Thank You Pragmatic Works!

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Hello Dear Reader I just wanted to say Thank You to all of the people that attended my webinar for Pragmatic Works on Tuesday.  My Slide Deck and Demo’s have been uploaded.  You can access them by going to my Resource Page at the links on the Top of the Page.

“So Balls,” you say “How did it go?”

This was the largest audience that I have ever presented to!  Almost 200 people tuned in and we kept around 190 of you for the entire time.  WOW!  200 that still brings a smile to my face, Thank You for showing that we the SQL Community are eager to learn about the technology we use every day!

The feedback I’ve gotten is has all been really positive, this is a tough subject to fit inside of 1 hour.  I know there where questions that I was not able to get to and I would encourage anyone who still has questions to use the Contact link at the top of the page to shoot me an email.  I’m slowly going through them all but I will respond to each and every one that I have received.

THANK YOU PRAGMATIC WORKS & ATTENDEES

But the biggest thing I want to say is Thank YOU.  Thank You to the Attendees and Thank YOU to Pragmatic Works.  We wouldn’t have these webinars without your commitment to the community.  I want to thank Devin Knight (@Knight_devin | Blog ) for offering to let me be a part of one of your webinars.

I see the Pragmatic Guys out there in the community, actively teaching, writing, and participating in every SQL Community event that comes their way.  And I am honored to say that I contributed!

This was a lot of fun and I had a blast!

Thanks,

Brad

Presenting Today at the Pragmatic Works Webinar

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Today I will be presenting a Free Training Webinar for Pragmatic Works at 11:00 am US EST.  My topic is Page & Row Compression How, Why, and When.   This will be the 8^th time this year that I have done this presentation! 

And yet the topic never get’s old to me.  Compression to me is like watching Sports Center, every time you use it you find something different, something new, something that you didn’t notice the first time around. 

“So Balls”, you say, “Why did you team up with Pragmatic Works and Why should I listen to you present on Compression?”

Great Questions Dear Reader let’s dive right in! 

WHY PRAGMATIC WORKS?

Since I have moved to Florida I kept hearing all these great things about a company named Pragmatic Works.  At my first SQL Saturday I met a guy named Jeremy Sirois (@JeremySirois ).  Jeremy is a Regional Account Manager for Pragmatic Works.  He’s from up North, I grew up in the Midwest.   We talked we joked around it was a fun evening.  That night I also met Brian Knight (@brianknight | Blog) for the first time.  We talked only briefly he was nice down to earth, and extremely tall.  I mean crazy tall, I’m picking him in a game of basketball tall.  So tall to dunk the ball he has to bend over tall.  I’m just saying….. the man is tall.

I soon met Adam Jorgensen (@Adam_jorgensen |Blog ), Devin Knight (@Knight_devin | Blog ) who is up to his eyeballs in beautiful baby twins right now (CONGRATULATIONS DEVIN!!), Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken | Blog), Mike Davis (@MikeDavisSQL | Blog), and Gareth Swanapoel (@GarethSwan | Blog).  All of these gentlemen I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to talk with, to see in action as presenters, volunteers, and experts within our community.  And I enjoyed every minute of it.  I’m thrilled that I get to hang out with such wonderful people.

But that wasn’t all Dear Reader, not only were these top notch professionals I soon found out they are Top Notch human beings, and it starts from the Top Down.  I’ll point you over to Brian Knight’s Community Manifesto at Pragmatic Works for more. 

Pragmatic Works gives away seat’s in their Webinars, not the Free ones that I’m doing, but seats in the Paying Ones to unemployed people within our community.  They work with Veterans who have served our country Bravely to give them training opportunities to learn new technical skills after they come home and transition to civilian life.  They donate their time to the Community through SQL Saturdays, and free Webinars of their own.  They team with Microsoft and I’ve seen quite a few of those same names presenting over in the beautiful Tampa Offices for Microsoft for free community events.

They are authors, they are MVP’s, they are Patriots, and they are just all around good human beings.  When I got the opportunity to participate I jumped with both feet and anytime you get the opportunity to learn from them you should jump as well.

Speaking of which Mike & Jorge are just two of the four Pragmatic Works speakers who will be teaching a full day Pre-Con for SQL Saturday in Orlando on September 23^rd.  Click here to view that full day of training for only $99 (this price includes lunch, coffee, and tea)!

