SQL Saturday #104 Recap

Amazing. If I had to describe this past SQL Saturday #104 in one word, that would be it: Amazing. From the great views driving from Denver down to Colorado Springs to the very cool people and the kick-butt presentations, this event was great. First I want to say thank you to all the volunteers who made this event possible. Without your hard work these events would not be possible. My friends and I arrived just before the 7:30am breakfast started and fueled up on eggs, potatoes, and sausages before heading over to the first of six presentations we saw that day.

First up was The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects by Tim Ford. What I liked about this lecture was how Tim organized the Dynamic Management Objects (DMO’s) into a chemistry-like periodic table. There are so many DMO’s that it might be hard at times to know which ones you need to solve a particular issue, but with the chart it makes it much easier to narrow things down. Once the presentation is available for download I am definitely going to print out the chart and post it at my desk.

The next presentation on our agenda was Development Mise en Place by Keith Tate. What Keith talked about applies to more than just DB Developers and DBA’s. You can apply his suggestions to any area such as programming. The main goal here was to show how you can increase your effectiveness, production, and reduce your stress by getting things in order when you set off on your tasks for the day. By getting the rest of your office on-board for respecting the times you do not want to be interrupted, you can maximize your Flow. On a side note I found out that Keith also is a hockey goaltender like myself, which is pretty darn cool.

The last lecture before lunch was Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional by Vicky Harp. Similar to the presentation given by Keith Tate, the lessons learned here can apply beyond the scope of the DB world. What she pointed out is that most testing is basic and does not look for those special cases that can lead to unnecessary issues and roadblocks in production. On top of that some companies do not have standard procedures for writing up test and use cases. As a developer if you take the extra time to think about the edge cases you can save yourself and the company a lot of time and headaches.

After lunch I sat in on the Discovering the Plan Cache presentation by Jason Strate. Another great lecture where we learned about how to leverage XQuery for examining the execution plans SQL creates. By looking through them you can get better insight into why SQL does what it does and figure out ways to further improve the optimization of your database. The live demos helped me in understanding this topic better.

Second to last in the day was 10 Things That Every DBA Should Know by John Morehouse. Being a programmer this presentation was very helpful in exposing some of the things I am doing wrong when I work with databases. There were a lot of things clarified by this lecture and going forward I hopefully will be making far fewer newbie mistakes. I probably should have them posted near my desk just in case.

Last but not least was But it worked great in Dev! Performance for Devs by Randy Knight. This lecture complimented John Morehouse’s and went into additional detail about safe and best practices when working with databases. At the end of the presentation we worked through some live examples and were able to see first hand the dangers of just hacking away in a database.

At the end of the day was the closing comments and prizes raffled off. I came in second place for the M&M jar counting contest. I was off by 42 M&M’s and my friend ended up winning with a count that was only 27 off. Similar to how I felt after attending my first SQL Saturday event, this event got me even more pumped up about wanting to be more of a DB Developer. I am very excited to be on this path and I look forward to the next SQL Saturday in my area.

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