Resources from May usergroup meeting
Here’s the presentation and examples from the May meeting: Management DataWarehouse presentation and scripts.
Enjoy.
Community
SA SQL Usergroup May meeting
The May meeting of the South African SQL Server Usergroup will be held Tue 19 May, 18h30 at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston, 3012 Willam Nicol Drive. This month we have two speakers. Cedric Labuschagne and Clinton Scholtz.
Cedric will be presenting “Performance Monitoring using Management Studio (SSMS) – Introduction to the Management Data Warehouse”
Understand the architecture of how SQL Server 2008 collects performance and diagnostic data and presents the information in Management Studio.Develop a plan for enabling performance data collection and analyzing the results for troubleshooting and diagnostics.Learn how to create your own collection sets and manage the performance data collection warehouse database.
Clinton will be presenting “The Basics and Fundamentals of Service Broker”
Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes.
Look forward to seeing you there.
SA SQL Usergroup April meeting
The April meeting of the South African SQL Server Usergroup will be held Tue 21 April, 18h30 at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston
This month, Gary Hope will be presenting on SQL 2008’s spatial features. As soon as I have a better description, I will update this post.
Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes.
Look forward to seeing you there.
PASS Summit submissions
I finally stopped dithering over the small details and get my submissions for the PASS conference in, with about 5 hours remaining to the original deadline.
Since it seems to be somwhat of a tradition this year to post the details (As Brent, Jack and Michelle have done), I’ll list mine.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
Ever wondered what the things called statistics are, why they’re important and what needs to be done to maintain them? If so, this session is for you!
In this session we’ll take a look at what statistics are and why SQL keeps them; at how SQL maintains them and under what circumstances that maintenance is insufficient; and we’ll look at the problems that result when they are inaccurate. Finally we’ll cover some suggestions and options around maintenance of statistics when the automatic maintenance is not sufficient.
Delving the depths of the Plan Cache
Do you want to want to know more about how your server is running? Do you want to be able to see how queries are running within the server, both now and earlier? If so, this session is not to be missed.
In this session we’ll take a look at some of the information that is available within SQL relating to query optimisation and query execution. We’ll look at some of the Dynamic Management Views and Dynamic Management Functions that expose data from the plan cache, some relevant Trace events and we’ll take a brief look at what Extended Events offers in this area.
Insight into Indexes
Are your indexes being used? Are there any that are taking disk space but aren’t contributing usefully to the server’s workload? Are there queries that could benefit from indexes that don’t exist?
In this session, we’ll be looking at the index-related dynamic management views to see what information SQL makes available on index usage and missing indexes, how that information can be used and what the shortfalls of those DMVs are
So now we get to sit until end of May and see who’s in and who’s not.
Resources from March usergroup meeting
I’ve uploaded some of the material from the last usergroup meeting.
Have fun.
SQL Server Usergroup – March meeting
The next SQL Server user group will be on the 17 Mar 2009 6:30PM at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston (3012 William Nicol Drive) Auditorium 1
We will have 2 session, one on Powershell and one on Auditing in SQL Server.
Paul Filmalter will be doing the Powershell session and Paul Els the Auditing on SQL Server.
So come and join us and have some fun.
Hope to see you all soon and please help us build the community by encouraging at least one friend or colleague to join us.
—
Paul
DevDays 2009
Registrations are now open for South African DevDays 2009.
Durban – 10th March
Cape Town – 17th March
Johannesburg – 26th March
For more info and to register – http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/default.mspx
PASS presentation and updated demos
I’ve had several requests for the presentation and demos from my presentation at PASS USA last year , so here they are. This is the presentation that I also did at the January SQL usergroup meeting and at the February meeting of SADeveloper in Durban
The demos are for SQL 2008 and use the SQL 2008 AdventureWorks database (downloadable from Codeplex), but they should work without too many problems on SQL 2005 against the 2005 version of AdventureWorks
Presentation – Dirty Dozen
Demos – https://www.sqlinthewild.co.za/PASS08/Demos.zip
The setup script adds a couple indexes, a column and a fair bit of data, so take a backup of Adventureworks before running that if you want to be able to get back to the original version.
SQL Server usergroup – Feb meeting
The Feb meeting wll be held Tuesday the 17th Feb at 18h30 at the Microsoft offices in Bryanston.
Inus du Preez will be presenting a session “6 reasons why SQL Server 2008 must run on Windows Server 2008”
Inus will be covering improvements in Server 2008 such as network throughput, memory swapping, drive addressing and stability and why they make Server 2008 such a compelling platform for running SQL 2008 on.
He’s also going to look at running SQL under Hyper-V and under the Core installation.
As always, please RSVP by replying to this post, or replying to the thread on SADeveloper.
Durban SA Developer meeting
I’m going to be speaking at a Durban SA Developer meeting on Thursday 12th Feb. Details and RSVP on the SADeveloper site please
I will be presenting once again the session that I did at the PASS summit in Seattle last year – The dirty dozen… 12 Ways to write badly performing T-SQL.