May 2011
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
« Apr   Jun »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

Month May 2011

Entries 2 Total

Stir Trek: Thor Edition (the Aftermath)

May 11, ’11 8:00 AM

I spent the weekend at Stir Trek: Thor Edition in Columbus, OH. While I had a blast speaking about databases, I had even more fun attending and learning.

Programming the Cloud with HTTP/REST

I knew about REST before I attended this talk and I’ve done a bit of REST programming (right before I decided to nerd out on data), but Mike Amundsen did a great job of convincing me why I should care about REST as a programming paradigm for web developers. I’m not going to go out and start writing code to build my own REST services, but I have a better grasp of how I can work with developers to build robust data driven services and applications and do some incredibly cool things in the process.

CSS 3: Something for Everyone

John Keyes delivered a presentation about the basics of CSS 3. I knew there were some great features of CSS 3, but I also knew that the spec is incredibly broad. I was a bit worried that John’s presentation was going to be a whirlwind tour with very little depth. Instead of a shallow romp through CSS 3, John delivered a solid presentation that worked through some core features of CSS 3 in a practical manner and built up on them to demonstrate new techniques with real world value. Except for maybe the demo that made a rectangle swirl into a circle, that was just cool.

John gets mad props for filling his slide deck with Jurassic Park references. I had some laughs while I got my learn on, and that’s a good thing. I’ve worked with John on presentations in the past and he’s become a phenomenal presenter, programmer, and web developer in the time that I’ve known him.

Real World jQuery

Matt Nowack had the difficult job of speaking right after lunch. He gave a great talk about jQuery 1.5 and 1.6. It turns out that Matt wrote the talk for jQuery 1.5 and did a great job of introducing some of the newest features of my favorite JavaScript library. jQuery 1.6 came out recently and it made parts of Matt’s talk irrelevant. Matt took it in stride and wrote new content earlier in the week and delivered a top notch presentation that was educational and entertaining. I overheard one attendee say that they were rushing off to Matt’s presentation because it was bound to be good. They were right and I was also right to pay them 15 bucks and a box of Milk Duds to yell it at the top of their lungs. Good job, Matt.

The Rest of My Time

I spent the rest of my time preparing and giving my talk The Database is Dead, Long Live the Database. If you attended, the resources page will always be online at http://brentozar.com/stir-trek-thor-edition. If you missed it and you wanted to see it, you’ll be able to catch it on June 28th at 8:00 PM Eastern through the PASS Application Development Virtual Chapter.

I was incredibly flattered when Matt Casto asked me to speak at this event, way back at Code Mash. I’m glad that he was clearly drunk and thought I would make a great speaker. You can’t imagine how happy I am that he accepted the bribes I sent his way, just in case he sobered up and didn’t remember asking me to speak. Luckily, most of that’s a lie. I did, however, have an awesome time in Columbus hanging out with old friends, hopefully making a few new ones, and only telling one STD joke during my presentation; nice try, guy in row three!

In summation: thanks Matt, thanks Stir Trek, and thanks Columbus!

Comments (0)

PASS 2011 Session Abstracts

May 2, ’11 8:00 AM

PASS 2011 Session Abstracts

Every November, a bunch of database geeks gather for the Professional Association for SQL Server’s (PASS) international Summit. This year it’s going to be held October 11-24 in Seattle, Washington. I didn’t submit last year since I was involved with the abstract selection process. This year I’m not involved, so I decided to submit a few abstracts.

Rewrite Your T-SQL for Great Good!

Refactoring SQL is not like refactoring application code. This talk will cover proven SQL refactoring techniques that will help you identify where performance gains can be made, apply quick fixes, improve readability, and help you quickly locate places to make sweeping performance improvements. Jeremiah Peschka has years of hands on experience tuning SQL applications for performance, throughput, and concurrency.

Why I submitted this session: I submitted this session because it’s a fun session to give, it crosses boundaries between DBA and developer, and I’ve given it a few times before.

The Database is Dead, Long Live the Database

If relational databases are so great, why are people talking about NoSQL? Shouldn’t we explore other ways to store and manipulate data? We’ll look at four scenarios – caching, session state, flexible data models, and batch processing – and discuss how traditional databases perform in each situation and what other options exist on the market. At the end of this session, attendees will have a better understanding of how different workloads perform in RDBMSes, best practices, and alternative storage solutions to make your life easier.

Why I submitted this session: I wrote this session when I was asked to speak at Stir Trek: Thor Edition. Writing it has been a lot of fun and has started the process of crystallizing a lot of the ideas in my head around data storage. This talk focuses on a few areas where relational databases don’t do a good job and proposes solutions to pick up the slack.

Rules, Rules, and Rules

Computers are governed by the rules of physics: electrons, drive heads, and disk platters can only move so fast. Database systems are built according to those rules: memory is faster than disk which is faster than the network. Database schemas and queries are built within the rules of database systems. You will hit the limitations of these rules. If you know what the rules are and why they are in place, you’ll know when it’s time to break them… and how to succeed.

Why I submitted this session: This is also a session I’ve given before. Andy Leonard asked me to speak at the inaugural SQLPeople event about my passion. One of my passions is learning about computer science and how it can be applied to databases in a practical way. (There’s a lot of purely theoretical information that only matters when you’re implementing an RDBMS.) This session is an extended version of the talk I gave at SQLPeople. I’m incredibly excited about it and I’ll be bummed if it doesn’t get accepted.

The Other Side of the Fence: Lessons Learned from Leaving Home

Traveling the world changes your outlook on things, home just doesn’t look quite the same once you’ve traveled. The same can be said for SQL Server; working with databases like PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Hadoop forced Jeremiah Peschka to re-learn concepts that he took as a given. Learn from his experiences about the importance of understanding isolation levels, data storage and retention, querying patterns, and even database functionality in this talk drawn from his experiences as a DBA, consultant, and developer.

Why I submitted this session: There’s a theme going on here – I’ve learned a lot about database and application design and how it’s sometimes necessary to move outside of my comfort zone to build an effective system. This is a 3.5 hour session that will cover a lot of features in SQL Server. I learned a lot working with other databases, and I hope that this information helps some other people.

Comments (0)

This site is protected with Urban Giraffe's plugin 'HTML Purified' and Edward Z. Yang's Powered by HTML Purifier. 214 items have been purified.