Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

SQL in the City – London 2012
It’s a wrap. Two days of SQL in the City are complete, and I’m back at home, almost feeling normal. I prefer short trips to the UK, but this one was extra hard since it was a conference schedule. For me that’s up at 6:30 to run and usually not getting back to my room until 10:00pm. Long days.

The event was great. If you haven’t been, or wonder what it’s about, SQL in the City is a day of training from Red Gate Software. We do have a track that talks about how to use our tools, but we have two tracks that are mostly technical information. Brad, Grant, and I do mention Red Gate tools, but we aren’t really there to focus on the tools. We’re there to talk about technical subjects and ideas.

Think SQL Saturday, but a bit more “posh” and sponsored by Red Gate Software. Not this posh:

This posh:

Once again this year the event was held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. We had a tremendous number of people sign up, so we added a day and ran the same one day conference for two days. Friday was packed, with over 400 people coming to learn a few things about SQL Server.

A note for the US: We’re bringing this event to the US in September and October, touring 5 cities in two weeks. We’ll also be in Seattle on the Monday before the PASS Summit.

A note to the UK and Europe: Let us know if you enjoyed it, missed it, and want us to come next near. I’d like to do more of these if there is a demand.

One of our two joint-CEOs, Simon Galbraith, opened the event, giving a short keynote on building software. For those of you used to long-winded, marketing filled keynotes, take note. This was 10 minutes, about 10 slides, 3 laughs from the audience, and that’s it.

Then it was time to learn. I watched a session from two Red Gate employees, Dave Atkinson and David Simner, on Continuous Integration (CI). If you aren’t using CI in your software process, you should. They showed how this process works, and how it has helped them build software quicker, and more bug-free. A few of the Red Gate tools make this easier, but there are many ways to do it.

I’ve never used CI before since the last time I developed software in a team was almost a decade ago. I realize now that I was really missing something. There aren’t a lot of cool, new things that I think have come through our industry, but this is one of them. Read the white paper we have, and start learning more about Continuous Integration.

There were a number of other talks on database maintenance, writing T-SQL, and more. I did two, one on preparing for disasters and thinking about things ahead of time and one on Contained Databases and AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012. Grant talked about Sandbox development and monitoring your servers with the ring buffer (an amusing talk with movie photo quizzes included).

This was a little more of a formal event than most SQL Saturdays. We recorded the event, and while the videos will only be available to attendees for the next few months, that does mean that if you missed a session, you can watch it.

We also had a very hard working staff, including product managers

developers

and quite a few people from all parts of the company.

Even more importantly, we had free refreshments at the end of the day. I remember because I was told more than a few times to mention this before my talks. Our 2012 Red Gate brew of Select Star beer (along with wine and soft drinks) was handed out at the end of the day.

We also had a nice happy hour with a few prizes. A SQL Toolbelt from Red Gate first, and then a ticket to the PASS Summit 2012. That one had quite a few people hurriedly filling out their evaluation forms.

This was a great time, and though it was hard and long for me to speak two days in a row, I enjoyed the trip. I got to run through Hyde Park (haven’t done that in 25 years) and Regents Park (never done that), and had the chance to meet a lot of people from the SQLServerCentral community, including a few I’ve corresponded with for years.

The US tour starts in September. The cities and dates are:
- New York City – Sept 28
- Austin – Oct 1
- San Francisco – Oct 3
- Chicago – Oct 5
- Boston – Oct 8
- Seattle – Nov 5
I’ll be at all of them, along with a crew from Red Gate and a few guest speakers from the local areas.

This is a great chance for free training, one that we think is worth a day of your time. Sign up today if you’ll be near one of the events, and I look forward to shaking hands with you if you attend.
July 16, 2012
Time Zones

Why don’t we have a function like the one in this article to convert from time zone to time zone? Seems like something SQL Server should have added awhile ago.

July 10, 2012
Back Across the Pond

This coming weekend is SQL in the City – London 2012. Friday, July 13, and Saturday, July 14, I’ll be at One Wimpole Street in London. This is the Royal Society of Medicine, a fantastic venue for events near Oxford Circus. I’m looking forward to the event and the venue.

This is the first stop in 2012 for our SQL in the City tour. These are the only two days in Europe and then we come back to the US with a 5 city, 11 day tour of the US. I’m looking forward to the events, but not the travel. It’s a lot of flights in a short time, and quite a few hotels. Fortunately I’ve consolidated down to one carry on bag and a backpack for travel, so I should be in and out of airports quickly.

This week I fly overnight on Wednesday to arrive in London and recover on Thursday before the Friday and Saturday events. Then I’m back home on Sunday, just in time to start another week of work. A quick trip, and likely not much sightseeing for me, but if you’re up early, you might find me running down Oxford Street in the mornings.

I’ll be delivering two sessions in London. They are both new and while I’ll link them to a few of the Red Gate tools, these aren’t sessions built around our products. These are sessions that talk about the issues of Disaster Recovery and Contained Databases.

If you’re coming to one of the London events, please feel free to grab me and shake my hand. I’ll be the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and cowboy hat

July 9, 2012
The Standing Desk – In the Light

It’s been almost a month since I started the Standing Desk experiment. My first setup was down in the basement, since that was the desk that fit my monitor stand. In the middle I had a week of vacation, where I didn’t do much standing at the desk, though I did have my laptop on the old desk.

This was the setup upstairs

That has now been replaced with this:

I spent a portion of the Fourth of July holiday moving my old desk downstairs, and then bringing the smaller one up stairs, setting up all the monitors again. A cleaned things up and minimized the setup, and learned a few things.

First, put the bigger, nicer monitors on top. I had them reversed in the basement, which wasn’t great. The smaller ones have less stuff on them, which isn’t great when I primarily use the top two for work (browsing, editing, email).

As you can see, the setup isn’t a lot different, but I did move a few of the podcast items off and I have a touch more space.

It’s also better to have the start bar on the top screen for me. I can more easily see the programs running without leaning over. Plus it’s cool to see the programs shoot out from the bottom and maximize.

In the last few weeks I’ve also learned the shoes matter. At first I thought it was because of the basement floor, but I found that the padding helps. I’ll look around for floor mats to help up here and see if that makes a difference.

The books and boxes work, but they aren’t great, and I’d like more of a surface at keyboard level for my coffee, water, etc. Whether I build or buy something is up for debate. I’d like to build something, but it’s time. I’m pressed a bit and if I can find something cheap, I might grab it.

Plus this gives me an excuse to hit the new IKEA store in Denver

July 5, 2012