SQL Intersection Registration Open – and a $100 Off Code!
Today is your lucky day.
How would you like to go to a SQL Server conference in Las Vegas where the sessions are taught by Brent Ozar Unlimited, SQLskills, SQLServerCentral, and SQL Sentry?
Yep. Me, Jeremiah, Kendra, Kimberly Tripp, Paul Randal, Jonathan Kehayias, Erin Stellato, Steve Jones, and Aaron Bertrand. Between us, that’s 3 MCMs, 2 MCM instructors, 7 MVPs, and 2 MVP Regional Directors.
If you’re serious about learning SQL Server, this should be the very first conference on your fall priority list. Check out some of these sessions:
- Troubleshooting SQL Servers in VMware and SANs (me)
- Understanding Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels (Kimberly)
- Understanding Logging and Recovery (Paul)
- X-Ray Glasses for Your Indexes (Kendra)
- Branding Yourself for a Dream Job (Steve)
- Deadlocking for Mere Mortals (Jonathan)
- Hadoop: The Great and Powerful (Jeremiah)
- Making the Leap from Profiler to Extended Events (Erin)
Team building in a Boxster through canyons
How much would you pay for three days of awesome learning at a conference like this with top-notch speakers, all killer no filler?
You want more sessions? You’re in luck! Your registration also includes ASP.NET Intersection sessions and Visual Studio Intersection sessions for developers, SharePoint Intersection sessions for sharing pointers. If your coworkers want to attend an open-source-friendly conference focusing on JavaScript and the web, the Angle Brackets conference is happening in the same hotel at the same time, so it makes for a great company getaway.
And hey, it’s Vegas, so it’s a great team building city, like when Jeremiah and I rented cars last time and, uh, built teams. Yeah.
But wait – there’s more! Check out the pre-con workshops:
- Accidental DBA Starter Kit (me, Jeremiah, Kendra – Pre-Con Sunday) - You’re responsible for managing SQL Servers, but you’ve never had formal training. You’re not entirely sure what’s going on inside this black box, and you need a fast education on how SQL Server works. In one day, you’ll learn how to make your SQL Server faster and more reliable. You’ll leave armed with free scripts to help you find health problems and bottlenecks, a digital set of posters that explains how SQL Server works, and an e-book that will keep your lessons moving forward over the next 6-12 months.
- Queries Gone Wild: Real-World Solutions (Kimberly – Pre-Con Sunday) - Have you ever wondered why SQL Server did what it did to process your query? Have you wondered if it could have done better? And, if so, how? Transact-SQL was designed to be a declarative language that details what data you need, but without any information about how SQL Server should go about getting it. Join order, predicate analysis – how does SQL Server decide the order or when to evaluate a predicate? Most of the time SQL Server gets the data quickly but sometimes what SQL Server does just doesn’t seem to make sense. Inevitably you’ll encounter certain workloads and queries that just aren’t performing as well as you expect. There are numerous reasons why query performance can suffer and in this full-day workshop Kimberly will cover a number of critical areas while showing you how to analyze a variety of query plans throughout the day.
- Scale Up or Scale Out: When NOLOCK Isn’t Enough (me, Jeremiah, Kendra – Post-Con Thursday) - Partitioning, replication, caching, sharding, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Enterprise Edition, bigger boxes, or good old NOLOCK? You need to handle more data and deliver faster queries, but the options are confusing. In this full-day workshop, Brent, Kendra, and Jeremiah will share the techniques they use to speed up SQL Server environments both by scaling up and scaling out. We’ll share what features might save you hundreds of development hours, what features have been a struggle to implement, and how you can tell the difference. This workshop is for developers and DBAs who need to plan long term changes to their environment.
- Practical Disaster Recovery Techniques (Paul – Post-Con Thursday) - Disasters happen – plain and simple. When disaster strikes a database you’re responsible for, can you recover within the down-time and/or data-loss limits your company requires? What if your plan doesn’t work? This workshop isn’t about how to achieve high-availability, it’s about how to prevent or overcome the obstacles you’re likely to hit when trying to recover from a disaster – such as not having the right backups, not having valid backups, or not having any backups! In this demo-heavy workshop, you’ll learn a ton of practical tips, tricks, and techniques learned from 15 years of experience helping customers plan for and recover from disasters, including less frequently seen problems and more advanced techniques. All attendees will also receive a set of lab scenarios for further study and practice after the class with assistance from Paul.
