This weekend is SQL Saturday #187 in Richmond, VA. Today’s a travel day for me, as I head out early because Red Gate Software is sponsoring a half day event tomorrow, Friday, where myself and Grant Fritchey (b | t) will be speaking. This is an experiment for us, and I’m hoping it goes well. If so, you might find us doing a number of these events around the country.
Today I travel, speaking on encryption at the Richmond SQL Server Users Group, then tomorrow at our Red Gate event, and Saturday at SQL Saturday. Then two days off, hanging with my brother, his wife, and my nephews in Maryland before coming back next week.
A busy few days. Four different talks, on four subjects. Fortunately I’ve been rehearsing this week.
If you register today, and attend one of the pre- or post-conference sessions, and there are some great ones in the SQL Server space, you’ll get a Surface RT Tablet. It’s a great tool to use for mobile work, taking notes at events, in meetings, or even walking around your office.
The tablet isn’t a reason to attend the conference, but it’s a nice bonus. And it will help you, since you’ll want to take lots of notes in the sessions. All of the speakers are experienced professionals, working with SQL Server and bringing a ton of experience to their talks. There are talks about new features and old ones, best practices, and practical advice.
In a little over a week, SQL Saturday #187 takes place in Richmond, VA. I’m looking forward to going back as I attended school not too far from there (Charlottesville), and even worked on the West side of Richmond for a time. My brother lives in MD and my mother in Virginia Beach, so it’s a good time for an extended weekend visiting family.
However I’m also extending my trip before the weekend. Red Gate Software is experimenting with a short learning seminar on Friday. After last year’s SQL in the City, large events with hundreds of people, we’re trying something new again this year. We have a free half day set of talks scheduled on Friday, from 1-5, given by Grant Fritchey and myself. We’ll each give two talks, with networking time in between. We are planning on covering four topics:
Core Monitoring
SQL Server Backup
Database Corruption
Indexing
It will be an interesting day as Grant and I have been working on our talks, trying to make them interesting to the attendees. We are linking the content to Red Gate tools, but don’t worry, these aren’t infomercials. We are delivering valuable information to help you in your job, whether you use Red Gate tools or not.
Afterwards we’ll have a short happy hour as well before we start prepping for the Saturday event.
You can register today, and there are still a few slots left, but this will be a small event, so my apologies if you can’t get in.
Saturday is the SQL Saturday event at the University of Richmond campus. There’s a great lineup of speakers from the Virginia area and beyond for you. If you can come, it’s a free day of SQL Server information and training with tons of networking opportunities.
Recently I was invited to speak at the Rocky Mountain Oracle Training Days. It was part of some cross platform talks that have happened in Denver, with some Oracle professionals coming to our last SQL Saturday in Denver. I was happy to oblige, and ended up spending part of two days at the small conference. I was a little nervous beforehand, unsure of how SQL Server talks might be received at an Oracle event. There’s a fair amount of animosity between the companies and that seems to bleed over to the professionals working on these platforms. I’ve made my share of Oracle jokes in the past, though all in fun.
It was interesting to sit and talk with some of the Oracle DBAs attending. For the most part, they have the same problems as SQL Server DBAs, and seem to approach things in a similar manner in terms of indexing, tuning SQL and more. They have the same types of problems, with similar solutions, though the details are different. And, of course, the Oracle solutions tend to be more expensive. I did hear about one thing that I wish was a part of SQL Server: mirroring of log files. I haven’t had many issues with log files, but as databases get more critical, this seems like an enhancement to SQL Server that would make sense.
One of the interesting things I did hear about was from a cross platform DBA who didn’t have a unified directory services structure and struggled with the SQL Server authentication when clients came from non-Windows systems. This person loved the integration of the Microsoft stack, but moving outside of their technology resulted in lots of challenges. This is one of the areas where I think Microsoft has fallen down in the past, in not supporting a variety of clients well. Even today there are issues when you leave the IE browser in some applications.
It was a good conference, with so many people facing the same types of concerns over limited resources, technology changes, and job security. Most of the attendees just want to learn more, get better at their jobs, and stay employed. I’m glad I had the chance to attend, and hope I get to go back next year.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
Voice of the DBA 