What is Kendra going to be talking about?

Stay Agile, Stay Sane

Agile software development emphasizes continuous depolyment and its methods do not directly include long term planning. DBAs must ensure data integrity and have a long term view for application scale, so Agile methods present challenges. Come learn about successful real-world practices iteratively developed in a high transaction internet service environment over the last five years. We have create a flourishing Agile shop while meeting high requirements for uptime, customer response, and data consistency. In this session we’ll cover key habits for success, practices to avoid, how and when to get started, and why Agile development can be a great thing for DBAs. Topics will also include how “Testing in Production” can be a huge benefit.

About Kendra

Kendra Little is a Senior DBA in the online advertising industry who has spent ten years nerding out on SQL Server. Kendra works closely with an Agile development team to deploy frequent incremental changes to scale and improve a busy production environment. She likes tuning production servers, developing tools to automate tasks, building SQL Reports for trending, and secretly enjoys writing troubleshooting guides and documentation. Kendra has a Masters degree in Philosophy and a salt shaker full of certifications, but all the best stuff she’s ever learned has come from her smarty-pants colleagues and the SQL Server community. Read her blog at http://littlekendra.com.

Free Stuff!

So, what do I know about that’s free?

Data Cleansing with SSIS – Eric Veerman is going to be talking all about data cleansing. You know, getting all of the crud and nastiness out of your incoming data. You know, the data where people have extra spaces in their name because your CRM system treats that as a different person and sales people can steal commissions if it’s a “new” customer.

SQL Lunch: Historical DMV Information Thomas LeBlanc is giving this presentation. Here’s what he has to say about it: DMV are great to find information about performance without running a trace. But there information is lost once the SQL Server service is restarted. After finding some useful scripts online (Thanks SQL Server community!!!), I decided to schedule a job to run the night before to store Index Usage, Least Used Indexes, SP Usage, Missing Index and Expensive CPU Usage. We will review the scripts and historical data captured.

CBusPASS – the Columbus, OH PASS Chapter – is meeting tomorrow, September 10th, at 6:30PM. Joe Webb will be giving his presentation Locking and Blocking Made Simple: A good working knowledge of how SQL Server makes use of locking and transaction isolation levels can go a long way toward improving an application’s performance. In this session, we will explore SQL Server’s locking methodology and discover techniques for enhancing query response times.

Some of the 24 Hours of PASS Sessions are now online for viewing. Check them out and get your learn on!

Cheap Stuff

Remember how I posted about getting to PASS on the cheap? Or how about that interview I did with Thomas LaRock about getting to PASS on the cheap?

Well, thanks to some some great volunteers we now have a forum for the Summit! The point of the forum is to help you save money bu sharing a room with another attendee, a ride, or to coordinate social get togethers. We really want you to come to the PASS Summit and have fun. I really do. Really.

Due to circumstances outside of anyone’s control our speaker, Andy Leonard, was very late getting signed in to LiveMeeting. What do you do when you have a room full of SQL Server people? You talk shop!

Over the course of the evening we talked about how to find the date when data was last inserted into a table, how to cope with rapidly growing data, future presentations for the user group, future presentations within PASS and the local community, performance on virtual machines, and a few other things that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Andy’s presentation was phenomenal. I thought I knew at least enough about SSIS to call my self competent. After last night’s presentation on Change Data Capture and Incremental Loading with SSIS, I know that I have a lot left to learn. The best thing about a great presenter and a great presentation is that 1)they make it look effortless and 2) you walk away having learned so much without realizing it. I know that I took away a great deal from the presentation. Andy graciously stuck around on LiveMeeting and answered audience questions. A big thank you to Andy for donating his evening to sharing his knowledge and experience. And an even bigger thank you to the Leonard family for letting us borrow Andy for the evening.

Going along with last night’s presentation topic, here are some SSIS tips.

Come pay us a visit. It will be a good time.

