I attended my first SQL Saturday on September 15, in Providence RI (http://sqlsaturday.com/156/eventhome.aspx) . I wish I had been to one sooner. I learned a lot (as usual, the lesson reiterated the most is how much more I need to learn). I will post more details about the actual sessions I went to in a bit, but I just wanted to give a brief overview of what the day was like.
The event started at 8:30, with registration at 8:00. It’s about 2:15 drive for me, so I had the alarm go off at 5 AM, took a quick shower and hit the road.
It was held at the New England Institute of Technology, which has a beautiful building that they let PASS use for no cost. It is a very new building with modern classrooms and conference rooms, a perfect place to hold an event like this.
When I arrived, I checked in, received my swag (T-shirt, notebook, MS Azure monitor cleaning rag), and ventured upstairs to where the vendor tables were located. I am sure it was not by accident that you could not get to the coffee without passing by the vendors.
I picked up some literature from Confio (never used their products before), and grabbed two nice items from Quest – their SQL Perfmon Counters poster, and their SQL DMVs poster. I have printed these out, but even on 11×17, they are microscopic. I entered their raffles (one for a kindle, one for a $100 Amazon gift card – I did not win either), and then picked up a “Best of PASS Summit 2011” DVD from the PASS table, which was manned by Jack Corbett, a Microsoft MVP who is active in the NE SSUG that sponsored the event.
After grabbing a coffee in a drug-test sized cup I ventured over the where the keynote was being delivered by John Miner. He gave an overview of what to expect, and informed us that we should all stick around until the end of the day for the raffles – need to be present to win!
As mentioned above, I am not going to go into each session in detail here (I will later in subsequent posts), but here are bullet point summaries of the sessions I attended:
- New Server in an Hour? No Problem! – presented by Mike Hillwig: A fantastic way to start the day. Mikes presentation was informative, and he is an entertaining speaker. Very energetic, although he may want to try decaf.
- I had planned on attenting Loading a Data Warehouse using SSIS 2012 – presented by James Phillips, but this was cancelled. In the same classroom they had “Best Practices Document- presented by Paresh Motiwala”.
- T-SQL : Bad Habits to Kick – presented by Aaron Bertrand: Aaron is a well-known contributor to the SQL Community, so I wanted to catch one of his sessions. Although some of this was basic material, it was presented in an informative way with good explanations as to why you should or should not do certain things.
- Transitioning from SQL Trace to Extended Events – presented by Jack Corbett. Trusty old SQL Profiler and Trace are going away, to be replaced with extended events, so getting an introduction to this technology.
- Cross Tabs & Pivots – Reports on Steroids – presented by Jeff Moden. One of the highlights of the day for me. Great presentation that simplified what can be a befuddling topic.
- SQL Server 2012 Availability Groups- presented by Andy Roberts. Another new technology (only in SQL 2012) that I have not played with, so I wanted to get an introduction.
- What to Look for in Execution Plans – by Grant Fritchey. Another highlight. Grant has written the book on execution plans, literally. Outside of referring to his incompetent junior DBA as “Timmy” it was a great high energy session with lots of information and lots of laughs too.
Last but not least, there were tons of books raffled off (I won a copy of Kalen Delaney’s SQL Server 2008 Internals, which I traded for another book from Red Gate, SQL Server Backup and Restore, because I already own the Internals book).