Voice of the DBA

Tag: Dev Connections

  • Come to IT/Dev Connections–July Sale

    You can register for IT/Dev Connections in October and save this weekend with the July Sale. Use code: JULYSALE.

    I’ll be speaking, though I’m not sure which sessions will be chosen. This year the conference is going to be on Oct 10-13 in Las Vegas at the Aria, which is a great hotel and centrally located on the strip. It’s also got great conference wi-fi, which is still amazing to me.

    The event is a great way to get exposure to a bunch of technologies, with Visual Studio, SQL Server, ASP.NET, C#, Azure, Exchange, and more being covered. I find myself taking advantage of the time to get some sessions in on non-SQL Server topics, learning things I might not otherwise get exposure to. The All Access pass also allows you to get online access to sessions and take a pre-con.

    If you’re looking for some intense learning, and you wear a lot of hats, check out IT/DevConnections as a possible way to learn a few things this fall.

  • Window Functions at IT/DevConnections

    I’m honored to have been chosen to present again at the IT/DevConnections conference this September in Las Vegas. It’s being held once again at Aria, which so far has been the only conference center I’ve seen that handled the bandwidth needs of a tech conference.

    I’ve got a few sessions, but one is on windowing queries in SQL Server. It’s an intermediate T-SQL session, looking to get you started in using Window functions in your code. It’s good if you’ve never used them, and I expect I’ll get some developers at this session, perhaps more than DBAs.

    If you’re looking for advanced usage, this is the wrong place. I’m not covering complex scenarios. I’m just trying to get you started.

    If you can get your boss to invest in your career, this is a good conference to attend, especially if you wear multiple hats or are responsible for multiple roles. You can get the chance to see an amazing set of sessions from some of the best people working in technology. You can learn about SQL Server, Visual Studio, SharePoint, ASP.NET, C#, Powershell, Azure, Windows Server, and more.

    The event is in Las Vegas, which is always fun for me. I don’t gamble, but I can take a night and see a show, which is always fun. If you want to come out for a few days, Hoover Dam is nearby, some great hiking outside of town, and of course, lots of music at various venues.

    It will be a good time, and I hope to see some of you there.

  • Back from DevConnections

    I spent a few days at DevConnections this week and really enjoyed the conference. The location was Aria in Las Vegas, where I’ve never been, but it was a new, really nice hotel and there was one amazing thing:

    The wi-fi worked.

    Not on and off, pretty much the entire time I was sitting in sessions, I had access from my devices. I think that was the first time this worked for me at a conference. Congrats to DevConnections and Aria.

    The conference itself was short for me, with too many other commitments for presentations and talks, I had to cut short my time there. Tues afternoon – Thur morning, which mean I saw a couple talks on Tues, only one on Wed, and gave two Wed.

    That’s disappointing. There were other things I wanted to see, and I wish I had the chance to do more. I’ll be looking to schedule less trips next year as more and more I am finding myself picking up things from really interesting sessions.

    One of the great things about DevConnections is that I can get a variety of knowledge from the event. I watched a session on Azure diagnostics, as I’m curious how to actually track the performance and issues of your application. I still hope to port some (or all) of SQLServerCentral to Azure, so understanding the telemetry is something I’d like to have.

    From there, I went to an interesting logical query processing talk from Itzik Ben-Gan, which I really enjoyed.  If you get the chance to see Mr. Ben-Gan talk, you should take it.

    That’s hard to do at many events, where we often have the focus on one technology. There’s nothing wrong with that, and we have some amazing events in the SQL Server community. However there are times that I want to learn a bit more about development, Sharepoint, Azure, or something else. DevConnections gives you the chance to do so, as does DevIntersection/SQLIntersection (coming in November).

    If you wear multiple hats, think about coming to one of these conferences in the future.

  • DevConnections–High Performance Encryption

    The talk page is updated, but in case you attended my talk, the downloads are here:

    Slides: EncryptionPerformance.pptx

    Code: EncryptionPerformance.zip

    There are also a few great questions in the talk. One that I certainly need an answer to is how do clients deal with the change of SSL certificates in communications. If someone knows send me a note.

    For those of you that attended, the Asymmetric Encryption query was still running at 24 minutes when I killed it.