SQLSaturday #116… Bangalore. ~ A note on my learning and experience.

SQLSaturday #116 is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server.

7th January 2012 at the tick of 0900Hrs IST , the registration process begins, with @kamleshrao and @skganguly. @vinodk_sql  was guiding us on the same. We saw the waitlisted candidates were waiting eagerly for a chance to witness the mega event. They made it and also the first twenty of them got some goodies from Vinod for there interest to learn and share.

One SQL Server Clinic, Two Tracks, Nine Speaker, Ten sessions, free books, Hundreds of prizes, Hundreds of tweets,  Two Hundred people, Thousand GB of information and super fun ….all these were candidate keys for Twitter handle for this great event. But as it was decided the primary key was #sqlsat116.

After a welcome note on both the tracks (one in Signature Building and other in Embassy of Microsoft), the first session was kick started by Lohith (@kashyapa ) on SQL Server Dev Tools -  Code Name Juneau and on the other track on BI in Denali by Karan Gulati.

I was attending the developer track and here goes some of the learning from the event.

Lohith took us through his mind-blowing presentation (which he does every time with an animated touch to the slide transition) and was informing us about the ease of use on JUNEAU. Every time he was changing his slide…a WOW moment was coming into the picture. He told us we as a application developer can carry out all our database design work for any SQL Server platform within Visual Studio. At one point of time we heard a sound “Ohhhhhhhhh”, when he just declared that “You can debug your Store Proc in JUNEAU”  which was like a relaxed moment for many of us.

Avoid Errors On Errors by Rick Morelan ~ “Aap sab kese hain????”…”Aati kya khandala”…Rick started with a lovely introduction and he presented some of the topics from his book (Joes2Pros series) to handle error. Scope Abortion, Batch termination, Error, Information, XACT Abort On are some of the keywords to learn to know about errors in SQL server. All of we are familiar to the below line, but Rick gave us a close view to the Error Level.

Server: Msg 547, Level 16, State 1, Procedure demo, Line 4

On his second session on Basic performance Tips and Gotchas , Rick showed some really cool examples on Indexes, Fill Factors and also he informed that “Updates can cause Page split too” and “seeking is faster than scan”. His dramatic expression and presentation makes him a great speaker.

SQL Server Performance Tricks and Tips by Pinal Dave ~ The much awaited speaker for the day, started firing question to the audience. Index-harmful or helpful? A good debate on Indexes between Pinal and audience left us with a clear idea on how to use Clustered and Non-Clustered indexes. NULL – Which you can not figure out says Pinal. The entire hall was laughing out loud when different answers were coming out from audience and Pinal was using his sense of humor to his level best. SQL server engine knows what to do , if required provide some hints. The next SQL server will have some interesting things like COLUMN STORE INDEX. He gave away couple of goodies to those who answered his questions or asked him a difficult one.

Security with SQL Server -  Discovering Pitfalls by Vinod Kumar ~ The mastermind behind the first such event in India, who took care of everything from logistics to arranging gifts and guiding all the audience on different notes of SQL. A down to earth person..Vinod started his session with a quick introduction and started asking about the security features of 2008. After getting the answers from the audience he described that concepts briefly. Also he told about Authentication and authorization with a live demo of everything on SQL Server. One of his question goes like this….

What is the permission checks done with SQL Server for the sysadmin account?

He gave some quick tips on SQL Server security and warned everyone not use the SA user for any application logins.

Keeping Database always Available (Always On Unplugged by Balmukund Lakhani ~ @blakhani a Technical Lead from Microsoft SQL Server Support Team, Bangalore showed us the real “Katrina” and took us through a full practical session on creating cluster and demonstrated the Always On feature. This feature enhances the capabilities of Database Mirroring and ensure availability of application databases. He took a challenge of creating the cluster in 2 minutes and he did it. Only one mirror per database is possible said Lakhani. Also he displayed the use of automate deployment using AlwaysOn PowerShell cmdlets which provides a powerful scripting option.

On the other track Kolaveri Di was a super hit and all the session were presented by Karan Gulati, Amit Banerjee, Pranab Mazumdar and Tejas Shah. The session covered are BI in Denali, Demystifying SQL Server Memory Dumps, A Whirlwind Tour of Contained Databases and a real clinic on SQL Server.

Web Links.

http://www.sqlsaturday.com/116/schedule.aspx

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/

http://www.extremeexperts.com/General/Home/Homepage.aspx

http://www.kashyapas.com/

http://joes2pros.com/

http://sqlserver-help.com/

http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/

http://www.telerik.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg427686

Twitter

#sqlsat116

Thank you all for such a eventful session and request others to add there notes if I have missed out anything.

My next set of articles will be on the basic algorithms and programs that we have studied during our High School or College days(kind of back to basics). I will be using C# to write the code and hopefully “A program a day” will be my tag line. Till then “Keep Sharing”.

 

If you want to go fast, go alone.If you want to go far, go together. ~ Proverb