Today at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta I presented a new brand new session, ''SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches.'' This session is designed to help people quickly analyze query plans and find likely culprits without being query tuning experts; I find that in a huge number of cases the root ...

On Friday, May 10 I will be speaking for the Knoxville SQL Server User Group, and on May 18, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday in Atlanta. Both days, my session is my old chestnut “Database Design Fundamentals”. It is my favorite session to do because of two things. 1. I love to talk about database design 2. No demos :).  The abstract is: ...

Today was SQL Saturday #146, put on by Mike Walsh, Jack Corbett, and a host of other volunteers and organizers. Scott and I missed the speaker dinner last night, but we headed up from Rhode Island at 6:00 AM and made a good day of it. We had lots of great conversations with both existing friends and potential customers. After lunch I ...

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays  were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog).  On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server.  I also delivered a session on SQL Server ...

Well, East Greenwich, RI. Another successful event, this one put on by John Miner, Brandon Leach, Steve Simon, Scott Abrants and a host of other folks. Several #SQLFamily friends in attendance as well: Grant Fritchey, Mike Walsh, Jack Corbett, Wayne Sheffield and others. I gave a session in the morning and then a session to cap off the day. Thanks ...

Yesterday I presented at SQL Saturday #162. My slide deck and samples are here:     Slide Deck & Samples: Bertrand - T-SQL Bad Habits & Best Practices I also wanted to answer a question from an audience member after the session about how to generate YYYYMMDD strings to represent yesterday's date in order to append to a backup ...

PASS SQL Saturdays are free 1-day training events for IT professionals interested in Microsoft SQL Server, providing a variety of high-quality technical sessions, all happen through the efforts of local volunteers.  The leadership team of the local chapter of PASS here in Nashville (Facebook | LinkedIn) have ...

Later this week I will be doing an episode of the Greg Low’s excellent SQL Down Under podcast (http://www.sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspx), something I did once before back in 2006.  If you haven’t listened to any of the previous editions, there are some amazing people who have been on his podcast. On Thursday at 12:00 Central Time, ...

One more week until we get to SQL Saturday 122 in Louisville KY. I have a couple of sessions on the calendar this time. First, the one on Sequences: ------------------------------------ What Sequence objects are (and are not) SQL Server 2012 adds a new object to our arsenal called a sequence that can will give us the capability to implement ...

I've been to a lot of SQL Saturdays. They are great events to attend - from a community standpoint, from a learning standpoint, and from a speaker growth standpoint. Who could ask for more, right? Great sessions, from passionate speakers willing to both teach and learn, fantastic networking opportunities and lunch. All for free, or at a very low ...