Here is the information from the CBusPASS website:

Topic
Incremental Loads, Change Data Capture, and SSIS 2008

Abstract
Change Data Capture is a new SQL Server 2008 feature. One benefit of CDC is data filtering for Incremental ETL in SSIS: only touching rows that are new, updated, or have been deleted! In this presentation I walk through enabling Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008, then present an overview of an SSIS package that utilizes Change Data Capture to perform Incremental ETL.

Presenter

THE Andy Leonard

CBusPASS Meeting, June 11th

Last week the local PASS chapter met and Brent Ozar and I gave a recap of our Pain of the Week presentation – Developing Something for Nothing (SQL Server Express Edition and SQL Server Management Studio Express). The presentation went very well despite some bandwidth problems with LiveMeeting – audio glitches led to Brent sounding like a crazy evil robot a few times.

After the presentation, a number of local chapter members sat around and talked about what we have been working on and the things that we’d like to see presentations about in the future. It’s nice to take the time and connect with the local SQL community. I think, too often, we focus on getting a solid presenter and pulling everything off without a hitch rather than encouraging a sense of community. Last week’s meeting definitely had some hitches – pizza was late due to outside causes, there were Live Meeting audio issues due to bandwidth, we were in a different room due to scheduling conflicts. But, despite all of that (or because of it) we had a great meeting with a lot of interaction and community building. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what having a user group is all about?

PASS Application Development Virtual Chapter

Yesterday, June 16th, the Application Development Virtual Chapter had its monthly meeting. Mladen Prajdic, author of the SSMS Tools Pack was kind enough to speak. The presentation was a huge success and we had 27 attendees tune in virtually for Mladen’s presentation: SQL Server 2008 for Developers. The presentation was recorded with LiveMeeting and will be available online for download in the next week.

Upcoming Presentations

CBusPASS

Next month, Andy Leonard will be presenting, via LiveMeeting, at CBusPASS. The topic of the presentation is Incremental Loads, Change Data Capture, and SSIS 2008 – Change Data Capture is a new SQL Server 2008 feature. One benefit of CDC is data filtering for Incremental ETL in SSIS: only touching rows that are new, updated, or have been deleted! In this presentation I walk through enabling Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008, then present an overview of an SSIS package that utilizes Change Data Capture to perform Incremental ETL.

App Dev Virtual Chapter

Aaron Alton will be presenting for the Application Development Virtual Chapter about Simple Data Change Tracking in SQL Server – For many reasons, it is often advantageous to be able to track data modifications in SQL Server applications. Some businesses require change tracking for audit purposes, and application administrators often desire change tracking to maintain visibility into application interfaces.

In this presentation, Aaron Alton will look at the two most common methods of application data change tracking: DML triggers and SQL Server Change Tracking. Aaron will review the strengths and weaknesses of each method, and demonstrate the ease with which data changes can be recorded and retrieved.

Hope to see you all there!

The meeting will be held, as per the usual, at Battelle For Kids, 1160 Dublin Road Suite 500, Columbus, Ohio 43215.

Note: Battelle For Kids has moved to a new suite in the same building.

Abstract

After learning how to use Perfmon and Profiler to gather performance statistics about your SQL Server, it still takes a lot of time to interpret those results and figure out what’s going on. Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Mining team has built a free cloud-based data mining tool for Excel that can help slice and dice mountains of data and help you make sense of it all.

Even if you’re not ready for BI in the cloud, you can use this same type of tool in combination with a local SQL Server Analysis Services instance. Wait! Don’t freak out – it’s much easier than you think, and you never have to leave the comforting environment of Excel. Even if this doesn’t sound like fun to you, you might want to learn about it because mid-level managers in your company might want to use this technique to analyze sales or customer data.

Attendees will learn how to install & configure data mining in Excel, how to analyze Perfmon data to break the server’s load into categories, and how to use BI to write a performance report about your SQL Server.

Live Meeting

May 14th, 2009 @ 6:30 PM EST.

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