Ernie takes in Hoover Dam
Now how much would you pay for all this? Three thousand? Four thousand? Ten thousand? BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
For $1,894 before June 24th, you can get the Show Package: the conference, PLUS a pre-con or post-con of your choice, PLUS your choice of a Surface RT, Xbox, or a $300 gift card.
For $2,294, you get all that plus ANOTHER pre-con or post-con – five days of nonstop learning from the absolute best in the business.
No? You want more? Okay, you drive a hard bargain, buddy. Use discount code OZAR and you get another $100 off. Register now. Operators are standing by.
Upcoming training – Summer 2013
Summer is getting started and we’ve got speaking engagements lined up from here through August.
May 7th
What Developers Need to Know About 1TB Databases
Brent Ozar, Technology Triage Tuesday
If you write code that accesses a database one terabyte or larger, you need to know that things are different around here. When you hit the very large database (VLDB) territory, you need to pay particular attention to statistics, TempDB, and staging tables. Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will share his favorite lessons for developers who work with either OLTP or data warehouses. Register here.
May 9-10
SQL Server Training for Developers
You’re a developer. You’re stuck managing a database server that you don’t understand – but that’s about to change in just two days of learning and fun. Join the upbeat, fun folks of Brent Ozar Unlimited for these sessions. Learn more.
May 14th
The Basics of SQL Server Execution Plans
Jeremiah Peschka, Technology Triage Tuesday
SQL Server execution plans provide a roadmap to query performance. Once you understand how to read the execution plan, you can easily identify bottlenecks and detours. In this high level session, Jeremiah Peschka will introduce you to the concepts of reading SQL Server execution plans including how to get an actual execution plan, how to read the plan, and how to dive deeper into the details of the pieces of the plan. This session is for developers and DBAs who have never looked at SQL Server execution plans before. Register now!
May 21st
How to Manage Vendor Databases
Brent Ozar, Technology Triage Tuesday
Are you frustrated by third party applications that you can’t change, but you have to support? Tired of beating your head against the wall when your users complain about things you can’t fix? In this 30-minute session, Brent Ozar will show you his favorite tricks to get the most performance without losing support. He’ll show you how to interact with vendors and get what you want – without getting heartburn. Register here.
May 28th
Bad DBA Job Detector Test
Kendra Little, Technology Triage Tuesday
Occasionally you check out job listings and wonder, “Could I have a better job?” If you’ve been working as a database administrator for a few years, it’s time to learn how to tell a dream job from a potential nightmare. Join Kendra Little for a 30 minute guide on how to read hidden messages in job listings and find the right next step for your career. Register here.
June 4th
Mirror Mirror on the Server, Who is the Principal of Us All
Jes Schultz Borland, Technology Triage Tuesday
Have you ever wished your SQL Server could have an identical twin, holding the same data, in case you ever needed it? SQL Server mirroring provides just that, and you can choose if you want it for high availability or disaster recovery. If you’ve ever been curious about what mirroring really is, and what the pros and cons are, this is the session for you. Register here.
June 6
Southampton SQL Server User Group – (live via the internet)
Which Queries Are Killing My Server?
Brent Ozar
It’s easy to find out in just a few minutes using ClearTrace, sp_WhoIsActive, and the plan cache. Whether you’re a junior DBA or a senior developer, you can use the three free tools covered in this session to find the culprit.
Completely Legal Performance Enhancements
Jeremiah Peschka
A database is far more than a persistent object store for your application; it is capable of data validation en masse, aggregations, and creating different projections of data. By working with your database, rather than against it, it is possible to leverage all of the capabilities of a relational database to provide rich, high performance interaction with your application through an ORM. This presentation will discuss the finer points of building a full-featured data access layer using an ORM and the features of a relational database.
June 8, Columbus, OH
SQL Saturday Columbus
Jeremiah Peschka
I’m traveling back to Columbus, OH to speak at SQL Saturday 217. The schedule isn’t up yet, but I have received word that I’ll be presenting two sessions at the event. If you can’t make it, never fear, you’ll have a chance to see one or both of these talks at [SQLIntersection][intersection].
