I attended the monthly ONETUG meeting last night to do a SQL presentation focused on developers. Same location as last year, the main library downtown. About 20 attendees this time. I chatted with a few people before things go started, including one who was trying to return to IT after a break and was doing all the right stuff – school, networking, and trying to find the best place to get started.

I went with a list of points I hoped to cover, but prepared to vary as needed. No Powerpoint when it’s that free flowing. I opened by talking about how to measure performance, showing them Profiler, Statistics IO, and Query plans and we spent a good bit of time on that, and then talked about some common misconceptions of how to get good performance. My goal on this talk, and almost always when I speak to a pure dev crowd is to get them interested in SQL, to see as more than a data store, and I think it worked this time.

I attend the after event this time and had several more interesting conversations, including one with a friend I met at SQLSat #1!