SQL Server User Group
This is just a reminder that the Atlanta MDF group is hosting the SQL Saturday event on Saturday, April 25th, 2009. The event is full so I hope everyone that wanted to attend got in.
The event will be a full day of training for SQL Server professionals featuring more than
20 technical sessions covering Business Intelligence, Development, and Database
Administration.
Some of the local sponsors are
From our friends at Atlanta MDF
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
AtlantaMDF is proud to host the first Atlanta SQLSaturday, on April 25, 2009 at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. A lunch fee of $10 covers a full day of training, including a featured presentation by Joe Celko: "Nested Sets Model - Trees & Hierarchies in SQL". Other presenters include Erik Veerman, Andy Warren, Kevin G. Boles, and many more! Seating is limited, so reserve your spot today at http://www.sqlsaturday.com.
For more information, contact Stuart Ainsworth at stuart@codegumbo.com
Join us Monday, Jan. 14 from 6:30PM to 9:00PM.
LOCATION: FusionLink
Suite 210, Building 4,
Glenridge 400 Business Complex,
5825 Glenridge Drive
Atlanta, GA 30328
http://www.affug.com/katapult/index.cfm?page=aboutaffug/directions
PLEASE REGISTER so we know how much food and beverages to prepare:
http://www.atlantamdf.com
Refreshments and networking start at 6:30PM, speaking starts at 7:00PM.
TOPIC: SQL Server 2005 Disk IO Performance
SPEAKER: Bryan Oliver – SQL Server Domain Expert, Quest Software
SPONSOR: Quest Software - Application, Database, & Windows Management
http://www.quest.com/
Charlie Arehart of ColdFusion fame is reaching out more and more to the .NET development community, as he did yesterday with his presentation of the relatively new SQL Server Report Builder tool. Report Builder is actually a part of the much larger SQL Server Reporting Services product from Microsoft, and like SSRS itself, Report Builder is a free tool enabling your end users to generate their own ad-hoc reports. The best part? It works with SQL Server 2005 AND SQL Server 2000. Let’s face it, it will be somewhere near 2008 before I’m able to migrate my company’s database engine to the new version.
Charlie did a great job with his presentation and he’s clearly comfortable in front of a crowd. If you’re interested in the topic and you missed his presentation, you’re the poorer for it. Charlie’s slide deck will be online on the AtlantaMDF website soon, but in the meantime you can check out these useful bits of information.
I hope these links are useful. Watch the site www.GotReportBuilder.com (owned by Charlie) as it gets built into a clearinghouse of helpful information about SSRS and the Report Builder. Maybe the above links will soon appear on that site!
Kevin Kline, president of the
PASS organization, came to Atlanta last night to present some Stored Procedure best practices. The slides will be available on the
Atlanta MDF site soon, so I'm not going to try to repeat all of his material. I will point out a few highlights:
- before the presentation began we had a tough "Stump the Chumps" question from the crowd. This individual was looking for guidance in a very complex process that needed to do left outer joins with coalesce statements from a SQL Server set of data INTO an Oracle database. Kevin's recommendation - bypass the paradigm boundries and copy all of the raw data from SQL Server into Oracle THEN do the coalesce and joins into the final table. This avoids all the cryptic problems when working with different environments
- never prefix a stored procedure with "sp_" - it causes a lookup in the master database which wastes cycles and potentially executes the wrong version of a stored proc
- use "SP_EXECUTESQL" instead of "EXEC" to run embedded SQL. You'll get better performance and avoid problems precompiling large statements with inline variables
- use local temp tables instead of TempDb tables. Better yet, use table variables. Significant improvements in perf are achieved
- Refer to http://sql-server-performance.com. Bookmark it. Love it.
- Get the book Inside SQL Server 2000 by Kalen Delaney. This is an essential "must-have" for anyone who works with SQL Server.
Last night's meeting of the AtlantaMDF was heavily attended (nearly 60 people showed up) as Teo Lachev presented what turned out to be part one of his Analysis Services 2005 presentation. I have to agree with what Geoff Hiten said about Teo last night, "The problem with Teo is that his knowledge is so deep that a high level discussion takes four hours". Teo certainly knows his stuff and did a great job of presenting. Unfortunately we only got through perhaps a third of his material (and already Brendon has 15 pages of notes!). I'm going to work with Teo and Douglas to see if we can't get him to come back and finish up his presentation.
