Yesterday was the Cleveland edition of SQL Saturday. If you do not know what SQL Saturday is, you really need to follow this link: https://sqlsaturday.com/default.aspx
From their site: “Free, high quality, 1-day, SQL Server Training events. You’ll find it’s a great way to spend a Saturday.” If you go to their site, you can also download slides, pdf’s and scripts from previous sessions from all of the other cities. I also recommend you sign up approx 3 months before the day of the class so you do not get shut out. Today I am going to give you a rundown on the sessions I attended.
It was again hosted at Hyland Software in Westlake Ohio. They moved it to a new building on their campus. This was a great decision, as the class rooms were larger and they were able to host more people this year and they were able to host more classes.
The first session I attended was called “Performance Tuning, Getting the Biggest Bang For Your Buck” which was taught by Monica Rathbun. This class provided a checklist of items that your servers should be set to in order to achieve optimum performance. She went over options like setting your power plan on the server to high performance, setting max memory on the instance correctly, setting max dop and cost of parallelism, etc. Making these changes will allow your database to run most efficiently. Highly recommended that you check out her pdf and verify the settings on your servers.
The second session was called: “Applying Data Warehousing Techniques” by Spencer Swindell. This was a great intro/overview on the differences between OLTP and OLAP processing. He taught about the STAR Schema and demonstrated the different types of Slowly Changing Dimensions.
The last session I attended was called: “I have indexes, but do I have the right indexes”, by Eric Blinn. In this class he went over the standard clustered and non-clustered indexes. Then he showed how FullText Indexes work, these would really be handy if you need to search lots of text or to create rankings on how close the matches are to the words you searched on. Lastly he showed ColumnStore indexes. These are very useful if you have tables in the multi million/billions of rows. He also did demonstrations of all of the indexes and showed how they improved queries. Very good class.
Unfortunately, I had a previously scheduled obligation so I needed to leave after this session. I still learned something in each of the classes and highly recommend everyone attends SQL Saturday for some top notch, free training on so many different technologies relating to SQL Server.
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