SQL Cruise 2013 Workshops

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The Miami SQL Cruise, January 2013 Workshop Lineup

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Do you want to get more SQL Server training with a side of fun, networking, and rejuvenation? Then join us in 2013 for SQL Cruise 2013!

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Tim Ford

Metadata for Mega Success

What is a SQL Cruise without a bit of diving? Tim dives deep into the data that exists in each of your SQL Server instances that gives you information about he health, performance, and availability of resources for feeding your hungry servers and their hungrier consumers – your customers. Dynamic Management Objects, catalog views, master, msdb, tempdb… no stone goes unturned when it comes to finding out just what is going on inside of SQL Server.

The Productivity Trap

Welcome to the new way of doing things. The 21st century economy is all about doing more with fewer resources and this means that today’s SQL Server DBA needs to be more productive. Consistently working 60 hours a week is one way of doing this; but it’s definitely not the right way. It all comes down to working more efficiently, creating processes that are re-usable, and setting priorities. In this discussion-based workshop Tim will provide his lessons learned as an Enterprise DBA for a major healthcare system for the last 13 years and will be drawing the entire group into sharing their success stories as well as digging into the pain points of today’s busy SQL Server Professional in order to come up with individualized solutions for the attendees.

 

Allen White

PowerShell 101 for the SQL Server DBA

The more you have to manage, the more likely you’ll want to automate your processes. PowerShell is the scripting language that will make you truly effective at managing lots of servers. But it’s more than just a scripting language. It’s an interactive shell that stores data for you and allows you to implement ad-hoc solutions quickly and easily. Within the PowerShell environment you can easily manage both SQL Server instances and the Windows servers themselves, giving you a ‘best of both worlds’ environment that puts you in control. This session will introduce you to PowerShell and show you how to use it to manage SQL Server across many instances.

Maintain SQL Server System and Performance Data with PowerShell

Maintaining a solid set of information about our servers and their performance is critical when issues arise, and often help us see a problem before it occurs. Building a baseline of performance metrics allows us to know when something is wrong and help us to track it down and fix the problem. This session will walk you through a series of PowerShell scripts you can schedule which will capture the most important data and a set of reports to show you how to use that data to keep your server running smoothly.

 

Kevin Kline

Title: SQL Server Internals and Architecture

Let’s face it. You can effectively do many IT jobs related to SQL Server without knowing the internals of how SQL Server works. Many great developers, DBAs, and designers get their day-to-day work completed on time and with reasonable quality while never really knowing what’s happening behind the scenes. But if you want to take your skills to the next level, it’s critical to know SQL Server’s internal processes and architecture. This session will answer questions like:

• What’s different about 32- and 64-bit systems?
• What are the various areas of memory inside of SQL Server?
• How are queries handled behind the scenes?
• What does SQL Server do with procedural code, like functions, procedures, and triggers?
• What happens during checkpoints? Lazywrites?
• How are IOs handled with regards to transaction logs and database?
• What happens when transaction logs and databases grow or shrinks?

This fast paced session will take you through many aspects of the internal operations of SQL Server and, for those topics we don’t cover, will point you to resources where you can get more information.

Leadership: Influence v. Authority

Ever wanted to convince the boss try something new, but didn’t know where to start? Ever tried lead your peers only to fail to achieve your goals? This session teaches you the eight techniques of influencing IT professionals, so that you can innovate and achieve change in your organization.

1. Learn about the fundamental difference between influence and authority and how you can achieve a high degree of influence without explicit authority.
2. Learn the eight techniques of influencing IT professionals, when to apply them, and how to best use them.
3. Discover the communication and procedural techniques that ensure your ideas get a hearing by bosses and peers, and how to best win support for them.

Goal 1: Learn about the fundamental difference between influence and authority and how you can achieve a high degree of influence without explicit authority.

Goal 2: Learn the eight techniques of influencing IT professionals, when to apply them, and how to best use them.

Goal 3: Discover the communication and procedural techniques that ensure your ideas get a hearing by bosses and peers, and how to best win support for those ideas.

 

Sean McCown

Become an Enterprise DBA – Parts One and Two – (2 sessions – 2 hours each)

There’s a real and quantifiable difference between a regular DBA and the leader of an enterprise. Guiding the database effort of a huge enterprise takes business acumen, experience, problem solving, street-smarts, and above all… vision. And quite often regular DBAs are thrown into big enterprises without knowing what it takes to get the job done. In fact, most DBAs get thrown into this situation without even a hint that there’s a difference. And while they do the best they can, they tend to do more harm than good which is why many companies have such a hard time managing their data. What you need is to change your tactic when dealing with large numbers of servers.

The biggest piece of missing training in databases is enterprise training. DBAs are often taught syntax and usage of features, but they’re never taught how to actually use them to plan an enterprise, run an enterprise, or cope with changing requirements, manage difficult users or groups, manage growth, manage vendors, etc. There are so many more requirements to running an enterprise than just knowing how the individual features work. There are disk and backup requirements, auditing requests, end-user reporting, paranoid VPs, and much more. And there’s no way to gain this type of business sense on your own. You have to learn from seasoned pros who have been there many times over.

If you manage an enterprise or would like to then you can’t afford to miss this session. No other training exists to take you from being a regular DBA to running and leading an enterprise database effort. And don’t fool yourself; There is a real difference. Get ready to take your skills and your career to the next level.

