Voice of the DBA

Tag: webinar

  • SQLServerCentral Webinar #15

    Once again, I’m the moderator for a webinar coming up at the end of the month, on Jan 31, 2012. It starts at 11am EST, and features Brad McGehee (blog | @BradMcGehee and Grant Fritchey (blog | @gfritchey)talking about DBA administrative tasks.

    Come register and save the date if you want a little basic DBA admin knowledge from some experts. It should be an informative hour for you, and this webinar is sponsored by  Red Gate Software.

    I like being the MC rather than the presenter because talking into my computer, in the basement, drives me slightly crazy.

  • SQL Source Control Webinar

    The 8th SQLServerCentral webinar, featuring SQL Source Control, is coming in a couple weeks. I’ll be hosting again, and this time my good friend, Andy Leonard, will talk about lifecycle management and source control as a part of that.

    You can register here.

    I believe in source control, mostly as a way of organizing the work of many different people and providing some insurance. It’s not often that I’ve rolled things back, mostly because I’m loathe to check things in that don’t work, but I have had to track down changes from older versions when a deployment didn’t go well, or someone quit and we weren’t sure what they had changed in code.

    SQL Compare would help somewhat here, but it has been more convenient for me to use Source Control systems, primarily Visual SourceSafe in the past.

    I haven’t seen this presentation from Andy, but I like hearing him talk, and I’ve been impressed with other talks he’s given in the past.

    Don’t forget to register here for the webinar on Mar 24, 2011. It’s at 5pm GMT, which is a nice, not-too-early 10:00am MST for me.

  • SQL Source Control Webinar

    We had our first public SQL Source Control webinar, on the new product from Red Gate Software, my employer. I MC’d a private one a month or so ago, and sat in on one at SQL Saturday #28, but this was the first public one.

    I think it went well, a minor demo crash, but overall it worked well. However with 150+ attendees the questions came fast and furious. Some dups, but mostly good questions and we ran long trying to answer.

    I couldn’t comment on a lot of them, but we have the transcript, I have sent it to Red Gate, and have them working on answers. Can’t guarantee it will be done tomorrow, but by next week I’ll have answer out.

    If you believe in Source Control, this is a good product. It eases the burden of tracking changes, but doesn’t eliminate them, and there are holes.

    This is a process, however, and I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different, even with the product, from what I wrote about years ago: Version Control Part 1 – Dealing with Code.

  • SQL Source Control Webinar

    SQL_68x68_SrcCon One of the new products that Red Gate Software has released recently is SQL Source Control. I saw a demo of this product back in March as it was nearing completion, and I thought it was pretty cool. I have struggled with source control for years, and build a process that was mainly manual, and one that I’ve seen others use over the years.  It worked well, but it was prone to errors unless I was allowed to chastise developers on a regular basis for not adhering to the process.

    friends_of_rg_logo Today I acted as emcee and moderator for a semi-private webinar that demo’d the product to the Friends of Red Gate, a group that is by invitation only, but lets some customers interact with Red Gate similar to how the MVP program grants some people access to Microsoft.

    This was the first time I actually acted as a moderator, having been an attendee or presenter in the past. It went well, I think, though I definitely had a little dead air and struggled to keep up with questions and find a smooth way to interrupt the presenter. I would rather be the one presenting and let someone else handle the other work for sure.

    I think we’ll be scheduling more of these on a regular basis for some Red Gate products to get the word out more and show how they can be used to solve problems. This is one of the few that I’d purchase myself if I was doing DBA work, so we’ll start here and see what happens.

    I’m also hoping to do some other more regular webinars from SQLServerCentral, on more technical topics, across the next year.