I’m proud to announce the return of Grant Fritchey to SQL Cruise!  Grant will be joining us courtesy of our Honeymoon Suite-level sponsor, Red Gate Software.  Thanks to Grant and Red Gate Software SQL Cruise will finally make its first foray into the CLOUD as well.  Yep, Grant will bring talks about SQL Azure aboard the big blue Caribbean Sea in January 2014.  For those of you who are not familiar with Grant’s work, first allow me to introduce you to the concept of daylight – it is something that rock you crawled out from under didn’t offer.

All joking aside, Grant brings over 20 years of experience to SQL Cruise.  He’s experienced the industry from both the Development and Administration angles and has been a Product Evangelist with Red Gate Software as a Product Evangelist for the past four years. Grant is a fixture on the SQL Server conference circuit and is one of the founding officers of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group (SNESSUG). Grant is an active participant in the SQL Server Central and AskSQLServerCentral discussion forums. He writes articles for SQL Server Central and Simple-Talk. Grant is the author of the books “SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Distilled” and “SQL Server Execution Plans.” He is co-author on the books “SQL Server Team-Based Development,” “SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2,” and “Beginning SQL Server 2012 Administration.” Grant’s nickname is “The Scary DBA”, but it’s all a ruse.  He’s one of the nicest, and most-generous individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure meeting.

Aboard SQL Cruise 2014 Grant will be speaking on the following topics:

Azure:  What Is It and How Do I Get Started With It?

This session introduces you to Microsoft’s extensive set of tools built in and around Azure. We focus immediately on talking about the data storage and management aspects of the tool set. Your learning includes what Microsoft has to offer you in terms of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. We cover how to set up your own platforms for testing and developing on this new tool set in order to give you the ability to being to experiment with it in your own environment.

Statistics and Query Optimization

There are any number of tricks and traps around getting the query optimizer to provide you with an optimal execution plan that gets you your data quickly and efficiently. But, at the end of the day, the principal driving factor of the optimizer, and therefore of your queries, are the statistics that define your data. This session teaches you how those statistics are put together and maintained by SQL Server. Different types of maintenance results in different levels of accuracy within statistics so we detail what the structures and information looks like after this maintenance. Your understanding of how the optimizer works with statistics will better enable you to understand why you’re getting the performance and types of execution plans that you are getting. Understanding enables you to write better t-sql statements and deal with performance problems such as bad parameter sniffing.

Best Practices for Database Deployment

The easiest part of any deployment is running the deployment script on production. But what have you done to prepare that script for production? Was the script tested? Is the script tightly coupled with the application code?  The difference between a successful deployment and a failed or problematic deployment is all the preparation work you’ve done to ensure that you’re deploying the right script, the right way to your production environment. This session will explore best practices that you can implement to ensure that your deployments are as successful as they can be.

Since this is a SQL Cruise however, it’s not just about the classroom time with Grant.  All of our Technical Leaders are involved in our “Office Hours” where we meet as a group to discuss more details of what was delivered in the classroom sessions as well as those issues and conundrums we’re facing “back in the office.”  Just think, you’re getting free time with Leaders in the SQL Server industry to pose your questions and work out solutions!  You’re also getting the group-think solutions from your peers who may have different ideas on resolving your taxing issues that have seemed unsolvable alone.  Grant alone brings his 20 years of experience aboard.  The remainder of our Technical Leads for 2014 push the combined years of experience up and over the 50-year mark!  For more details on the other Technical Leads please visit our 2014 Technical Leaders page.  For more information on all the presentations being delivered on the next SQL Cruise please visit our 2014 Training page.