I’ve got an iPad full of PASS Summit 2010 recorded sessions that I need to watch, and now the guys at SQLbits go and release all of their videos for free too.  I’m never gonna catch up.  Not only can you watch the SQLbits sessions live over the web, but you can download ‘em to your portable media player too.  Just go to SQLbits.com, scroll down to the bottom, and start clicking on session titles.  Here’s mine:

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

SQL Server Storage at the Terabyte Level

Some other sessions to check out:

• Ten Things You Should Never Do with SQL Server by Simon Sabin
• Designing High Scale OLTP Systems by Thomas Kejser
• Panel Discussion with the SQLCAT Team
• SQLDiag and SQLNexus by Christian Bolton
• Understanding SARGability by Rob Farley

Ugh.  There goes my free time in 2011.

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Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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This will be a fun, intimate session – it’s limited to 40 people max, and we’ve got a few spots left.  Here’s the abstract:

Virtualization, SAN, and SQL Server: The Perfect Storm

Each of these things alone is tough enough to manage, but when you start to combine them, the forecast calls for rogue waves of bad performance.  Metrics like CPU % and disk queue length just don’t mean anything anymore.  No matter what numbers you hand your virtualization sysadmins, Windows admins, or SAN admins, they all say the same thing: “It’s a SQL Server problem.”

Learn how to fight back as Brent Ozar, Microsoft Certified Master, exposes some surprising truths like:

• What metrics can prove it’s not a SQL Server problem
• Why you might not want to separate your data and log files onto different drives
• How to double-check to make sure the other guys are doing their job
• The crucial configuration choices that can doom your SQL Server performance from the start

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to walk back into your office, gather statistics and configurations, and give your sysadmins and SAN admins the information they need to fix performance problems on their end.

For £450, you get my all-day pre-con session on Thursday plus full days of training on Friday and Saturday too!  Check out the SQLBits agenda, which includes sessions like:

• Understanding SARGability – Rob Farley is one of the funniest guys you’ll ever meet, and his sessions get rave reviews.  Once you understand SARGability, you’re much more equipped to troubleshoot slow queries.
• SQLDiag and SQLNexus – these two completely free tools will change the way you do performance tuning.  Microsoft Certified Master Christian Bolton, the lead author of Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, will explain how to use ‘em.  His company, Coeo, is even giving away a free Fusion-IO drive during SQLBits!
• Introduction to Extended Events – this new tool in SQL Server 2008 doesn’t get much press because it’s a pain in the rear to get started with.  Jonathan Kehayias is the man to show you how because he wrote the free SSMS Extended Events Manager, a tool that’s been featured in SQL Server Magazine.

This event has speakers from around the world including Brad McGehee, Buck Woody, Kevin Kline, Thomas Kejser, and more.  This is the cheapest way to see the best people in one place in Europe, and it’s in a fun, relaxed atmosphere where you can have plenty of discussions with the speakers.  To see what the shorter sessions look like, check out one of my sessions from my last SQLBits:

Register now and choose Full Conference, and you can pick my session as your pre-con.  Register fast – we’re running out of seats!

...
Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

• Thursday – Pre-Conference Sessions – for £350, you get in-depth training on one particular subject from one trainer.  Attendees like pre-con sessions when they need more than just 45 minutes of training on a subject, like when they’re starting to work with SSIS or virtualization for the first time.  I’m doing a pre-con on Virtualization & SAN Basics for DBAs – I’ve been gradually expanding my coverage on this topic over the years, and I’m up to a full day of goodies now.
• Friday – Deep-Dive Conference Sessions – for £225, you get access to a day of advanced sessions by the best speakers.
• Saturday – Free Public Conference – anyone is free to waltz in, sit down, and get their learn on.

