Last week I attended SQL Saturday. In last years posting: SQLSaturday #595 Cleveland 2017 I explained all of the benefits and all of the great FREE training and networking that you can do. This year I will give you a rundown of the sessions I attended in 2018.
The first session I attended at 8:30am was called: “Emergency! Are you ready for disaster to strike?”, presented by Allen White. This session showed the importance of documenting your servers and practicing recovering your environment and creating documentation on your processes so when (not if) disaster does happen, you will have proven methods to save the day.
The next session at 9:45am was called: “The Data Professional’s Junk Drawer”, presented by Peter Shore. Peter talked about all of the free utilities out there that can be used to identify your hardware, text editors, tools from Microsoft like Sysinternals and Robocopy. Attendees also mentioned what applications they use that speed up their work or made their lives easier.
11:00am, I attended “Essential Linux for the SQL Server DBA”, by Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman. In case you do not know, SQL Server 2017 will run on Linux. In this class, Kellyn showed dozens of different utilities and commands that can be run to help you diagnose performance issues and navigate through this “strange” operating system.
12:00pm–1:30pm Lunch!!! A very filling Taco Bar. You could also attend different vendors demos of their products.
1:30pm, I attended “SQL Server and Powershell: Lets get serious”, by Drew Furgiuele. Drew showed a bunch of tasks that can be automated or more easily done by using scripting.
At 2:45 the last session I attended was: “High-Performance SSRS: Techniques For Faster Reports”, by Bert Wagner. In this session, Bert talked about the three ways you can improve SSRS performance. In general it is either a SQL statement issue, doing too much processing and “on the fly” formatting in the report, or other hybrid special case solutions. He also showed it is possible to do insert/update and deletes from within a report.
I was not able to stay for the final session, but it was another great time at SQL Saturday. It is highly recommended that you try and attend one when they come to your city/country. They are in a different location each week.
You can read more about it at their official site: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/default.aspx
Jim Salasek's SQL Server Blog 