 

Ryan Adams

Manage Your Shop with CMS and Policy Based Management

In this presentation we talk about Central Management Server and how it can help you manage a disperse environment. We will also cover what Policy Based Management is and how you can leverage its power to better manage your environment. With PBM we’ll see what it can and cannot do to help you enforce standards in your enterprise. We will cover and demonstrate PBM for the beginner from creating and evaluating policies to receiving alerts on policy violations.

How Active Directory Affects SQL Server

There are many things that can go wrong with SQL server, and a lot of times they come from outside influencers. Active Directory is one of the largest influencers that can have many interesting and unexpected issues that are not apparent. We’ll discuss how the location of your server in AD is important, how security can be compromised, AD DNS configuration, and of course Kerberos. By the end of the session you’ll have a check list of things to discuss with your domain administrator when you return to work. This includes the biggest perpetrator, Group Policy Objects.

 

Neil Hambly

SQL Server 2012 Memory Management

SQL Server 2012 brings a wide range of changes, including a key change in how SQL Server memory is managed. Earlier releases of SQL Server have two memory managers, which have now been merged into one. And that’s just the beginning of the changes for SQL Server memory.  This session will dive into SQL Server 2012’s new memory architecture. We’ll see how to diagnose memory performance issues and gain insight into memory pressure issues. We’ll also cover the settings to adjust memory configuration levels and their impact.

This session is packed with Demo’s; in fact more than half this session is spent demonstrating so as to provide great opportunities to delve deep into memory clerks and SQLOS and use Resource governor and other techniques to ensure good memory utilization.  Time is dedicated to discuss real-world experiences of consolidating multiple SQL Systems onto new equipment, how to configure servers with large amounts of RAM (512GB).  The session concludes with discussions on LPIM, large pages and memory trace flags.

 

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Alaska SQL Cruise, May 2013 Workshop Lineup

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Do you want to get more SQL Server training with a side of fun, networking, and rejuvenation? Then join us in 2013 for SQL Cruise 2013!

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Buck Woody

Of Communication and Career

Buck Woody brings a great deal of unique experience back to SQL Cruise in 2013. Be it the military, NASA, or Microsoft he has decades of exposure to some of the most intense and demanding environments for technical professionals. Buck is known as a great facilitator for discussions that span the areas of technical topics and the professional development angle that SQL Cruise also places equal weight upon and is the behind-the-scenes Confidant and Guru to many leaders in the SQL Community. In these two workshops Buck will work with each attendee to identify their strengths and weaknesses and work to build upon those things each student is good at doing. Building on your strengths is multiplicative; improving your weaknesses is simply additive.

 

Tim Ford

Metadata for Mega Success

What is a SQL Cruise without a bit of diving? Tim dives deep into the data that exists in each of your SQL Server instances that gives you information about he health, performance, and availability of resources for feeding your hungry servers and their hungrier consumers – your customers. Dynamic Management Objects, catalog views, master, msdb, tempdb… no stone goes unturned when it comes to finding out just what is going on inside of SQL Server.

The Productivity Trap

Welcome to the new way of doing things. The 21st century economy is all about doing more with fewer resources and this means that today’s SQL Server DBA needs to be more productive. Consistently working 60 hours a week is one way of doing this; but it’s definitely not the right way. It all comes down to working more efficiently, creating processes that are re-usable, and setting priorities. In this discussion-based workshop Tim will provide his lessons learned as an Enterprise DBA for a major healthcare system for the last 13 years and will be drawing the entire group into sharing their success stories as well as digging into the pain points of today’s busy SQL Server Professional in order to come up with individualized solutions for the attendees.

 

Stacia Misner

Dimensional Modeling Demystified

Do you have a business intelligence project in your future, but are confused by the following terms: star schema, facts and factless facts, surrogate keys, fast or slowly changing dimensions, junk dimensions, and degenerate dimensions? If you’ve spent your career designing data models for OLTP systems, it can be confusing to take a completely different approach to support business intelligence projects. Whether you need to design models for Analysis Services in multidimensional or tabular mode, for PowerPivot, or even for a traditional data warehouse, a solid understanding of multidimensional techniques is essential to produce a model that helps users to effectively analyze data. In this session, we’ll start with the basics of dimensional modeling, and then show to apply these concepts to specific situations that you are likely to encounter.

Introduction to Business Intelligence

Many people with years of experience with SQL Server have never installed or explored the business intelligence components that are included with their SQL Server license. Just because you haven’t been asked to work on a BI project yet doesn’t mean you won’t get asked in the future! It’s time to get a jumpstart on your SQL Server BI skills. In this session, you’ll learn important guidelines for installing Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. You’ll also learn about the role that each of these components plays in the overall architecture of a BI solution, and become familiar with key terms and concepts relevant to the development of a BI solution. You’ll also see working examples of each component in action so that you can understand how data stored in a SQL Server database gets transformed into information that’s useful for decision-makers.

 

Aaron Bertrand

Bad Habits and Best Practices

In this session we will go over several bad habits that are quite pervasive in the SQL Server community, and show with demos and samples why these habits can be bad.

We’ll also illustrate some good habits that are less common and why they should be adopted.

The goal is to have every user in the room walk away with immediately actionable knowledge to improve their existing stored procedures, raise their overall T-SQL skill, and change the way they think about writing code.

Practical SQL Server 2012

In this session we will explore several of the new SQL Server 2012 features in depth, using demos and code rather than informational slides. The topics we will cover include Contained Databases, Sequences, Transact-SQL enhancements, SqlLocalDB, Windowing functions and Columnstore indexes. With a small audience I will cater to the majority for flexibility – we can deep dive on 3 or 4 topics, or medium dive on all of them.