Next week, on Saturday 28, make sure you don’t miss SQLSaturday Pordenone!

Pordenone is the place where the Italian adventure with SQLSaturday started, more than two years ago. It was the beginning of a journey that brought many SQLSaturdays to Italy, with our most successful one in Parma last November.

Now we’re back in Pordenone to top that result!

We have a fantastic schedule for this event, with a great speaker lineup and great topics for the sessions. Everything is set in the right direction to be a great day of free learning and fun.

I will have two sessions this time:

SQL Server Security in an Insecure World

In this session I will talk about security, with a general introduction to the topic and then I’ll go straight to demonstrate some of the vulnerabilities that attackers could use to take over your server. Yes, I’ll be demonstrating SQL-Injection attacks: SQL-I is still a top security issue, even if we’re in 2015. Everyone must be aware of the risks and take action immediately.

I will also describe the security features available in SQL Server to lock down the server as much as possible, but the key concept I will try to drive is that security is a process, not a feature.

If you want to find out more, join me at 12:00 PM in room S7.

Extending the Data Collector to Monitor SQL Server effortlessly

In this session I will try to promote one of the least used features in SQL Server: the Data Collector. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the expensive monitoring suites, but it does the job pretty well. Things start to be painfully difficult when you try to extend it with additional collection sets, but the good news is that there’s an open-source project that provides a GUI to manage and customize the collection sets. The project is called ExtendedTSQLCollector and it does much more than just adding a GUI to the Data Collector: it also provides two additional collector types to collect data from LOB columns (in case you’re wondering, no – the vanilla Data Collector doesn’t support LOB columns) and Extended Events sessions.

I will also demonstrate a convenient way to centralize and extend the Data Collector reports to create a reporting and alerting solution for free.

Sounds interesting? Join me at 4:30 PM in room S7.

So, what are you waiting for? Register now and join us in Pordenone!