SQL Saturday #48 Recap

Introduction

I got to attend SQL Saturday #48 2 Oct 2010 and was honored to present.

“I’m Andy, and I’m a session-hopper.” There. I said it. When I’m not presenting, I often wander between sessions. I want to learn a little something from everyone. Here are some sessions I wandered through and some notes from them:

Alejandro Mesa – Parameter Sniffing

I started in Alejandro Mesa’s session on Parameter Sniffing. I actually got to speak with Alejandro before his session started. We spoke about family and the importance of feedback. Alejandro is cool. He’s friendly and cares about delivering quality presentations. His passion for SQL Server and the community is evident – even if you only spend a few minutes with him.

I listened to the beginning of his session. In the portion I heard, he shared a good definition of parameter sniffing. He summarized the benefits and performance hit of parameter sniffing, and stated he would show how to detect and tune for various sniffing scenarios. I wanted to hear the remainder, but Andy Warren was presenting at the same time…

Andy Warren – DBA 101: The Basics

I skipped over to Andy Warren’s (Blog | @sqlAndy) talk on DBA 101: The Basics. Andy is a great presenter who’s passion for education and SQL Server are obvious to anyone with a pulse.

From what I heard Steve Jones (Blog | @way0utwest) wrote this presentation. There were 25 people in the room with 27 seats. The number of people in the room are a testament to the popularity of introductory material. It’s a cool presentation to introduce people to SQL Server. Andy (and Steve) did a good job covering the objects of SQL Server: tables, views, stored procedures, and triggers. There were good questions from various attendees – evidence they were following and thinking about what they learned.

Introducing any topic in SQL Server in 60 minutes is tough. If you know someone brand new to SQL Server and databases in general, this is a good talk for them.

Julie Smith – Cool Tricks to Pull from your SSIS Hat

Meeting Julie Smith (Blog | @Datachix1) was a cool surprise for me. Julie is a great presenter with years of Business Inteliigence experience. Her presentation covered SSIS Expression Language and Variables. She did a good job with the “gotchas” of Variable scoping – accidentally creating a variable at a lesser scope than intended is a big-ee. She demonstrated the constraint options of the precedence constraint – which is a powerful and under-represented topic in many SSIS training sessions. I learned to use the Preview Pane in Windows Explorer!

I liked her presentation style and the material. Plus she provided some feedback on my SSIS Design Patterns talk that I will incorporate in future 60-minute versions of this talk.

Unfortunately, I needed to leave for the long trek back to Farmville before her session completed. I look forward to learning more cool SSIS tricks from Julie in the future!

Conclusion

SQL Saturday #48 was a huge success. The Columbia community responded to this awesome event by turning out in droves. I found the attendees of my sessions engaged – even right after lunch – and I received awesome questions throughout.

The organizers of the event are to be commended. They organizd an awesome event – from the Speaker Dinner through the After-Event party. About 90% of those in my sessions were attending their first SQL Saturday event.

:{> Andy