Join SQL Server professionals from around the world for free online technical training and networking year round. PASS Virtual Chapters (VC) are interest-based forums that unite the SQL Server community through live webcasts with top SQL Server experts, online forums and resources – including an archive of past presentations, and special training events.
DBA Fundamentals - Virtual Chapters
Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Time: 10:00 am - 11:00 am (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: Statistics Starters
Have you been updating statistics as part of your maintenance plan, even though you’re not really sure what they are? Have you been asking yourself where statistics exist, how to find them, and what people mean when they say “check statistics”? Do you look at the database options for statistics and wonder if they really matter? It’s time to end the guessing and start understanding the basics about statistics. In this session I’ll answer these questions using straight-forward demos and real-world examples. And if you haven’t been updating statistics as part of your maintenance plan don’t worry, I’ll get you started.
Speaker Info:
Erin Stellato is a Principal Consultant with SQLskills and lives in Cleveland, OH. She has over 12 years of technology experience and has worked with SQL Server since 2003. Her areas of interest include internals, performance tuning, and high availability and disaster recovery. She is involved with the Ohio North SQL Server User Group and blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/erin. You can find her on Twitter at @ErinStellato.
There will be a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card at the end of the meeting. A winner will be randomly chosen from all those in attendance for the whole webcast who provide their email address.
Big Data Virtual Chapter - Virtual Chapters
Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: Table Partitioning: Secret Weapon for Big Data Pro
Big Data starting to slow you down? Data growth putting your maintenance tasks in danger of not meeting your SLAs? Wish you could archive old data with minimal impact to your tables during the archive process or that you could eliminate most of the data in your tables when you query them? If so, it’s time you consider implementing table partitioning to help with general performance and reduce your window for completing maintenance tasks. Come learn how table partitioning works and when it should be implemented. You’ll see how to initially configure partition functions and partition schemes to have a rock-solid partitioned table. And you’ll learn how to implement an automated sliding window to maintain your partitioned tables and ensure optimal performance.
Speaker Info:
John Sterrett is a database administration senior advisor for Dell, directly responsible for several mission-critical databases. Previously, he was a senior DBA focused primarily on performance tuning at a Remote DBA service company with over 200 SQL Server clients. He has presented at many community events, including PASS Summit, SQLRally, 24 Hours of PASS, SQLSaturday, and local PASS Chapter and Virtual Chapter meetings. He is a PASS Regional Mentor for the South Central US region, co-founded the West Virginia SQL Server User Group, and hosted the first and second SQLSaturday in West Virginia. He is a syndicated blogger at SQLServerPedia and SQLServerCentral.com and a writer for MSSQLTips.com.
Business Analytics - Virtual Chapters
Date: Thursday, November 7, 2013
Time: 10:00 am - 11:30 am (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: Power BI Info Management and Data Stewardship
Business intelligence tools continue to improve, letting users shorten their time to insight and take that insight to more devices in more places. But this evolution of BI doesn’t change one fundamental fact of information management: You can’t gain insight from data you can’t access. In this session, Matthew Roche and Ofer Ashkenazi will introduce the role of the data steward and the self-service information management capabilities included in Power Query and Power BI for Office 365, focusing on how Power BI empowers business users to add value to the organization.
Speaker Info:
Matthew Roche is a Senior Program Manager on the SQL Server product team, working on Self-Service Information Management (SSIM) in Power BI, and who has worked on the SQL Server Enterprise Information Management (EIM) platform including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Master Data Services (MDS) and Data Quality Services (DQS). Before joining Microsoft in 2008, Matthew was a business intelligence consultant and trainer and a Microsoft SQL Server MVP. In addition to implementing small- and large-scale BI solutions with SQL Server, Matthew has presented on SQL topics at major technical conferences, code camps, and user groups across the US and in Europe. Ofer Ashkenazi is a Senior Product Planner with the Data Platform Group (Information Services). His focus is on Power BI, in particular Power Query, the Data Catalogue, and the Data Stewardship Experience in Power BI. Before this role, Ofer was the planner for SQL Azure and other cloud data services, including the Azure Data Marketplace. He was also the product planner and senior technical product manager with the Enterprise Application Platform Marketing team at Microsoft. Ofer’s roles include planning for new services releases, briefing market analysts, and presenting at conferences. Before joining Microsoft, Ofer served as a Microsoft Regional Director, BizTalk Server. At the same time, he managed a BizTalk Server consulting, training, and professional services business for a Microsoft partner.
Business Intelligence - Virtual Chapters
Date: Thursday, November 7, 2013
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: The Accidental Business Intelligence Project Manager
You’ve watched the Apprentice with Donald Trump and Lord Alan Sugar. You know that the Project Manager is usually the one gets fired. You’ve heard that Business Intelligence projects are prone to failure. You know that a quick Bing search for ‘why do Business Intelligence projects fail?’ produces a search result of 25 million hits! Despite all this… you’re now Business Intelligence Project Manager – now what do you do? In this session, Jen will provide a ‘sparks from the anvil’ series of steps and working practices in Business Intelligence Project Management. What about waterfall vs agile? What is a Gantt chart anyway? Jen will give you some ideas and insights that will help you set your BI project right: assess priorities, avoid conflict, empower the BI team and deliver the Business Intelligence project successfully!
Speaker Info:
Jen Stirrup, a SQL Server MVP and PASS Director-At-Large (Elect), is best-known for her work in business intelligence & data visualization. She runs Copper Blue Consulting, delivering business-critical solutions that add enterprise value. Jen has presented at TechEd North America, TechEd Europe, PASS Summit, and SQLBIts, as well as at SQLSaturday events in Europe. She won PASS's prestigious Passion Award, presented at Summit 2012, for her work in supporting the SQL Server community in Europe.
Virtualization - Virtual Chapters
Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Time: 10:00 am - 11:00 am (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: Testing and Benchmarking SQL Server Consolidation
Whether you are consolidating SQL Server on a hypervisor or bare-metal, proper testing and benchmarking of SQL workloads is critical. This session will introduce you to testing methodologies for the most commonly consolidated SQL Server workloads. CPU and memory configurations will be discussed as well.
Speaker Info:
Andrew: Frank Cicalese is a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco Systems, Inc., assisting customers with their design of SQL Server solutions on Cisco Unified Compute System. Before joining Cisco, Frank worked at Microsoft Corporation for 10 years, excelling in several positions, including as Database TSP. Frank has in-depth technical knowledge and proficiency with database design, optimization, replication, and clustering and has extensive virtualization, identity and access management and application development skills. He has established himself as an architect who can tie core infrastructure, collaboration, and application development platform solutions together in a way that drives understanding and business value for the companies he services.
Book Readers - Virtual Chapters
Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm (Mountain Time)
Cost: Free
Language: English
Featured Presentation: Delivering Business Intelligence 5th Meeting
Speaker Info:
Ike Ellis SQL, Business Intelligence, and Data Consultant. He's been a SQL Server MVP since 2010. He has 17 years of experience writing software and working with SQL Server. He's the principal SQL course author and instructor for DevelopMentor. His twitter handle is@ike_ellis. Find more information at www.ikeellis.com
Brad Cunningham C# MVP since 2008. He's always on the cutting edge of software development, writing for the new web, mobile, and enterprise solutions. His code has been featured all over the Internet, on numerous pod casts and user groups. You can find him on twitter as @foovanadil.
Rob Sullivan Bona fide Alpha Nerd, SQL Server DBA by day and code slinger by night. He is the SQL Dude for Tekpub, open source contributor to .NET Micro ORMS, speaker and can occasionally be found on This Developers Life. In his free time, he frequents various user groups in Oklahoma City or pretty much anywhere that has pizza.
Scott Reed An Azure MVP since 2011. Scott’s career in software began in 1993 at IBM. Along the way, he has developed enterprise solutions for both Microsoft and Cardinal Health. Scott is a generalist, his interests ranging from data access technologies and multithreading to communications and UI technologies. Scott holds a BS in Computer Science and math from Virginia Tech.
