Well, it’s Monday morning and back to the DBA salt mines! 

Now that SQLSaturday #39 is all but a joyful memory, I wanted to share some highlights at this spectacular event.  It was a beautiful sunny day in NYC, with lots of content, great food and wonderful prizes!!  We had 250+ people in attendance, who decided to make their Saturday a day of fun, learning and networking.  Everything went off without a hitch!  I ran into some friends, former colleagues, and met with our favorite SQL MVP’s, vendors and volunteers.  Not only did I man the Pearl Knowledge Solutions sponsor table, I actually had the privilege to break away and catch some cool sql sessions!  It started out with the KeyNote session and continued with Pragmatic Works’ President and SQL MVP Adam Jorgenson, with his intelligent presentation of “Zero to Cube in 60 Minutes” where he took us through building SSAS projects and quick start to building a cube.  Packed with gotchas, humor and valuable live demos, we got an in-depth intro to creating our data source views, fact tables, dimensions, and build our cube!

Another awesome session was by SQL MVP and PASS’s own Grant Fritchey, aka the Scary DBA (although I wasn’t too scared :-), who gave us great insight and real-world examples into query performance and optimization.  His presentation, entitled, “More Unnecessary Query Tuning”, was exactly what we needed, and indeed a necessary function into optimizing your slow queries.  I’ve never seen so much execution plans at one session, but he really showed us step-by-step on what to avoid (think cursors), and best practices to making your queries hum.  One take away, is to avoid queries that give us RBAR, “row by agonizing row” – sounds like a condition akin to GERD .  Excellent delivery, excellent presentation! 

Finally, I was able to catch Thomas LaRock’s (aka SQLRockstar) presentation on SQL Server 2008’s Audit features.  I enjoyed the historical stroll down the inception of the “AUDIT”, from the industrial revolution, to SQL 2008.  Professor LaRock moved us through time to help us leverage SQL 2008’s built-in auditing features, to make all our IT database audit’s less painful, and actually fun!

I also enjoyed the ad-hoc comments and conversations going back and forth at the sessions, with Adam, Thomas, Andy and Grant.  They each added humor and value to each other’s presentations!

There were more excellent sessions going on with great Speakers, like Andy Leonard, Derek Comingore, Kevin Goff, Matt Can Horn. Rehak Roman, Scott Weinstein, Don Demsak (Mr. SQLDiva – hope he doesn’t mind the reference :-), Andrew Brust, Slava Kokaev, Matt Larson, et al (Think I got all of them)

I was pleased to be next to Pragmatic Works and Setfocus, and the traffic was amazing!   I chatted heavily with volunteer and SQL Server MVP Sugeshkumar Rajendran, aka, Sugesh, and glad “THE MAK”, who was simply an attendee, with his lovely wife, stopped by to say hello. 

Indeed, SQLSaturday was a great success, and we owe it all to Melissa, aka SQLDiva, her fantastic volunteers (I will list their names on my follow-up) , the sponsors and the awesome speakers and their cool presentations. Met many folks, vendors, and colleagues.

Congratulations to Uday Bhoopalam & Yugandar R. Kavuda, the winners of SQLCentric licenses, and Richard Flandera winner of SafePeak std. edition. Will contact you soon to claim prizes #sqlsat39

At the Pearl Knowledge Solutions, sponsor table, SQLCentric’s Live SQLOS Performance Dashboard and SafePeak, the only plug and play result-set caching software, guaranteed to immediately resolve performance bottlenecks and reduce latency of repetitive queries, was on display.  More on this coming soon.

If you were there, please feel free to send me your comments and questions , rsp05@pearlknows.com, and join us on our LinkedIN group DBA.Connect.   If you haven't attended a SQLSaturday, visit the web-site, and get to one in your vicinity.  SQLSaturday.com  TTFN