Much Ado About Hadoop
By now you’ve probably heard the words “Big Data” and “Hadoop”, but you’re not sure what they mean, much less how to get started. Maybe you’re struggling with storing a lot of data, rapidly processing a huge volume of data, or maybe you’re just curious. There are a bewildering array of options and use cases within the Hadoop ecosystem. Every day I help customers understand their data problems, understand where Hadoop fits into their environment, and determine how they can use Hadoop to solve their problem. This session provides an introduction to what Hadoop is, when it’s appropriate to use Hadoop, and guidance on how to get started.
Reporting in Production: A Hadoop Case Study
You’ve upgraded to better hardware, tuned your queries, and busy seasons is still six months away; you should be resting easy. But reports are running too long, SQL Server is under a heavy load, and you’re not sure how you’ll keep up with the demands of customers, much less the rest of the business. I’ve been there before. By moving functionality into Hadoop, I’ve been able to scale the database bigger and faster than previously possible; small incremental improvements became massive linear improvements and I delivered functionality that was previously thought to be impractical. In this session, I’ll cover patterns, strategies, and use cases to increase reporting and analytics performance using Hadoop.
June 18th
Mirror Mirror on the Server, Who is the Mirror of Us All?
Jes Schultz Borland, Technology Triage Tuesday
Sometimes our identical twin turns out to be evil – and sometimes our SQL Server does, too. When we encounter data corruption, hardware failure, and OS errors, we need to fail over from our principal to our better mirrored twin. Jes will show you how to handle database mirroring failovers in both high safety and high performance setups. Register here.
August 21
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine
Brent Ozar, South Florida SQL Server User Group
When you pass in a query, how does SQL Server build the results? We’ll role play: Brent Ozar will be an end user sending in queries, and you’ll be the SQL Server engine. Using simple spreadsheets as your tables, you’ll learn how SQL Server builds execution plans, uses indexes, performs joins, and considers statistics. This session is for DBAs and developers who are comfortable writing queries, but not so comfortable when it comes to explaining nonclustered indexes, lookups, and sargability. Register here.
August 28-30, Chattanooga, TN
Jeremiah Peschka, devLink
I’m excited to be speaking at devLink for the fourth year running. This year, I’ve been selected to present 4 talks (down from last year’s five) on a variety of database subjects. Here’s what I’ll be covering:
Defining a Data Strategy
If you’ve worried about outgrowing your current database or wasting countless hours moving to the wrong data platform, listen up. There is an overwhelming array of database options on the market, knowing which to pick is difficult. Before jumping in, it’s important to have a list of questions to make your decision easier. In this session, we’ll cover a set of questions to get your team started in the decision making process. This session is for senior developers and software architects looking to expand their horizons.
Much Ado About Hadoop
By now you’ve probably heard the words “Big Data” and “Hadoop”, but you’re not sure what they mean, much less how to get started. Maybe you’re struggling with storing a lot of data, rapidly processing a huge volume of data, or maybe you’re just curious. There are a bewildering array of options and use cases within the Hadoop ecosystem. Every day I help customers understand their data problems, understand where Hadoop fits into their environment, and determine how they can use Hadoop to solve their problem. This session provides an introduction to what Hadoop is, when it’s appropriate to use Hadoop, and guidance on how to get started.
Riak in a .NET World
Developers have a lot of choices when it comes to storing data. In this session, we’ll introduce .NET developers to Riak, a distributed key-value database. Through a combination of concepts and practical examples, attendees will learn when Riak might be appropriate, how to get started with Riak using CorrugatedIron (a full-featured .NET client for Riak), and how to solve data modeling problems they’re likely to encounter. This talk is for developers who are interested in backing their applications with a fault-tolerant, distributed database.
Scale Up or Scale Out
You need to handle more data and deliver faster queries, but the options are confusing. In this session, you will learn from battle tested techniques used to speed up SQL Server environments both by scaling up and scaling out. We’ll cover which features can save you hundreds of development hours, which features are a struggle to implement, and how you can tell the difference. This workshop is for developers and DBAs who need to plan long term changes to their environment.
FAQ About Our SQL Server Developer Training Course
On May 9-10, we’re doing a 2-day training course for developers who rely on SQL Server. Here’s the most frequently asked questions we’ve gotten so far.
Q: Will you be doing this training in a different city this year?
