In just six days I'll be presenting at SQL Saturday #173 in Washington, DC. If you are in the area and can make it, I hope to see you in my session on avoiding SQL Server Reporting Services annoyances. SQL Saturdays are free events and are the best one-day SQL Server training events I know.
SQL Saturday #173 will have two tracks on Business Intelligence and Analysis Services, two on DBA topics, one for T-SQL developers, and one on personal development. The agenda is packed with great topics. For example, right after my session is over I'm heading over to hear about advanced charting techniques in SSRS presented by Jason Thomas.
Not only are the sessions rich in information, but so are the door prizes. Last year I won the book SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes, and I've used it many times since. Crossing my fingers for an equally good prize this year!
Even if you can't make it up to DC this coming Saturday, consider coming to SQL Saturday #187, which is right here in Richmond, VA! This will be our second SQL Saturday in the city, and the Richmond SQL Server User Group is psyched to bring this event to Richmond again. Jessica Moss and Kevin Kline have already signed up as speakers, and that's just the beginning of what should be a powerful slate of presenters.
Hope to see you Saturday!
About Me
Showing posts with label SQL Saturday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SQL Saturday. Show all posts
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Sunday, November 6, 2011
SQL Saturday #96 Wrap-Up and Top 10
SQL Saturday #96 happened in Washington, D.C. yesterday, and it was a great event. It is a special event to me because it was my first opportunity to speak at a PASS event and give back to a community that has given me much and transformed my queries for the better time and time again. If you are visiting my blog because you came to one of my sessions, please leave me some feedback on the presentation -- constructive criticism is as welcome as praise.
If you would like my PowerPoint presentations along with the .sql files I used for the demos in SQL Server Management Studio, you can download them from the SQL Saturday #96 Schedule page.
And in the same vein as my comments on the PASS Summit, I'm going to post the top ten things I learned yesterday. These are in roughly chronological order.
1. If you ever go to a SQL Saturday event, definitely use the Speed Pass and print it off before you to the venue on the day of the event. If you don't, you'll likely be in a line waiting to check in before you can join the fun.
2. Apparently Twitter or some Twitter-related organization ranks people's "influence" based on their tweets and the number of people who respond to them. This ranking is quite important to many people, and it was a point of animated discussion in the speaker's room at this event.
3. I discovered that people who are coming to T-SQL and SQL Server from Oracle and other platforms can benefit from an introductory course such as my introduction to Common Table Expressions, even when their time of experience with SQL is greater than mine. I suppose this is self-evident, but it was a little eye-opening to me.
4. Even though features have been around since SQL Server 2005, some people who have been using T-SQL for a long time may have overlooked a feature that I take for granted now, such as the window functions. I was a little pleased when I heard a couple of attendees express surprise that it is possible to generate an aggregate value without a GROUP BY clause because it meant that I had something to share that I knew could help them tremendously.
5. Receiving applause for a presentation is truly gratifying, even when it is a customary act done for every presenter. It seemed authentic in both my sessions, and therefore it was meaningful to me.
6. It seems that for most Business Intelligence professionals, having the primary justification for having a data warehouse is the ability to create an OLAP cube for analysis. I'm not sure that will be my justification. I think its primary benefit as a companion to our OLTP database would be to capture historical data for slowly changing dimensions and a close second or even a tie for first would be to enable a clearer semantic model for our end users in report design.
7. The date dimension generally adds the most overhead to any OLAP cube because it generally adds 365 rows x however many years are tracked. If there is any way to summarize to the weekly granularity or less, that will be a huge win for the efficiency of the cube.
8. It is ever clearer that any data warehouse that might be built as a companion for the Shelby v.5 OLTP database will include a single "EntityNames" role-playing dimension that contains all the entity attributes across all the available modules supplemented with views that take the core table and breaks out the module-specific attributes.
9. Even a large software company like Microsoft can overlook a feature that the end user sees as patently obvious. The case in point for today is the ability to update automatically all the Reporting Services reports that use a report part that has been changed. It's a manual process for now.
10. The built-in change tracking mechanism in SQL Server may be a great option for customers who want to know when things have changed at a more detailed granularity than we capture in the OLTP tables. But it only captures three days' changes by default, so a secondary mechanism for moving that data to a flat file or supplemental table is needed to go further back from there.
