SQLSaturday #104 - Colorado Springs 2012 1/7/2012 12:00:00 AM (GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US and Canada) SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. #sqlsat104 Mr. Biggs 5825 Mark Dabling Boulevard Colorado Springs CO 80919 http://www.sqlsaturday.com/images/sqlsaturday_gb_icon.png http://www.sqlsaturday.com/images/sqlsaturday_gb_image.png Conference Information general True 1 default Maps maps False 2 default Schedule of Events schedule True 3 default Sponsors List sponsorslist True 4 default Twitter twitter True 5 default Todo List todo False 6 default My Schedule myschedule True 7 default Feedback feedback False 8 default Key Events keyevents False 9 default Share share True 10 default 1658 SSWUG Gold Pre-Con Sponsor http://www.sswug.org http://www.sqlsaturday.com/files/530ad995-e258-41d7-b9ab-2bc159ec71ca.png 60 170 1672 SolidQ Gold Pre-Con Sponsor http://www.solidq.com/us-en/Pages/Home.aspx http://www.sqlsaturday.com/files/9a76cb19-134d-471b-9d38-c536b1d3bcbe.png 60 170 1682 Confio Software Gold Pre-Con Sponsor http://www.confio.com http://www.confio.com/images/assets/confio_logo.jpg 60 170 1659 Idera Gold Sponsor http://www.idera.com http://www.sqlsaturday.com/files/c3b4c5c2-e3b1-4b83-821d-b02d5db4af22.jpg 60 170 1673 Red Gate Software Ltd Gold Sponsor http://www.red-gate.com/?utm_source=ugutm_medium=uglogoutm_content=sqlsaturday104utm_campaign=redgate http://www.red-gate.com/archive/redgatelogo_black.jpg 60 170 1683 Data Realized Gold Sponsor http://www.datarealized.com/ http://www.sqlsaturday.com/files/9c96c827-a67a-41be-b010-865e07b76add.jpg 60 170 1720 Dell, Inc. 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Most of the time parameter sniffing is helping performance on your servers. But sometimes, circumstances change and what was helping you is now hurting you, bad. In this session we’ll gain an understanding of what exactly parameter sniffing is and why it’s usually so helpful. Then, we’ll explore how parameter sniffing can go wrong and I’ll show you seven different ways you can deal with it when it does. You’ll bring back a wealth of knowledge so that you can identify and resolve bad parameter sniffing in your own environment. 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 10:30:00 AM 5906 William E Pearson III BI Room 3 Microsoft BI Architect and SQL Server MVP Bill Pearson overviews PowerPivot for Excel, the client side of Microsoft’s foray into self-service BI. The targeted audience includes BI professionals who are seeking an introduction to what PowerPivot offers their organizations. Among others interested will be Excel power users who are fluent with PivotTables and want to understand the new capabilities. 1/7/2012 4:00:00 PM 1/7/2012 5:00:00 PM 5913 Randy Knight DBA / DEV Room 4 If you've ever found yourself stating the above, this session is for you. For many developers, writing T-SQL that works is not the challenge. But too often, functional T-SQL is not the same as good T-SQL. In this session, we will examine why 'SQL that works' is not good enough. Understanding indexes, exectuion plans, sargability, and more are all critical to writing good T-SQL. We will also examine several real-world examples of T-SQL that 'worked great in dev' but caused major issues when it hit production. 1/7/2012 4:00:00 PM 1/7/2012 5:00:00 PM 5942 Marc Beacom BI Room 3 Just starting or thinking of starting a data warehousing project but not sure where to begin. Or still not sure if your organization needs a data warehouse. This discussion is geared towards answering the what and why (or why not) of data warehousing. 1/7/2012 8:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 5946 Michael Fal BI Room 2 Is your table fat? Do you need to manage a table that has billions of rows within it and are overwhelmed by index rebuilds that take more than 12 hours? SQL Server's table partitioning gives the DBA the tools to manage this beast and support very large tables in a way where index management and data retrieval does not become unwieldy. This presentation will take you step by step through choosing an appropriate partitioning key, setting up the partitioning on the table, and finally maintaining the partitions. 1/7/2012 4:00:00 PM 1/7/2012 5:00:00 PM 5963 Thomas LeBlanc BI Room 3 This session is going to help create a dimensional Data Mart from the AdventoureWorks database that includes dimension tables and 2 example fact tables. The Kimball spreadsheet for documenting a Data Mart will be used to reenforce the need for Requirements and Functional specifications. A brief review of ETL for Slowly Changing Dimension and population of the Fact will be deomstrated as well as a simple cube for reporting. 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 10:30:00 AM 5964 John Morehouse DBA / DEV Room 1 Are you just starting out in the DB world? Are you unsure of things that you should know? Are you a developer wanting to gain further insight on how to improve your SQL Skills? If you answered 'Yes' to any of those question, then this is the session for you! John will be talk about things that he's seen in the trenches that every DBA should know and understand. 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 3:30:00 PM 5968 Ted Malone DBA / DEV Room 4 This session will discuss developing applications that make use of SQL Azure databases, and will address some of the challenges of off-premise data. This session will also discuss developing Windows Azure applications that take advantage of on-premise databases and the various security mechanisms that are involved. Attendees will learn how hybrid cloud solutions are architected and built. Attendees will also learn about the various security implications of cloud and on-premises data applications. 