to see you all there (well, not all of you, just the SQL nerds who are reading this. The history buffs who are still wondering why we are going to be inside the founder of our continent this weekend, well, you I feel sorry for you.

SQL Saturday #48 Recap

andyleonard — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Introduction

I got to attend SQL Saturday #48 2 Oct 2010 and was honored to present.

"I'm Andy, and I'm a session-hopper." There. I said it. When I'm not presenting, I often wander between sessions. I want to learn a little something from everyone. Here are some sessions I wandered through and some notes from them:

Alejandro Mesa - Parameter Sniffing

I started in Alejandro Mesa's session on Parameter Sniffing. I actually got to speak with Alejandro before his session started. We spoke about family and the importance of feedback. Alejandro is cool. He's friendly and cares about delivering quality presentations. His passion for SQL Server and the community is evident - even if you only spend a few minutes with him.

I listened to the beginning of his session. In the portion I heard, he shared a good definition of parameter sniffing. He summarized the benefits and performance hit of parameter sniffing, and stated he would show how to detect and tune for various sniffing scenarios. I wanted to hear the remainder, but Andy Warren was presenting at the same time...

Andy Warren - DBA 101: The Basics

I skipped over to Andy Warren's (Blog | @sqlAndy) talk on DBA 101: The Basics. Andy is a great presenter who's passion for education and SQL Server are obvious to anyone with a pulse.

From what I heard Steve Jones (Blog | @way0utwest) wrote this presentation. There were 25 people in the room with 27 seats. The number of people in the room are a testament to the popularity of introductory material. It's a cool presentation to introduce people to SQL Server. Andy (and Steve) did a good job covering the objects of SQL Server: tables, views, stored procedures, and triggers. There were good questions from various attendees - evidence they were following and thinking about what they learned.

Introducing any topic in SQL Server in 60 minutes is tough. If you know someone brand new to SQL Server and databases in general, this is a good talk for them.

Julie Smith - Cool Tricks to Pull from your SSIS Hat

Meeting Julie Smith (Blog | @Datachix1) was a cool surprise for me. Julie is a great presenter with years of Business Inteliigence experience. Her presentation covered SSIS Expression Language and Variables. She did a good job with the "gotchas" of Variable scoping - accidentally creating a variable at a lesser scope than intended is a big-ee. She demonstrated the constraint options of the precedence constraint - which is a powerful and under-represented topic in many SSIS training sessions. I learned to use the Preview Pane in Windows Explorer!

I liked her presentation style and the material. Plus she provided some feedback on my SSIS Design Patterns talk that I will incorporate in future 60-minute versions of this talk.

Unfortunately, I needed to leave for the long trek back to Farmville before her session completed. I look forward to learning more cool SSIS tricks from Julie in the future!

Conclusion

SQL Saturday #48 was a huge success. The Columbia community responded to this awesome event by turning out in droves. I found the attendees of my sessions engaged - even right after lunch - and I received awesome questions throughout.

The organizers of the event are to be commended. They organizd an awesome event - from the Speaker Dinner through the After-Event party. About 90% of those in my sessions were attending their first SQL Saturday event.

:{> Andy

Additional links for my presentation on defensive database programming.

Alexander Kuznetsov — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:29:00 GMT

Yesterday I delivered a session named "Develop T-SQL defensively" at East Iowa SQL Saturday. Thanks to those who attended, and many thanks to Michelle Ufford, Chris Leonard, Ed Leighton-Dick, and other volunteers, who organized the event.

Here are the links with more information and more repro scripts, more or less in the order following the order of the presentation.

Basic Defensive Database Programming Techniques Summarizing previous posts about defensive database programming Happy programming!

Repro scripts and more info for my presentation on concurrency

Alexander Kuznetsov — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:10:00 GMT

Yesterday I delivered a session named "Developing T-SQL to survive concurrency" at East Iowa SQL Saturday. Thanks to everyone who attended, and thanks to Michelle Ufford, Chris Leonard, Ed Leighton-Dick, and other volunteers, who organized the event.

As promised, here are the links with more information and more repro scripts, more or less in the order following the order of the presentation.

Selects under READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ may return incorrect results.

Reproducing deadlocks involving only one table

Retrying after deadlocks leads to lost updates

Patterns that do not work as expected.

Developing Modifications that Survive Concurrency

And, finally, Erland Sommarskog's article Arrays and lists in SQL

A Day of SSIS Training 15 Oct 2009 at SQL Saturday #21 Orlando

andyleonard — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:00:00 GMT

I'm honored to be presenting a day of SSIS training entitled From Zero To SSIS on 15 Oct 2009 - the Thursday before SQLSaturday #21 (17 Oct 2009) in Orlando. I'm so excited about the opportunity! I've personally taught hundreds of developers to use SSIS and wrote courseware used to train even more. In this course, I use real-world data and cover SSIS development from a practical perspective.

I teach you how - and why - I develop SSIS the way I do.

I've also submitted a session on Database Development for the event proper. Here's hoping I get to meet a bunch of new Florida friends and catch up with some old Jacksonville friends!

:{> Andy