WHY SHOULD I ATTEND!

 

One of the most important things I’ve found is the steps you should take in determining what it is you should be compressing.  As a matter of fact I’ve even made a Monday Morning Checklist that you can download that will give you the steps that I would follow if I was there sitting with you trying to determine what to compress.

And all of the Scripts that you will see today are available for download on my Resources Page.  I’ve taken a lot of time to learn about this fascinating and very new technology so I can help you learn what you need to know as quickly as possible.  Personally I could spend days, and I have, just working on Compression. 

But you don’t have time for that!  You need to understand how it works so you can report on it to your Boss, but you want to make sure that you don’t learn it so quick that you end up forgetting it.  That is one of the MANY great things about Pragmatic Works is this Webinar will be online afterwards for you to download it and re-watch it.  My samples and my Deck will be Up on my website.  I will continue to blog on this topic, and you can find a lot of great ways to continue to educate yourself.  However this Webinar provides you a wonderful opportunity to ask me questions live and in person. 

And I will make you the promise that I make at every conference, if you ask me a question and I do not know the answer I will research it and I will Blog on it.  Some of the best learning I have done on the topic of Compression came after SQL Rally.  I got a lot of wonderful questions, and I scoured over all the fun things I could do with compression and I wrote on every single topic.  Don’t be afraid to ask, your question just might be the one that pushes me to keep on learning.

So come and join us today at 11 am, here is the link to Register!

Thanks,

Brad

SQL Saturday 85 for a Jr. DBA

SQL Saturday 85 is a little under 5 weeks away and it will be coming to you live in Sunny Orlando Florida on September the 24^th.  During a planning meeting my friend and the Fearless Leader of MagicPASS, Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA | Blog), had suggested writing blogs aimed at a particular level of attendee.  Last week I took a swag at Why a Manager Should Care About SQL Saturday, and this week I thought we would shift gears and drop from the Manager level of the SQL Stack down to the Jr. DBA level.

“So Balls”, you say, “I’m a Jr. DBA why should I attend SQL Saturday?”

Great question Dear Reader let’s dive right in!

WHERE DO I START?

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When I was in college I went to one of my professors before I graduated and I told him I was scared.  He smiled slyly and asked me what I was scared of.  To graduate I blurted out, I told him I feel like I’m standing on the Iceberg that sank the Titanic holding a snowball. That Iceberg was all of the IT knowledge in the world, and the snowball was all that I knew.  I told him it wasn’t enough, and that I was scared of what graduation would bring.  He smiled and told me that now I was ready.

I said nothing and thanked him for his time, knowing that this was some Yoda communicating to a Young Jedi kind of moment.  However, normally the Young Jedi somehow gets the sage advice.  I didn’t, I left just as nervous and I had arrived, save for one thing.  This brilliant Professor who had run his own software company, had been out in the outside world, and was an international lecturer thought I was ready.  That helped me because either I had this guy fooled, or he saw something I hadn’t yet recognized.   I’d prefer to believe the second one, and I still feel the best is yet to come.

Everyone who is currently a DBA, accidental or otherwise, started out where you are.  We all understand some of the things you have yet to learn.  We understand and have considered ideas that you will have in a few years.  The great thing about that is the places you have to learn are Legion, and the majority cost you nothing but your time.

So if you take me back to my first SQL Saturday I remember it felt all shiny and new.  I was a kid walking into Toy’s R Us all over again, and my mind was exploding with the possibilities of just how AWESOME this would be.   Then before you know it, SQL Saturday is over, you’re at an after party with a swag bag and your mind is still reeling from the greatness of the day.  From start to finish how do you make the most of it?

PRE-CON’S

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I would suggest you start with the Pre-Con’s.  They are only $99, and that includes lunch and all the Coffee & Tea you can drink in a day.   Take a good hard look at what you business is doing and where the most growth is and plan accordingly.   At this stage in your career if you want to go the DBA path we have a great Pre-Con with Microsoft’s Buck Woody (@buckwoody | Blog ) on SQL Server Performance Tuning Using Application Analysis. Click HERE to go to Buck’s Pre-con site!