1/7/2012 8:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 5985 Chris Randall DBA / DEV Room 4 SQL Azure's not just coming; it's here. In your role as the local expert on all-things-SQL-Server, you will need to know how to talk intelligently about it. You may also want to be able to whip up an impromptu SQL Azure demo for co-workers and decision makers. This demo-heavy session will help get you to that point. We'll look at what kind of usage scenarios work best for SQL Azure. We'll look at what SQL Azure does, and what it doesn't do. We walk through the process of creating, loading and querying databases, at what management tools are available, and how you will create and manage your account. We'll explore what cost-efficient ways there are for an individual to get access, and how to monitor the costs on an ongoing basis. 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 10:30:00 AM 6001 Meredith Ryan-Smith DBA / DEV Room 1 Creating backups is one of the fundamental skills every DBA should know, but there are a plethora of choices when it comes to how you will back up your databases. Learn the options with SQL server, what each choice will do for you and when to use each one. 1/7/2012 1:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 6003 Jason Horner DBA / DEV Room 1 This presentation will provide a brief overview of how to get started with powershell and will be demo intensive. Demo topics will include common challenges that database professional's face including: basic code generation, deployment automation, and database discovery. We will also attempt to touch on automation and general script development best practices. 1/7/2012 8:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 6010 Jason Strate DBA Room 5 Execution plans are stored after execution in the plan cache. This metadata about how queries are executed can provide insight into how your SQL Server environment is functioning. By using XQuery to browse and search the plan cache you can find potential performance issues and opportunities to tune your queries. This information can be used to help reduce issues related to parallelism, shift queries from using scans to using seek operations, or discover exactly which queries are using what indexes. All of this and more is readily available through the plan cache. In this session we will explore the plan cache and start you on the road to discovery. 1/7/2012 1:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 6019 Vicky Harp DBA / DEV Room 1 Are you confident that your application performs as expected on Leap Day? Do you know how long it would take to run out of identity values in your major tables? Can you support case-sensitive collations and non-standard sort orders? If not, odds are good that you are not edge and corner testing your application. In this session, learn how to define the edges of your application and start to stretch those boundaries by setting up challenging test and development environments. For database administrators, learn what configurations in your environment may be a source of bugs in application code and what you can do about it. Learn about edge cases that you can start hardening your code against on Monday morning! 1/7/2012 11:00:00 AM 1/7/2012 12:00:00 PM 6020 Thomas LaRock DBA / DEV Room 4 Life is all about choices, and when it comes to SQL Server it is no different. If you don't have a methodology for researching questions and resolving issues then you need to get one, and soon. Join Microsoft MVPs Jason Strate from Digineer and Thomas LaRock from Confio Software as they help guide you while YOU make the choices in this interactive performance tuning adventure. 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 3:30:00 PM 6023 Josh Fennessy BI Room 2 Given in the form of a case study, this session will highlight a real-life implementation done of an interesting user request. Using the functionality of SharePoint, SSIS, and SSAS attendees of this session will learn how to give analyists the ability to generate, define, and immediately use Custom Defined sets in an Analysis Services cube. This session will highlight some of the power of SharePoint lists, third party SSIS providers, and many-to-many relationships in SSAS cubes. Additionally, the flexibilty of this solution will be shown though the use of several different user reporting tools. 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 10:30:00 AM 6024 Karen Lopez DBA Room 5 A highly interactive and popular session where attendees evaluate the options and best practices of common and advanced design issues, such as: * Natural vs. Surrogate keys * Classwords and other Naming Standards * Varchar Minimums *Identity Crisis * Who Calls the Shots and Who Does What? ...and others. Bring your votes, your debates, and your opinions. 1/7/2012 4:00:00 PM 1/7/2012 5:00:00 PM 6027 Doug Lane BI Room 3 Do you remember what it was like to fall in love? Wasn't it wonderful? Lately it hasn't been the same. There's no spark anymore. You've been stuck doing the same old charts and tables. Maybe Reporting Services won't tell you what's wrong, and you're even thinking about seeing other reporting products. In this session, Doug will re-ignite your passion for RS by reminding you how reports perform best, what RS has been trying to tell you (but you haven't been listening), and show you some new -- and easy -- tricks you may not have known RS can do. You'll leave knowing more about troubleshooting with the execution log views, understanding how to design reports for high performance, how to deal with blank pages, and more. 1/7/2012 11:00:00 AM 1/7/2012 12:00:00 PM 6028 John Halunen Aubra Moore BI Room 2 Tips, tricks and architecture options to successfully use Virtual IP's to give your users 100% reporting database uptime with a minimum of pain (and most importantly, learn from our mistakes, its much easier). This session describes how we used VIP's (virtual IP's) to present 10TB of datawarehouse to thousands of users to run user generated reports 24x7x365 with good maintenance and recoverability practices. 