There you have it, my top 10 things learned yesterday at SQL Saturday #96. I'll return to blogging more procedural stuff after today. Let me finish this entry by saying that I really enjoyed the privilege of sharing my knowledge with the PASS community, and I hope to have similar opportunities in the future. If I do, you'll definitely be reading about it here. :-)
If you would like my PowerPoint presentations along with the .sql files I used for the demos in SQL Server Management Studio, you can download them from the SQL Saturday #96 Schedule page.
And in the same vein as my comments on the PASS Summit, I'm going to post the top ten things I learned yesterday. These are in roughly chronological order.
1. If you ever go to a SQL Saturday event, definitely use the Speed Pass and print it off before you to the venue on the day of the event. If you don't, you'll likely be in a line waiting to check in before you can join the fun.
2. Apparently Twitter or some Twitter-related organization ranks people's "influence" based on their tweets and the number of people who respond to them. This ranking is quite important to many people, and it was a point of animated discussion in the speaker's room at this event.
3. I discovered that people who are coming to T-SQL and SQL Server from Oracle and other platforms can benefit from an introductory course such as my introduction to Common Table Expressions, even when their time of experience with SQL is greater than mine. I suppose this is self-evident, but it was a little eye-opening to me.
4. Even though features have been around since SQL Server 2005, some people who have been using T-SQL for a long time may have overlooked a feature that I take for granted now, such as the window functions. I was a little pleased when I heard a couple of attendees express surprise that it is possible to generate an aggregate value without a GROUP BY clause because it meant that I had something to share that I knew could help them tremendously.
5. Receiving applause for a presentation is truly gratifying, even when it is a customary act done for every presenter. It seemed authentic in both my sessions, and therefore it was meaningful to me.
6. It seems that for most Business Intelligence professionals, having the primary justification for having a data warehouse is the ability to create an OLAP cube for analysis. I'm not sure that will be my justification. I think its primary benefit as a companion to our OLTP database would be to capture historical data for slowly changing dimensions and a close second or even a tie for first would be to enable a clearer semantic model for our end users in report design.
7. The date dimension generally adds the most overhead to any OLAP cube because it generally adds 365 rows x however many years are tracked. If there is any way to summarize to the weekly granularity or less, that will be a huge win for the efficiency of the cube.
8. It is ever clearer that any data warehouse that might be built as a companion for the Shelby v.5 OLTP database will include a single "EntityNames" role-playing dimension that contains all the entity attributes across all the available modules supplemented with views that take the core table and breaks out the module-specific attributes.
9. Even a large software company like Microsoft can overlook a feature that the end user sees as patently obvious. The case in point for today is the ability to update automatically all the Reporting Services reports that use a report part that has been changed. It's a manual process for now.
10. The built-in change tracking mechanism in SQL Server may be a great option for customers who want to know when things have changed at a more detailed granularity than we capture in the OLTP tables. But it only captures three days' changes by default, so a secondary mechanism for moving that data to a flat file or supplemental table is needed to go further back from there.
There you have it, my top 10 things learned yesterday at SQL Saturday #96. I'll return to blogging more procedural stuff after today. Let me finish this entry by saying that I really enjoyed the privilege of sharing my knowledge with the PASS community, and I hope to have similar opportunities in the future. If I do, you'll definitely be reading about it here. :-)
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Top Ten Things I Learned at SQL PASS Summit on 10/14/2011
Travel and busy-ness with my baby Destiny have prevented my posting this last installment in my list of top lessons learned at SQL PASS, but now here it is:
1. Buck Woody and Rob Farley are not only superstars in SQL technologies, they are talented as singer/songwriters too. Check out the video of the opening of the keynote session for proof. Cue it up at 00:02:27 to skip to the song. Their song was my favorite moment of the week.
2. On Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to learn more about Hadoop since it was part of a new feature of SQL Server 2012, and today I learned more about it than I really wanted to know, but the presentation by Dr. DeWitt was fascinating. Hadoop is a method of "divide and conquer" applied to massive amounts of unstructured (or more accurately loosely structured) data, the kind collected by websites such as Facebook, eBay, and Google.
3. If you add NOSPLASH after the path to SSMS executable in the shortcut properties, the application will open a few seconds faster. It does not seem like much, but it's a handy tip that I put in place right away.
4. If there are more than a couple of OR conjunctions in any given WHERE clause, using UNION ALL is probably a better approach. The query optimizer in SQL Server is much better at streamlining two or more small query conditions rather than one huge, complex one.
