Next Tuesday (8/19) is the August meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Our presenter this month is the Ross McNeely (twitter | blog). Ross will be presenting a Spatial Data Deep Dive going over Spatial Data types, the Bing Spatial Data Services, and Spatial Analysis. It is a topic I haven’t taken much time to dig into, but it seems like almost every company I have worked at has some sort of geospatial data.
As a part of the PASSMN Board I spend a lot of time talking about SQL and a lot of time talking about talking about SQL. (Trust me that is a real sentence.)
Each month at our user group meetings we have someone present on something that relates to our careers as SQL Server professionals and each year we host a SQL Saturday where we usually have at about 35-40 different people present. We are lucky in the Twin Cities because it isn’t usually hard to fill those spots. We have a lot of people involved in our community and many people who enjoy speaking or at least see the value in it.
Tuesday of this week (7/15) was the July meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Our presenter this month was Mike Matthews (no twitter|no blog – someone should talk to him about this). Mike presented on SQL Server I/O. I didn’t get a blog post put out before the meeting to remind people, but I am hoping to have twelve posts for PASSMN for the year. I’ll just have to reflect on how the meeting went instead of announcing what it will be about.
Recently I have been encouraging some first time speakers to submit a session for SQL Saturday Mineesota #332. The usual first question is, “What should I talk about?” That’s not what this post is about. I may put something together on that later, but this is going to be a step by step instruction manual for how to submit a session. With screen shots and everything.
A few weeks ago PASSMN finalized the date for our SQL Saturday (October 25th, 2014). This means that we now have an official website for SQL Saturday #332 and opened up our call for speakers. This will be the 5th SQL Saturday that I will attend in Minnesota and the third one that I have been involved with the preparation. Last year I had the very fun task of selecting our speakers and organizing the schedule. After looking at all of the abstracts and fitting them into slots on the schedule the hard part was deciding which sessions to attend. We are fortunate to have one of the larger SQL Saturday events (I expect we will go over 400 people this year) and as a result we get a lot of great sessions submitted. However…
Tomorrow (6/17) is the June meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). For June we are doing a lightning talk format that will include short talks from Paul Timmerman (blog|twitter), Rizwan Hassan (twitter), myself, and a short presentation from our sponsor this month, Kroll Ontrack, with an update on their SQL backup product. It is the first time I have presented at the user group since March of 2012 and I am looking forward to it.
Today (4521) is the May meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Mark Vaillancourt (B|T) is presenting this month on Analysis Services Terms and Concepts for the DBA. Mark is a great presenter and it will be fun to see how he makes SSAS entertaining.
As usual there will be a few announcements before the main event.
Today (4/15) is the April meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Our presenter this month is Jason Strate. Jason will be presenting Are You Following Your Own Best Practices? He’ll show us a solution using Policy Based Management to monitor best practices and report on your own internal compliance. This should be an interesting take on a topic that I am guessing we all struggle with.
Before we let Jason get you worrying if all of your new databases are being set up with backups we’ll let you know what is going on in the SQL Server community.
Saturday March 29th: SQL Saturday #287 in Madison, WI
Tuesday April 1st: PASSMN Tabletop Gaming and Pizza Night (No Foolin’)
Saturday April 26th: SQL Saturday #291 in Chicago, IL
Today (3/18) is the March meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Our presenter this month is the Joe Sack (Blog|Twitter). Joe will be presenting on Practical SQL Server Cardinality Estimation and filling us in on how this estimation works behind the scenes, plus what changes Microsoft has added in SQL Server 2014. Joe was one of my favorite presenters last year so I am looking forward to this.
Of course before Joe teaches about cardinality estimates we’ll let you know what is going on in the SQL Server community.
A Coding Journey 