It’s #GroupBy time! Wanna watch free SQL Server training?

You voted in a great lineup for this Friday’s free GroupBy.org conference:

• 8AM Eastern – How to Use Parameters Like a Pro and Boost Performance by Guy Glantser
• 10AM – Introducing the SQL Server 2016 Query Store by Enrico van de Laar
• Noon – Worst Practices & Less Known Limitations for Columnstore Indexes by Niko Neugebauer
• 2PM – Gems to Help You Troubleshoot Query Performance by Pedro Lopes
• 4PM – Crash Course on Better SQL Development by Vladimir Oselsky

Register now, then vote to pick the next sessions.

GroupBy is 100% community-driven – so it’s up to you to pick the list. After you’ve registered for Friday’s event, you can head over to the voting page to decide the next lineup.

Here’s some of the sessions I’m excited about:

• Measuring the Overhead of the Query Store by Jason Hall – I think Query Store is the single most important feature of 2016, and a tool that will make your performance tuning dramatically easier. (We even throw a high-priority warning in sp_Blitz if you’re on 2016 and you haven’t turned Query Store on for a database yet.)
• Alleviating database consolidation pains by Alexander Arvidsson – this is one of those projects that looks really easy until you get halfway into it. During our weekly Office Hours, we get a lot of questions about “is it safe to put these two databases on the same server?”
• Apache Zeppelin and SQL Server: two best friends by Davide Mauri – Zeppelin is a neato technology that lets you visualize data quickly, and you can run it on your desktop in a Docker container. It’s like free, open source PowerBI. To see it in action, watch Davide demo a quick graph. I’m not going to become a Zeppelin guru in an hour, but this session will help me see if it’s a good fit for my clients.
• T-SQL for Beginners by Andrea Allred – no, not because my T-SQL sucks (which it does), but because I think the community needs a good 60-90 minute online tutorial video that we can point users to. Since GroupBy records & transcribes all of the session videos, this would be a helpful community asset.
• Green is good, Red is bad – Turning your Checklists into Pester Tests by Rob Sewell – Pester is a unit testing framework for PowerShell, and hold on, wait, come back here! Like the Zeppelin session, this isn’t something I’m probably gonna implement in an hour, but I’d like to see an expert give a tour of it. Rob is @SQLDBAwithBeard, writes at SQLDBAwithaBeard.com, and he’s spoken all over the place, so I bet this will be good.
• Level Up Your Biml: Best Practices and Coding Techniques by Cathrine Wilhelmsen – I hear from all my SSIS friends that Biml is the future, and it’s hard for them to find good online training material. Cathrine’s a solid speaker.

So go register, then go vote. I’m excited to see what you pick.