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 3:30:00 PM 6029 Bill Fellows BI Room 2 Slow running packages? SSIS consuming all your resources? No idea what it's doing? After attending this session, you will come out with an understanding of how Configuration, Logging, Package settings and deployment work in SQL Server Integration Services. You will also be armed with a list of transformations and perfmon counters to watch out for. 1/7/2012 8:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 6045 Jim Murphy DBA Room 5 In the past, High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) had many limitations. Clustering and Mirroring are great, but the mirror/secondary database is not very usable since it is not online. Finally, AlwaysOn solves this limitation by merging both multi-node Clustering and mirroring. AlwaysOn also allows the secondary database to remain ONLINE, so we can use it for reporting purposes without resorting to a Snapshot! Come see this lively session with extensive demos of setting up, configuring and testing AlwaysOn. We'll also test automatic ConnectionString fail-over using a real web app to see how well that feature works. 1/7/2012 11:00:00 AM 1/7/2012 12:00:00 PM 6052 Tim Ford DBA Room 5 Taking the periodic table of elements into consideration I've created The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects as a reference tool for these functions and views that have become so critical for today's SQL Server DBA to performance tune and gain metadata insights into their various SQL instances. In navigating the table we will examine key DMVs and DMFs of interest: requests, sessions, wait stats, indexes, system information will all be covered. We will also delve into how these DMOs - just like their elemental counterparts - can be combined to yeild interesting insights into your servers. We will also look at how things can go awry as well! Like mixing vinegar and baking soda, sometimes combining DMOs can cause a big mess too! 1/7/2012 8:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 6091 Ben DeBow DBA / DEV Room 4 Can SQL Server be offered as a service (SQLaaS) in your own private cloud? Can it provide application teams with the ability to easily procure an instance of SQL Server quickly? You may have some elements of this created in your environment but how do you create the full service offering? Creating a SQLaaS offering is a lot easier than you think and many companies are now ready for this change. In this session, you will learn how to design a SQL Server service offering for the Private Cloud that will enable your organization to react faster to the increasing project demands. 1/7/2012 11:00:00 AM 1/7/2012 12:00:00 PM 6095 Michael Sexton BI Room 3 Companies store data in multiple diverse formats on multiple databases using multiple versions of software and none of it is designed to integrate of work together… until that it gets to the BI systems. In the BI system data suddenly must – as if by magic - become a fully integrated and logically coherent system to generate reports for executives. This session will explore the Master Data Management (MDM) default system for many companies, their BI stack and how we can use the ETL process to get a single version of truth for corporate data. 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 3:30:00 PM 6106 Mark Halstead DBA / DEV Room 1 There are times when T-SQL, DMV's and system tables can't tell you what you need to know or do what you need to do. Knowing the basics of PowerShell VBScript can provide functionality when you need to work 'outside of the box'. 1/7/2012 4:00:00 PM 1/7/2012 5:00:00 PM 6116 David Eichner BI Room 3 Learn how easy it is to utilize the free download from Microsoft that allows users to create charts, dashboard objects and reports against any kind of data easily without having to use Visual Studio. 1/7/2012 1:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 6134 Troy Ketsdever BI Room 2 Predictive analytics is no longer exclusively for those shops that have the resources to design and implement an entire BI architecture. In this session, we will review a class of modeling problems that are not only quite powerful, but are amenable to implementation via relatively simple T-SQL querying. All it takes to get started is the data available in your OLTP system, a basic understanding of the math, and a bit of imagination… 1/7/2012 1:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 6140 Tom Norman DBA / DEV Room 4 Peanut Butter and Mayonnaise? No, Policy Based Management What can it do for me? Do I really need it? How do I install and configure it? How can it help me to pass audits? Who is that masked man you got into my database. You mean each server can really be configured the same. Let's explore Policy Based Management and what it has to offer us in better management of our Sql Servers. 1/7/2012 1:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 6144 Keith Tate DBA / DEV Room 1 Chefs and cooks have a process called mise en place (MEEZ ohn plahs) which translates to 'put in place'. For cooks this means 'organize and prepare' their stations. They have everything they need ready and in the right place. It also means to remove all distractions. In this session I will show how developers and DBAs can use this method to better organize their time and efforts to get more done with less rework. 1/7/2012 9:30:00 AM 1/7/2012 10:30:00 AM 6152 Carlos Bossy BI Room 2 Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2012 will allow you to significantly improve the processing time of common data warehousing queries without creating cubes, aggregated tables, or other techniques normally used to improve performance. This session will show how to implement this new type of index in SQL Server and demonstrate their advantages compared to traditional solutions. Carlos will also discuss the scenarios for which columnstore indexes should be implemented to provide powerful but flexible BI solutions. 1/7/2012 11:00:00 AM 1/7/2012 12:00:00 PM 6171 Joe Sack DBA Room 5 While a SQL Server consultant may encounter various one-off situations over the course of a career, there are also several patterns and scenarios which repeat themselves with only minor variations. In this presentation Joe Sack will walk through common scenarios based on his experiences as a field engineer at Microsoft and also as a consultant with SQLskills. 1/7/2012 2:30:00 PM 1/7/2012 3:30:00 PM