Voice of the DBA

Category: Presentations

  • SQL in the City This Fall

    We’ve got a couple of large SQL in the City events coming this fall.  I’m speaking at both, which I think means my boss is happy with my work for Red Gate Software. At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself.
     
    In a little over a week I’ll be in both London and Seattle, delivering a variety of sessions on DBA and development topics. I start the day off with a session for the DBAs with Avoiding a DBA’s worst days with monitoring. This is based on The DBA Team’s 5 Worst Days in a DBA’s Life where we look at some of the situations you can avoid by keeping an eye on your environment. I then cover Version control and CI Fundamentals for databases, looking at how you can get your database code in a VCS and build a Continuous Integration (CI) process. I’ll also cover testing, using the free tSQLt framework to write some tests against your databases.
     
    It’s a quick set of sessions for me, but I’ll be around all day to talk to you about your database delivery, deployment, development, or administration issues. Or just shake your hand if you’d like.
     
    I fly to London for our event on Fri, Oct 24 and then will be in Seattle on Nov 3 for the second stop on the tour. A lot of travel for me, but I’m sure it’s an easier commute for most of you.  I hope you’ll join us and come learn a bit more about SQL Server than you might know today.

  • Get Testing with tSQLt

    tSQLt is a testing framework that is designed to help you write repeatable, isolated tests against your database code. In this session we will briefly examine the goals of testing, where it can be used in an automated deployment pipeline, and introduce you to the tSQLt framework. We’ll show you how to design and write tests to enforce standards, check calculations and other DML operations as well as check exception handling. You will see how a real world refactoring task can be tested in a repeatable manner. Learn how you can incrementally write tests that help you build higher quality code and minimize the introduction of errors against your existing objects.

    We will examine a variety of tests, including

    • Checking table metadata
    • Checking function calculation
    • Isolating a procedure test from an embedded function
    • Checking for error handling

    PowerPoint slides:

    Code: GetTestingtSQLt.zip

    Presentations:

  • Creating Your First Technical Speaking Opportunity

    Abstract:

    This session will cover the basics of choosing a topic, writing an abstract, building a slide deck, and finding an opportunity to deliver your presentation. This is a short introduction to beginning to speak about technical topics.

    Length: 30 minutes

    Slides: FirstSpeakingOpportunity.pptx

    Sample Blank PPTX: BlankSample.PPTX

  • High Performance Encryption

    It is becoming more and more important to protect your data from anyone that should not access it, including the DBA. Learn how you can use column level encryption as well as TDE to protect your data files, with minimal performance impact to your SQL Server instance.

    This session will look at securing data

    • in flight
    • at rest
    • inside the database

    We do this with

    • IPSec/SSL Communications
    • Transparent Data Encryption
    • Partial Hash Bucket values with symmetric encryption.

    Slides:

    Code: