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SQL Saturday #357 – Cleveland, OH

On February 7th, I’ll be speaking at SQL Saturday #357 in Cleveland, Ohio. I missed this event last year due to other travel, and I hate missing it because I love the folks that run the event – Allen White, Erin Stellato, Craig Purnell… The speaker lineup reads like a community all-star team, too; Wendy Pastrick, Joey D’Antoni, Wayne Sheffield, Ben Miller, Hope Foley, Michael Swart…

The session they selected from my submissions was Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Triggers, a talk I’ve given a couple of times before, centered mostly around a few of the most common mistakes people make with their triggers. The punchline – not to give anything away – is to try to avoid triggers altogether, but I still give some useful advice if you’re stuck with them.

There are also two pre-conference workshops being offered the day before the event, one from yours truly, and one from Julie Smith and Audrey Hammonds. Here are the titles, links and abstracts, in no particular order:

50 Things All SQL Server Developers Need To Know

What are the most problematic patterns and anti-patterns that trip up SQL Server developers on a daily basis? What sort of SQL and Transact-SQL challenges does every SQL Server developer encounter at some point in their career? This full-day, pre-conference seminar takes a tour of the most common and challenging issues that database developers face. Learn how to conquer them in the lab today so that they won’t take you by surprise in the future. Loaded with live demonstrations and useful techniques, this session will teach you how to take your SQL Server queries from mundane to masterful.

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • Internal operations of the SQL Server query optimizer and caching mechanisms and their impact on T-SQL code performance, including ways to change default behavior using settings, trace flags, and hints.
  • Techniques and metadata analysis needed to make T-SQL code, including queries and stored procedures, achieve top performance and maximum reliability.
  • A few tricks to better simulate production on your workstation or test box to avoid “it worked fine on my machine” syndrome.
  • A variety of patterns and anti-patterns in T-SQL coding that are common challenges for all but the most advanced database developers.

With these 50 tricks and techniques in your coding toolkit, you’ll be able to write T-SQL code that consumes less system CPU, memory, and I/O, while being easier to maintain and offering faster performance.

From Here to BI: Data Warehousing from Start to Finish

SQL Server MVPs and blogging team Audrey Hammonds and Julie Smith of DataChix.com offer a training day chock full of data warehouse, ETL, and business intelligence goodness. Audrey will take you on a guided tour of converting a transactional model into Dimension and Fact tables. After the model has been created, Julie will guide you through loading those tables using SQL Server Integration Services. Finally, they’ll show you how to present your data to users and give them the tools they need to make their business… intelligent.

Part I Dimensional Modeling with Audrey

  • So you have a transactional database… what’s next?
  • Why Third Normal Form is Tough for Reporting
  • Aligning Business Needs with Your Modeling Plans
  • Getting started with Dimensional Modeling
  • From Codd to Kimball: How to get your data BI-ready
  • Facts about Dimensions and Facts
  • Here Comes the Grain Again: Granularity and You!

Part II Extract Transform and Load using SSIS with Julie

  • A tour of SSIS
  • Control Flow Basics
  • Data Flow Basics
  • How to load Dimensions with SSIS
  • How to load Facts with SSIS
  • Frameworks
  • What happened and when
  • Queing auditing and error handling
  • When things go wrong, how to know the details
  • Top quirks of SSIS—what, why, and how to get around them.

Part III Expand your BI Toolkit with Julie and Audrey

  • DQS – Data Quality Services and ETL
  • MDS – Master Data Services and the Data Warehouse
  • PowerPivot – Convert business users into reporting experts

Aaron (@AaronBertrand) is a Data Platform MVP with industry experience dating back to Classic ASP and SQL Server 6.5. He is editor-in-chief of the performance-related blog, SQLPerformance.com.

Aaron’s blog focuses on T-SQL bad habits and best practices, as well as coverage of updates and new features in Plan Explorer, SentryOne, and SQL Server.

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