Wow - what a great trip through Europe! SQLBits8 was in beautiful and sunny Brighton, which everyone local to the area assures me that it's not usually either. The crowd was large and enthusiastic. We did two rollickin' fun lunch time vendor sessions, one being the SQL Pub Quiz. (I'll tell you about the other one tomorrow in a separate ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you ...

Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday has me caught slightly unawares. I’m in the UK, having come over for SQLBits, and I’m left writing this with only a few hours to go. The theme this time is on misconceptions in SQL, and this fits nicely with SARGability – one of the topics that I presented on at SQLBits a week and a half ago. I often see people refer ...

Last week I was in Great Britain for SQL Bits 7.  This was the first conference outside of the United States that I have attended, and I was honored to attend SQL Bits 7 as a speaker during Friday’s Sessions.  The city of York is absolutely beautiful, and full of history.  While I didn’t really have the time to go sight seeing while ...