Nope – this is it. In 2014, we’re going to offer a 2-day developer course and a 2-day DBA course, and we’re going to offer them together in the same week. We’ll run that in two different cities – Chicago, and a city to be determined.
Q: That’s four days. What are you going to do on the fifth day that week?
A free event open to the public sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?
Q: How many people are coming?
There’s a couple dozen developers signed up so far, plus a couple of DBAs too. (Hey, everybody wants to figure out how to make queries go faster.) And of course there’s all four of us, too.
Q: Do I get the scripts and handouts?
Yes, you’ll get some of our favorite troubleshooting and demo scripts – cool stuff that we save for private paid sessions. We use these exact same scripts during our SQL Server Critical Care™ sessions to help clients make their SQL Servers faster and more reliable.
Q: My schedule is unpredictable. I want to save a spot but I might not make it.
That’s not a question. Okay, here’s the answer anyway – you can hold a spot in the class with a 20% nonrefundable deposit. On the order page, click the “Show other payment options” button, and choose to pay via check. It’ll give you payment information including the address for the check. Send the 20% now, and send the remaining 80% before the event starts. (We won’t be accepting checks onsite.)
Q: How will the Q&A work?
In addition to the onsite Q&A, we’ll run two two-hour Q&A webcasts after the training. This gives you the time to go back to the office, dig into what you learned, and ask followup questions based on your specific environment. We’ll run a morning session and an afternoon session to help more people attend.
Q: What’s with the “Enter promotional code” link on the order page?
It’s where you can put in stuff to get a discount on the price.
Q: What’s one of the discount codes?
I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But they probably line up with funny things that have happened to us in the past, like when we talked about our experience writing a book or we dressed up in costumes for sessions. And they would probably expire soon, like the end of this week.
Q: How do I get my boss to send me?
Check out our business justification PDF. It’s written for the pointy-haired guys in mind.
Q: Okay, I want to register. Where do I click?
Why I’m Crazy Excited about the SQLIntersection Conference
Next month, I’ll be in Vegas at the SQLIntersection conference. Yeah yeah yeah, I’m a presenter, but forget that for a second. I want to give you a tour of the agenda and talk about why I’m so excited to be there as an attendee, too.
Here’s the pre-conference workshops:
Sunday, Kimberly Tripp is talking indexes. If you work with indexes as a DBA or a senior developer, I can’t think of a better index teacher today than Kimberly. I’m lucky to have seen most of the great SQL presenters in person around the world, and when it comes to indexes, she’s at the top. At $450 for one day, this is a screaming deal.
Monday, Kim’s got a workshop on understanding the plan cache. She’s a complete expert at that too, at the top of the game, and it’s a great session for developers and DBAs who manage internally developed applications. I’ve got a one-day workshop on SQL Server setup best practices, which seems odd because there’s a million best practices documents out there already, right? Well, things have changed a lot this year with SSDs, VMware, clusters, TempDB, and AlwaysOn Availability Groups. If you’re building a new server this year, you need to revisit what you think you know.
On Tuesday, the main conference sessions start:
There’s three track rooms, and in each room, we’ve got a host/MC. The host will be facilitating discussion in the room, helping with Q&A, and talking shop in between sessions. This is a completely new way of handling downtime between sessions, and I’m really excited about it.
The speakers are all killer, no filler. These are people who know their subjects really well, and they do a fantastic job of explaining the topics. It’s a complete all-star list, and I could write for pages about just this one list of sessions, but I’m going to focus on the people in my track just because I don’t wanna bore you to death.
Joe Sack ran the Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server program when he worked at Microsoft, and now he’s with SQLskills. He’s one of the funniest, friendliest guys I know, and if you’ve been reading his incredibly detailed blogs, you’ll already know he’s smart too. His session topic is so relevant – if you’re not already troubleshooting SQL Server CPU issues, you will be soon. Companies are getting tighter and tighter with SQL licensing now that we pay by the core, and they want to minimize CPU use as much as possible.
Paul White is the blogger that wows other bloggers. His blog posts do an incredible job of teaching even the smartest SQL Server professionals, and I can’t wait to see his session on parallel execution. His classic post on forcing parallel execution plans contains a ton of gems, even just starting with the list of things that cause your queries to go single-threaded.
Andrew Kelly has been distilling the best parts of performance monitoring for years, and he’s at the top of his game here too. He doesn’t get the blog press that the other speakers get, but believe me, he knows his stuff forwards and backwards. One of my favorite gauges of presenter quality is the number of notes that attendees take during the session, and I always see people scribbling like crazy while Andrew’s onstage.
The day finishes up with Kevin Kline and Sumeet Bansai talking about how you can use local SSDs to achieve high availability and high performance with AlwaysOn Availability Groups. I’m not gonna lie – keynotes at conferences usually suck hard, but with Kevin onstage, that’s not going to happen here. His recent post about doing good technical demos is a clue that he not only takes his work seriously, but he wants to explain it to others well too
And that’s just the first conference day.
Because SQL Intersection is a brand new conference, you might be thinking, “I dunno if I should go. Maybe it’s just a flash in the pan and they don’t know what they’re doing.” Au contraire, mon frere – this conference is set up to be very different than others, and in a good way.
April is a great time to be in Vegas – the weather’s wonderful. Vegas has some of my favorite restaurants in the world, and I love seeing shows like Cirque du Soleil and Penn & Teller.
If you’d like to join me, Jeremiah, Kendra, and the sharpest, friendliest minds in the SQL Server business, register for SQL Intersection. The Show Package (conference plus one pre-conference or post-conference session) even includes a free Surface RT tablet. (I’m so not ready to see an army of attendees with Surface RTs.)
Use discount code OZAR and you’ll get $50 off, plus we’ll donate $10 to charity. We’re looking for charity ideas, so leave a comment with your favorite charity. We’ll pick our favorite suggestion(s) and report back with how much you gave to charity after the show.
A Week of Conferences and Travel
This week is a double conference extravaganza! That also means that this week is a double travel extravaganza, so you can expect to see a lot of moaning about airports over on twitter. Feel free to heckle me back as I travel across the country from Portland, to San Francisco, to Columbus, and back again.
RICON
On Wednesday and Thursday, I’m heading down to San Francisco to attend RICON. RICON is being put on by Basho – they’re the fine folks who make a distributed key-value store known as Riak.
RICON is more than a conference about Riak. Yes, there are going to be talks about Riak, but RICON is a conference focused on distributed systems. Let’s face it – we know that scaling up is expensive and presents a unique set of challenges around performance and budget. Scaling out presents a different set of problems. The ability to spin up hundreds of AWS instances in a matter of minutes means that we all have access to the type of scale out capabilities that were previously reserved for people with a lot of rack space.
RICON promises to bring together people who are building distributed systems. I know a few of the speakers and I’ve seen a few more of them present at different venues. These are the people who are building distributed systems in response to concrete needs. It’s not like these are developers faced with products that might go viral; these are software engineers solving problems that require large scale distributed systems.
The best part about going to RICON (any conference, really) is chatting with attendees and speakers. I’m looking forward to having interesting conversations around building distributed systems.
P.S. If you’re interested in see what all the fuss is about, the entire event is being streamed live.
Columbus Code Camp
Before moving out to scenic Portland, OR, I lived in or around Columbus, OH for 14 years. I have a lot of friends back in Columbus and, thanks to some sponsorship from Red Gate I’ll be heading back to speak at the Columbus Code Camp. A few years ago, I spoke at the inaugural Columbus Code Camp and I’m honored to be making it back this year.
While I’m in town, I’ll be giving my presentation “Failure to Launch: Code, Upload, and Explode.” This talk focuses on the importance of code performance in a world where we can attach a dollar value to every wasted CPU cycle. It’s not flattering to show off your terrible software development skills, but I’ve really pulled out all of the stops with this sample code to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes that I have – we’ll be learning from various failures in my past.
I’m excited to share my terrible code with the world, but I’m even more excited to see some of the other talks and meet up with various folks I know from the Columbus technology world. Code camps and other local events are a great way to get introduced to new ideas that you may not find at a more specialized conference.
The Theme
I’m not just excited about crazy distributed systems or hearing myself talk. I’m excited about hanging out with practitioners: the people who are putting their hands on code and solving difficult problems every day. Getting a chance to chat with attendees and presenters makes attending strange and interesting conferences worth the price of admission. Sometimes I even skip sessions just so I can chat with smart folks in the hallways.