5. When possible, replace correlated subqueries in the SELECT clause with joins in the FROM clause. This is because the correlated subquery must execute once for every row in the main results, eliminating any optimization that is possible when the data are correlated in the FROM clause.
6. I learned how to create a "temporal snapshot fact table" for a data warehouse solution. This improves the efficiency of a "daily summary" fact table by using date ranges instead of individual days as the granularity level, ranges during which nothing changes in the data. I suspect this may come in handy when constructing fact tables for pledges and donations. It is definitely a nice concept to keep in the toolbox of report design.
7. I learned that the query optimizer can anticipate the best query plan even when part of the query statement has been "refactored" into a common table expression (CTE).
8. Thanks to Audrey Hammonds, I learned some great techniques for explaining CTEs effectively. I plan to use some of her presentation style and content ideas when I present an introduction to CTEs at SQL Saturday #96 in Washington, DC.
9. CROSS APPLY is comparable to an inner join and OUTER APPLY is comparable to a left join. In that same context, I learned that there is no difference in query efficiency to move a CROSS APPLY table valued expression into a correlated subquery within the SELECT clause. This is reassuring, since I have already made such a move with the FOR XML technique of turning row values into delimited strings.
10. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a book I need to read. When Audrey referenced it in her presentation, about half the audience recognized it and praised it as a great read. She mentioned a few other books throughout her talk, but this one definitely stirred the strongest positive response.
1. Buck Woody and Rob Farley are not only superstars in SQL technologies, they are talented as singer/songwriters too. Check out the video of the opening of the keynote session for proof. Cue it up at 00:02:27 to skip to the song. Their song was my favorite moment of the week.
2. On Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to learn more about Hadoop since it was part of a new feature of SQL Server 2012, and today I learned more about it than I really wanted to know, but the presentation by Dr. DeWitt was fascinating. Hadoop is a method of "divide and conquer" applied to massive amounts of unstructured (or more accurately loosely structured) data, the kind collected by websites such as Facebook, eBay, and Google.
3. If you add NOSPLASH after the path to SSMS executable in the shortcut properties, the application will open a few seconds faster. It does not seem like much, but it's a handy tip that I put in place right away.
4. If there are more than a couple of OR conjunctions in any given WHERE clause, using UNION ALL is probably a better approach. The query optimizer in SQL Server is much better at streamlining two or more small query conditions rather than one huge, complex one.
5. When possible, replace correlated subqueries in the SELECT clause with joins in the FROM clause. This is because the correlated subquery must execute once for every row in the main results, eliminating any optimization that is possible when the data are correlated in the FROM clause.
6. I learned how to create a "temporal snapshot fact table" for a data warehouse solution. This improves the efficiency of a "daily summary" fact table by using date ranges instead of individual days as the granularity level, ranges during which nothing changes in the data. I suspect this may come in handy when constructing fact tables for pledges and donations. It is definitely a nice concept to keep in the toolbox of report design.
7. I learned that the query optimizer can anticipate the best query plan even when part of the query statement has been "refactored" into a common table expression (CTE).
8. Thanks to Audrey Hammonds, I learned some great techniques for explaining CTEs effectively. I plan to use some of her presentation style and content ideas when I present an introduction to CTEs at SQL Saturday #96 in Washington, DC.
9. CROSS APPLY is comparable to an inner join and OUTER APPLY is comparable to a left join. In that same context, I learned that there is no difference in query efficiency to move a CROSS APPLY table valued expression into a correlated subquery within the SELECT clause. This is reassuring, since I have already made such a move with the FOR XML technique of turning row values into delimited strings.
10. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a book I need to read. When Audrey referenced it in her presentation, about half the audience recognized it and praised it as a great read. She mentioned a few other books throughout her talk, but this one definitely stirred the strongest positive response.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
SQL Saturday in Richmond, VA
I know it has been awhile since I posted anything. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day have all preempted my usual posting schedule. Even now I just have time to post a brief message about the upcoming SQL Saturday in Richmond, VA. On Saturday, January 30th, there will be a SQL Saturday event at the ECPI College of Technology. I will be presenting a session on SELECT Query Fundamentals at this event, and there are lots of other topics there too, for beginners all the way up to experts.
If you want to learn more about SQL and if you can be in Richmond on January 30th, SQL Saturday is the place to be.
Hope to see you there!
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