Search results matching tag '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

SQLBits XI : Bad Habits & Best Practices in T-SQL

AaronBertrand — Sat, 04 May 2013 14:01:00 GMT

Yesterday I gave my session to the fine folks in Nottingham, UK. Below is a zip file containing the deck and samples:

Bertrand_BitsXI_BadHabits.zip

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 London 2012 - Demos

Adam Machanic — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:50:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions last Friday and Saturday at SQLbits! It was great to meet many new people, not to mention spending some time exploring one of my favorite cities, London.

Attached are the demos for each of the two talks I delivered:

Query Tuning Mastery: The Art of and Science of Manhandling Parallelism
As a database developer, your job boils down to one word: performance. And in today's multi-core-driven world, query performance is very much determined by how well you're taking advantage of the processing power at your disposal. Are your big queries using every available clock tick, or are they lagging behind? And if your queries are already going parallel, can they be rewritten for even greater speed? In this session you will learn how to take full advantage of parallelism, from a developer's point of view. After a quick terminology review and technology refresher the session will go deep, covering T-SQL patterns that allow certain queries to scale almost linearly across your multi-core CPUs. Alas, not all T-SQL queries can go parallel, so you will also learn to watch for those things that can restrict the query optimizer's decisions. Along the way you’ll learn to manipulate costs and row goals, challenge generally accepted tuning practices, and take complete control of your parallel queries.

... and ...

Query Tuning Mastery: Workspace Memory Internals
As SQL Server professionals, we often think of memory in vague, instance-level terms: buffer pool, procedure cache, Virtual Address Space, and so on. But certain tasks require a more in-depth focus, and query tuning is one of them. Large, complex queries need memory in which to work--workspace memory--and understanding the how's, when's, and why's of this memory can help you create queries that run in seconds rather than minutes. This session will give you an in-depth understanding of how the optimizer makes its query memory decisions, with lots of tips and tricks along the way to help you guide the process for top performance. If you work with large queries and are serious about achieving scalability and consistently great performance, you owe it to yourself to attend this session.

Enjoy!

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.

Rick Review: SQLBits7: Consolidating Data Collection with SQLDIAG and SQLNexus

RickHeiges — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 02:54:00 GMT

I ran across this recording about 3 months ago. It is a recording that is open to everyone. It was recorded at SQLBits 7 with Christian Bolton as the speaker for a session entitled: "Consolidating data collection with SQLDIAG and analysing it all with SQLNexus". I found it very informative and hope that you will too.

SQLBits is a UK based conference that occurs twice a year and I can't wait to attend one personally from the stories that I have heard. They record the sessions and make each one available for FREE access - AMAZING! You can find this session at the following URL: http://sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event7/Consolidating_data_collection_with_SQLDIAG_and_analysing_it_all_with_SQLNexus. The imbedded video has both a video of the speaker speaking to the audience as well as a full screen capture of the presentation to make the replay even more vivid.

Christian walks through the basics of using SQLDIAG for Data Collection initially. He then turns his attention to SQLNEXUS as a tool to analyze the data collected in SQLDIAG. He goes through how to configure SQLDIAG to collect the necessary data (perfmon and SQLTrace data) with the SQLDIAG process in order to discover the items needed for further analysis. If you need to perform a relatively quick analysis of a server, check this video out to discover your "pain points" for a particualr server.

After viewing this webcast, I am positive that you will find that using SQLDIAG along with SQLNEXUS will make your job easier.

New PASS Summit speakers that deserve votes

rob_farley — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:35:25 GMT

I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting.

Instead, I’m going to pick a few people that I recommend you vote for.

The people I’m going to pick are Paul White, Chris Testa-O’Neill and Erin Stellato. Three very different people, even from different countries. But I don’t think any of them have spoken at the PASS Summit before, and it would be good if they got accepted.

Paul White (NZ) is a fellow blogger at sqlblog.com. If you haven’t read his stuff, you’re seriously missing out. He spends an inordinate amount of time researching the behaviour of SQL Server, and has discovered all kinds of amazing things. He recently gave a presentation at the Boston SQL Saturday, and there was a lot of good feedback about it.

Chris Testa-O’Neill (UK) is one of the organisers of the SQLBits conferences in the UK, and has also appeared on many of the eLearning training for Microsoft. He hails from Manchester but has family living in Adelaide. He visited over Christmas and did an excellent job of speaking at the Adelaide SQL Server User Group.

Erin Stellato (US) blogs at erinstellato.com (I guess that makes sense). I met her briefly at the last PASS Summit, but over recent months have had a few conversations with her about some of the things she writes about on her blog. She submitted an abstract for 24 Hours of PASS event, but didn’t manage to get enough votes to speak. Despite this, I know she knows her stuff, and would do an excellent job presenting.

So there’s three people that I recommend you vote for. You can easily see the abstracts they’ve submitted on the site, to help in your decision. There are plenty of other people you should vote for too, such as the Scottish Jen Stirrup, the Aussie Darren Gosbell, or Seattle’s own Kendra Little (I think they haven’t spoken at the PASS Summit before either) – but please have a look through the names and pick some that are not the usual suspects.

@rob_farley