Yesterday I was fortunate to have attended SQL Saturday down in Englewood. For those that might not know SQL Saturday is a FREE one-day event with expert speakers that are all about SQL Server.
In attendance were several MVPs: Jason Strate, Chris Shaw, Glenn Berry, and Tim Mitchell (just to name a few).
I started off the day listening to a fab presentation on Extended Events by Jason Strate. Some takeaways about this session were:
1. If you’re running SQL 2008 you already have most of what you need already running
2. It’s usually a good practice to add a single event instead of several in one shot. This way if you need to drop one you don’t have to re-create all the others.
3. You can capture upwards of 250 events
4. SQL Load Generator is a nice tool to easily generate a test load for SQL Server.
After Jason’s great session I wandered over to learn from the DMV master Glenn Berry. He ran through the T-SQL/DMV code in his SQL 2008 Diagnostic and Information Queries. I am chomping at the bit to run this and audit some servers I have going at work.
Before lunch I decided to take in Jason Horner’s presentation on PowerShell. I have been using PowerShell very little and wanted to get an idea on how to bridge the gaps between using it for server admin tasks and SQL Server. Some takeaways here were:
1. You can invoke processes with the & (ampersand)
2. With v2 you can output to a WPF window
3. There are client components for SQL2k SP4+ and SQL2k5 SP2+ as well
4. You can automate table creation and drill into the SQL engine to edit items.
At lunch there were several giveaways and Steve Jones talked about life and career.
Attended three more session after lunch. The first was Glenn Berry talking about SQL Azure and all the caveats. He gave a great presentation but SQL Azure still seems to be lacking a bit in my opinion on what you can do with it (security, fine-tuning, etc).
Jen McCown of the MidnightDBAs gave the next presentation on T-SQL Codes Sins to a packed room. Jen hit home a couple of great points on documenting your code and keeping it clean. “Document as if you’re talking to the new guy”.
Lastly there was an interesting session on the SSIS API by MVP Tim Mitchell. As a C# programmer (as well as a DBA) this made sense and the practical applications of being able to create SSIS jobs on the fly have numerous possibilities.
Taking Mr. Denny Cherry’s advice I decided to go to the after-party for a bit and it was well worth it. I met some super smart and great people. The people at the Colorado SQL User group are awesome! The MVPs were very forthcoming with time and questions.
All in all I would put the event down as a great success for it’s first year. I absolutely can’t wait until next year?
Heck! Maybe I’ll even submit a topic.
You’re going to love this. It appears I didn’t look at the ALTER EVENT as close as I should. You can drop individuall events from a session without dropping the session. So I’m reconsidering my recommendation of one event or collection of events per session. There is a definite benefit to leaving a session active but dropping out events or adding events you are no longer interested in.
Awesome! I’m going to do a blog post soon about the target differences (bucketing, ring buffer, etc). I’ll have to read up on the ALTER EVENT more as well.
Thanks Jason!