Teo gave away two copies of his new SSAS book (I actually won one of them) and we had lots of other swag for our winners including some SQL Pass messenger bags and 2005 Launch tshirts.
-- Matt Ranlett
Yesterday (Monday 12/12/2005) was the annual year end Atlanta MDF wrap party where we look back at our past successes and where we look ahead to our future successes.
Before I go any further, everyone needs to take a moment or two to thank Douglas McDowell, our fearless UG leader, for the incredible amount of work that he puts into planning the user group and making everything happen. Brendon and I try to help out where we can, but for the most part all we do is run the meeting if Douglas is out of town. Douglas plans the meeting presentations and sponsorships months in advance, secures the location for the group, handles the newsletter, and generally makes his expert subject matter knowledge available for the rest of us. Thanks for being there for us Douglas!
We did some meeting planning in terms of possible future subjects. Here's the list in no particular order:
- Upgrade from 2K to 2K5
- Data Mining
- WMI and SQL monitoring
- Encryption and certificates
- Application/database/enterprise architecture
- SQL Express
- Hardware/Capacity/Availability (SANs, 64 bit, etc)
- Disaster Recovery
- Dimensional Modeling
- Data Warehousing 101
- PSS panel - what, why, how
- SSIS
- SSRS
- OO Programming for Relational People (an intro)
- CLR/TSQL improvements for more performant queries
- Score Cards
- Management Views + System Tables = monitoring beyond the GUI
- Service Pack 1 (not yet released)
- Partitioning
- Development with VSTS
- Microsoft Certifications
This is what the 30 of us present came up with in the 15 minutes we brainstormed. What we're looking for is to have some of these topics presented by subject matter experts we bring in from outside the group (like most of our meetings last year) and some of the presentations should come from within the group membership. We heard some complaints that we might be getting too vendor-heavy in terms of our presenters
-- Matt Ranlett
The Atlanta MDF SQL Server user group met in their new location for the first time last week. They are now meeting down off North Druid Hills in the Childrens Hospital of Atlanta training facility. We had a great presentation on SQL Server security, especially in light of Sarbanes Oxly (I know I spelled that wrong) restrictions. The content was promised to us via e-mail, but we have yet to see it. I'm sure we'll get it eventually and we'll get it online. About 45 people were in attendance at the beginning of the evening but we lost some at the break and were down to about 30. Douglas had some really nice handouts as well - neat little tape measures with built in pens and pads of sticky notes. Not sure which IT company is handing them out but they sure were cool.
-- Matt Ranlett
While I was at the SQL Server User Group last night, I brought up the recent problem my company has been having with deadlocks - where we needed to find who was ACTUALLY causing the locks (not the parent SPID, but the low level trigger or nested SQL SPROC).
Basically, I was standing there with a room full of 70 DBAs offering suggestions on how they would have found the solution to the problem faster than I could have. It's really great to know that I have such a fantastic resource at my disposal and I'm sure I learned more in the 3 minutes standing there than I could have searching the web and knowledge bases for hours.
-- Matt Ranlett
Nearly 80 people showed up to listen to Brian Moran teach the group about using Profiler and SQL Trace to performance tune their database applications. The presentation was fantastic - so much so that I've sent Brian an e-mail asking him how much he costs to give a more indepth class to some of the folks at my company. We need this kind of training! Anyway, back to the UG review. I'll post an update to this entry when the SQL Server UG posts the slide deck to their website. There was way too much detailed info in the presentation to bother trying to sum anything up here. Except for this - whenever you have a database performance issue - the issue is being caused by your application code, not SQL Server itself. Use tools like Profiler and the built in SQL Server performance counters to uncover the real problems. Brian did a great job covering the material and introducing everyone to the correct way to use Profiler.
Many thanks go out to Quest Software who provided the pizza and 40 shirts to the group. The shirts were handed out to everyone who wanted one until they were all gone. David Rodriguez also brought some excellent "Got Spinny" Reporting Services shirts.
Don't forget about the SQL Server Road Show this August 30th at the Cobb Galleria. It costs $99 to get in but if you register with either the banner on the www.atlantamdf.com site or the banner on the www.devcow.com site you'll be working towards earning the SQL Server UG a donation from the SQL PASS organization.
-- Matt Ranlett