If you are curious about Business Intelligence then I would Highly Suggest going to the Pragmatic Works Business Intelligence Workshop featuring Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken | Blog), Mike Davis (@MikeDavisSQL | Blog), Bradley Schacht (@BradleySchacht | Blog), and Kyle Walker (Blog).  Click Here to go to the Pragmatic Works Pre-Con site!

Pre-Con’s are a great way to get to know other folks that are attending as well as getting some time with the speakers as well.  There will be breaks, lunch, and plenty of other opportunity to meet people while getting some quality education from some top notch talent from the SQL Community.

THE MAIN EVENT

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So now we are here, it is SQL Saturday 85.  You’ve registered you’ve signed up for and attended the Pre-con of your choice.  Let’s get to the schedule.  The great thing is we are chocked full of DBA goodness., so let’s get straight to the selections.

Don Stevic – The Fundamentals of DBA-ism

Daniel Taylor – Useful tools for a DBA and or Database Developer

Nathan Heaivilin- Introduction to Execution Plans        

Chad Miller- Storing Powershell Output

Rob Volk- Revenge:The SQL!

Mike Davis-SQL Smackdown SSIS vs T-SQL                   

Don Stevic(@SQL_Superman | Blog) is a fabulous presenter.  This session is all about getting a good base fundamental knowledge as a DBA in the form of lessons learned from Don.  Don most recently presented at the MagicPASS, SQL Server User Group for Celebration Fl, and I had a chance to see Don in action at SQL Saturday 74 Jacksonville this year.  Don is a great guy and he uses a lot of pop-culture references to get some very technical ideas across.  To any DBA that hasn’t seen Don present, this is a MUST SEE.

Daniel Taylor (@DBABulldog | Blog) is a very good friend of mine.  It is my privilege to work with him every day.  He works hard, he’s damn smart, and I think he is quite funny.  Dan is one of those DBA’s that makes you better just by hanging around him.   He is a Sr. DBA and is extremely good at what he does and one of the great things Dan loves to do is figure out the best way to get the best answers as quick as possible.  This is a session that you should go to and soak up as much knowledge as you can.

Nathan Heaivilin is doing a presentation that I saw last year at SQL Saturday 49 in Orlando.  It was the second session of the day and it was great.  The last time Nathan gave this talk his wife and young child were sick and he had been up all night with them.  He walked in tired and apologized to the audience and gave what was still one of the top 3 sessions I’ve ever seen.  If you want to understand what an execution plan is, and how it can help you optimize your Database’s performance then go see Nathan!

Chad Miller (@cmille19|Blog) is a SQL Server MVP and a recipient of the Microsoft Community Contributor Award for 2011.  Chad Maintains the SQLPSX project on Codeplex.  If you are not familiar with Powershell or Chad then you should be.  Chad is a very impressive man, and he is covering how to store the output from a Powershell Script.  The formats you can store the output in, and how you get that output are things you need to know.  Powershell is only going to become more important as you become a more Senior DBA, so go get your Powershell on with Chad!

Rob Volk (@sql_r | Blog) is doing a Session called Revenge: The SQL!  This is all about how you can do cool things in SQL that will make the lives of your problematic users a proverbial hell.  You do not actually want to do these things as they could/will get you fired.  However T-SQL as a language has a lot of little tricks with it.  So go see a really awesome DBA teach you all the things you could do in SQL if you ever really wanted to mess with your users.

Mike Davis (@MikeDavisSQL | Blog), is closing out the show with SQL Smackdown SSIS vs T-SQL.  By this time in the day your head is spinning with all of your new SQL Knowledge.  Let’s toss in a little more by showing the sheer power of SSIS and T-SQL going head to head.  If you have never seen the this presentation you are in for a treat, Mike is an expert showman and this Session promises to launch itself off the top rope with all the power of a 450 Slam.  It should be a good old fashioned slobber knocker, T-SQL should get whipped harder than a government mule.  Come for the knowledge stay for the show, this session will be a treat!

There are 7 tracks going on so if what I pick doesn’t match what your interest is then take your choice over mine, and trust your gut.  So what are you waiting for Click HERE to Register for SQL Saturday 85 and I hope to see you there!

Thanks,

Brad