It’s close to that time of year again. It’s time for a SQL Saturday in Minnesota and this… it isn’t happening on a Friday. Yes, this year PASSMN has opted to instead have the SQL Saturday on a Saturday. If you’ve followed this event in Minnesota for the past few years, you’ll know that this is a big change from previous years. So it’s time to clear your calendar and make your plans to attend the SQL Saturday in Minnesota on September 29 and, of course, time to get registered.
Pre-Conference
With the SQL Saturday on a Saturday this year, that opens up the opportunity for the user group to offer some pre-conference training sessions the day before the event. The training sessions will run you $99 to attend and give you a chance to dive into a full-day of training on each particular topic. As part of this event, I was asked to provide one of the sessions and chose to do a pre-conference that takes a basics to deep dive into indexing.
These session is called:
Indexing for Performance – This pre-con is a full day session that looks at indexing from the basics down to the internals. With guidance on how to collect statistics on indexes and use that information to drive changes to indexing.
Indexing is an important aspect of maintaining an well-performing database. Without the proper indexes, database will not perform to their potential and users will inevitable help you share their pain. In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into indexes and how they work within the database. We’ll look at the indexes types available to the statistics collected on the indexes. From there, we’ll dig deeper into the internals, maintenance, and tools available for indexing your databases. The session concludes with a walk through of a process for collecting index statistics and using them to validate the indexes in place and drive changes that are needed.
As an added bonus, anyone attending the pre-conferences will have their lunch fee for the SQL Saturday comped as well. So if you are looking to hear me or one of the other SQL Server experts that are providing these sessions, register now before the time is up.
SQL Saturday Sessions
If you haven’t had a chance to look, the sessions and scheduled for the event have now been posted. And the speaker list is looking great with a total of 45 sessions on the schedule. I’m pretty excited to see some friends coming to town to speak, such as Ted Krueger, Jes Borland, Jason Horner, Hope Foley, Robert Davis, Aaron Lowe and many others.
As part of the schedule, I have two topics that I’ll be presenting on. They are:
The Creepy DBA, How to Stalk Your Users – Do you know when your users are using the production login accounts from their workstations? Are you aware of changes being made to the development servers that may impact future deployments? Has the new Junior DBA start giving out access like candy? As DBAs, we are responsible for knowing and acting on all of this and much more. Fortunately, SQL Server provides a number of features that you can use to monitor and track user activity. In this session, we’ll look at these features and demonstrate how you can use them to the extent that your users find you creepy!
Getting to Know Index Operation Stats – There’s a lot that goes on under the covers of SQL Server with your indexes. But it’s not as secretive as you might think. Most of this information is made available to you through DMVs. While this information is useful – you need a clear understanding of what is in the DMVs in order to understand what is going on. In this session we’ll take a dive into sys.dm_index_operational_stats to find out what it does and what you can do with this information.
You don’t want to miss out, so make sure you get registered now. And by missing out, I mean seeing all the other great sessions.
Before we wrap-up this post, there is one more thing…
The After Party
One thing that has lacked the past few years is a full fledged after party. For some reason, that detail wasn’t ever too flushed out – and it was likely my fault. At the end of the day, I was tired and was really looking for a bed to crash on. This year, though, since I am not participating in organizing the event, I’ve opted to throw my volunteer time behind the after party. And, yeah, I’m hoping to make it sound a lot like SQL Karaoke.
Follow me on Twitter at StrateSQL.
Original article: Minnesota SQL Saturday (#SQLSat149)
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