SQLSaturday #59 – Speaker Interview Series #9 – with Scott Weinstein

To round off the week, we bring you a short interview with our next speaker Scott Weinstein, who is scheduled to give us two distinct presentations, one morning session, and one later in the day. So, you will have a chance to meet Scott and learn how to optimize your SQL Code, and leverage version control, to get your databases under control, respectively.  Scott also manages the New York .Net Meetup, and has spoken at SqlSaturday, CodeCamp, and the Alt.Net meetup in NY.  Please read on to learn a little bit about Scott and his upcoming SQLSaturday#59 sessions.

RP: Scott, please tell us a little about yourself, your background, your career and your involvement in the SQL Community.

SW: I'm a practice head of LabInteractive, at Lab49. Specifcially, that means technical oversight of multiple projects, with a focus on the UI development.

RP: What is your area of expertise?  How did you become a DBA/SQL Professional?

SW: I'm a generalist in the .Net world. Often that means working with the SQL stack. More recently, I was a lead on a SQL BI projects.

RP: What advice would you give your fellow colleagues who are trying to become more senior professionals?

SW: Gain deep competence in at least one area, and sufficient competence in many.

RP: What are you working on currently?  (Projects, Books/Articles, Speaking circuit, etc.)

SW: Tools for MS Reactive Extensions

RP: What are you looking forward to, or, what excites you the most about presenting at our SQLSaturday event in the capital of the world, NYC?

SW: Sharing hard won knowledge. 

RP: Give us a preview of the topic and session you have planned for us at SQLSaturday#59

SW: I have two topics planned. The first is on "Keeping your SQL Code DRY" - as in learning how to refactor SQL code so that you don't have duplicate code scattered across your views, SP, and queries.

Don't Repeat Yourself - it's the golden rule of good code, and with Common Table Expressions, Table Values Functions, and the APPLY operator, we'll show how well structured code can be created without stored procedures.

The second is on "Getting your database under version control" - with minimal effort and w/o any additional cost. And as a side benefit, you get tooling for database deployments w/ no extra effort.

Many developers turn a blind eye to source code in their database - the critical views, stored procedures, and user defined functions. With a few concepts and tools build into every version of SQL Server I'll show how to build simple and free version control for your project.

RP: Good deal, Scott!  Thanks for participating, and see you there.  In the meanwhile, Scott maintains his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/sweinstein.

Have a great weekend everybody!  Stay bookmarked to the PearlKnows blog for more dynamic and exciting SQLSaturday#59 Speaker Interviews, coming next week.  -RP