The April meeting went well.  I had hoped that the prospect of a couple of Technet subscriptions would increase attendance a bit for this meeting, but it doesn't seem to have done so.  On the bright side, that meant my competition for them was less and I managed to walk out with one at the end of the night.  We had our usual group of about 8 or 9 people.

Herve Roggero (Blog | Twitter) gave a great presentation on indexes, join types and some common things that catch people when they try to analyze performance.  Herve is obviously very comfortable speaking in front of a crowd (Or if he's not he does a very good job of pretending to be).  Here is what one of the members had to say about it:

I really enjoyed Herve’s presentation on Performance and Best Practices for Indexing in SQL Server last night.  He started with the basics concepts of covering/clustered/non-clustered/unique indexes, and the built on that to show how logical vs. physical operators may differ based on the indexes provided.  The hands on demos were very helpful in understanding how changing the columns, column order and column data types impacts the execution plan that SQL Server selects.
Herve showed how to gauge actual performance using the profiler and server management studio settings… and how to avoid potentially misleading information like relative to batch percentages.  There was a lot more and all very good info from start to finish.
As an aside I sat in on Hervey’s Azure talk at Tampa SQL Saturday.  Looking forward to his upcoming book.

We ended the evening at World of Beer, which was (again) too loud.  As much as I love the beer selection there, I fear we're going to have to switch our meeting spot back to a quieter bar.  Blaringly loud live music is all well and good if the intent is to go and watch, but if the intent is to converse, it's somewhat problematic.

Thanks again to Herve for spending his valuable time to make the drive over from Tampa and spend the evening with us.