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.
Tomorrow (2/18) is the February meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). Our presenter this month is the Real SQL Guy, Tracy Mckibben (Blog|Twitter). He will be presenting on Subqueries for superheroes. He claims it is for T-SQL beginners, but I imagine most people in the audience will learn something about the “lowly subquery.”
In addition to Tracy’s talk we will also be letting people know about some of the many things going on the SQL and Data community. Continue reading
Next Tuesday (1/21) is the January meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). It is my first meeting as the board chair so I am sure everything will run smoothly. Our presenter this month is Merrill Aldrich (Blog|Twitter). Merrill has a great dry sense of humor and this month he is presenting on Storage Internals. Which is sort of burying the lead. Merrill wrote a visualization tool for SQL Server data files and he will show us “what happens in a data file when you convert a table from a heap to a clustered index!” and “fragmentation and the havoc wrought by Shrink!” I missed him when he gave this talk at our SQL Saturday event last fall so I am glad we got him to come in and show us at the user group meeting. Continue reading
Next Tuesday (12/17) is the December meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASSMN). I am excited about this meeting because we have five new speakers each presenting a 10-15 minute topic. Continue reading
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2, Chapter 12
Build your own SQL Server 2008 performance dashboard – by Pawel Potasinski (Blog|Twitter)
For this chapter Pawel Potasinski has done exactly what the title suggests. He lays out the steps to create a simple performance dashboard for SQL Server. He specified the version in his chapter title, but he clarifies that these steps can be “implemented on SQL Server 2005 and later (where CLR, DMV’s and SSRS are available).” That one sentence sort of gives away his whole strategy. He shows how to use a Common Language Runtime (CLR) function to get at operating system performance counters. He then combines this with SQL Server Performance counters from the dm_os_perfornamce_coutners DMV and uses a SSRS report to display them both.
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2, Chapter 59
Real-time BI with StreamInsight – by Allan Mitchell (Blog|Twitter)
This was a hard one. I had to remind myself a couple of times while reading this chapter that I am writing these reviews so that I can understand these topics better.
Before I read this chapter I had never heard of StreamInsight and it took me a while to wrap my head around what exactly this tool is. Finally after doing some Binging around on the topic and reading the chapter for the sixth time these lines jumped out at me:
StreamInsight is a complex event-processing engine…
Once the events leave the input adapter, they enter the engine.
The engine is where all the query logic is introduced and from where the intelligence is derived.
A Coding Journey 