Interesting pricing setup, huh?  You can choose as much in-depth long-session learning as you want, or just come for the presentation buffet on Saturday.  But there’s something else that makes SQLBits unique – you can vote on the sessions you want to see!  After you register for an account and log in, your session list screen will look like this:

SQLBits Voting

Just click on the sessions you like, and your voice is heard by the conference organizers.  These guys are doing a fantastic job of building a great event.

If you’re in the UK, go hit SQLBits, register for an account, vote for the sessions you wanna see, and help ‘em bring you the best training.

...
Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

• Kimball SDC
• Trace File Source
• XMLify
• File Watcher
• Dynamic Data Flow
• Rank Transform
• Normaliser
• Twitter
• Compression

XMLify

Jamie find this useful when parsing error output from other SSIS steps, which often have several result sets with different columns.  XMLify dumps all of the data into a single XML file for easier error storage.

It’s currently only available for SQL 2005 on Codeplex, but Jamie’s updated it for 2008.  He expects to upload it to Codeplex shortly.

Kimball SDC

SSIS includes a Slowly Changing Dimensions wizard, but Jamie says it has extremely poor performance due to the amount of lookups it does, plus you can’t modify your work.  You have to reuse the wizard.  One workaround is the KimballSCD tool on Codeplex, which handles Type 1 and Type 2 dimensions.  These dimensions track the history of our data – for example, as our customers change from Single to Married to Divorced, we may want to capture those changes so we can view their status over time.

The KimballSCD component takes your incoming stream of data and dumps out separate streams with new records, changed records, deleted records, invalid input, and so forth.  It has a staggering array of configuration choices on how to handle errors.

Twitter Task

Built by Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss, this SSIS component can fetch and retrieve tweets.  Of course, when he went to demo Twitter.com, the page took forever to load.  Ah, the curse of using Twitter and WiFi networks for demos!

He demoed how to send tweets, then how to receive them and pipe the results through the Term Extraction task.  It’s basically data mining for text – it finds the most popular phrases in the stream of tweets.  Jamie asked if attendees found it interesting, and they definitely did.  A couple of attendees wanted to know when Twitter search integration would be included.  Doh!

Normaliser

This component takes a flat source like a list of orders that includes both header and detail info in the same row, and then normalizes it.  You have to pass in the data in the right sort number, because it uses those sorts to determine duplicates.  You pick which fields determine a header versus a detail record using checkboxes.

Rank Transform

The ranking T-SQL functions in SQL 2005 will take a set of data and add a rank column, and this SSIS component does the same thing.  Jamie says it’s still a little buggy, but he’ll work out the bugs in the next few days.  (Honesty is the best policy!)  The bugs are problems with the UI – checkboxes don’t show up as checked when they’re supposed to be.  The data under the covers works though.

It has nice options for rank, dense rank, row number, and row number by partition.  Rank and dense rank are two different ways to handle ties.

Compression Task

Pass in a file – but only one file at a time – and this task will gzip it.  It works for SQL 2005, and there’s a newer version coming on Codeplex to work in SQL Server 2008′s SSIS.  There’s an identical task to unzip.  I can see this as being useful for passing big XML files over networks.

File Watcher

This task watches a directory and waits for files to arrive.  When a file is created, it goes on to the next task in the package.  The File Watcher passes the name of the newly created file to the next task as well, so you can process that file.

Trace Reader

This takes a SQL Server trace file as a source, and then splits it out into three data outputs: short queries that took under 300ms, queries that took 300-1,000ms, and queries that took over a second.  Useful for DBAs who want to automate performance tuning on a large scale.

Dynamic Data Flow

The only non-free tool in the demo, Dynamic Data Flow is by a company called CozyRoc.  You can use one destination in SSIS, but populate different tables based on the contents of your data.

I bailed out just before the last task was shown because I had to get to my own session.

End of the Line

Jamie did an awesome job of demoing a lot of stuff in a short period of time without being overwhelming.  I can really appreciate how much work he had to put into these demos – every single component needed its own set of data.  Fantastic work.

...
Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts