Conferences and Classes

The Nordic countries are some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Erika and I are scheduling a few trips over there in 2020, and the first one I can announce is SQL Saturday Gothenburg and SQL Saturday Oslo. I’m teaching my one-day workshop before each event: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos. You’re a…

How to Set Up Your Own Mastering Class VM

September 11, 2019

When you buy one of my Live Class Season Passes, you can save a lot of money by building your own VM to follow along with the labs. Or, you might just wanna re-run the labs later to see if you can do a better job, or if you’re still mastering a concept. You’re going…

Registration Open for My SQLSaturday Sacramento Workshop

March 28, 2019

I’m coming to Sacramento this year for SQLSaturday #885. On Friday, I’ll be teaching a one-day pre-con: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos – You’re a developer or DBA who wants to tune indexes and queries to make your application go faster. You don’t like learning by watching slides or reading white papers – you want to…

Registration Open for My SQLSaturday Boston Pre-Con

March 19, 2019

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I’m coming to Boston this year for SQLSaturday #877. On Friday, I’ll be teaching a one-day pre-con: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos – You’re a developer or DBA who wants to tune indexes and queries to make your application go faster. You don’t like learning by watching slides or reading white papers – you want…

Poll Results: What Conference Schedule Did You Prefer?

March 18, 2019

Last week, I asked you a couple of questions: When you attend a 1-day conference like a SQLSaturday or SQL Relay, what is your preferred session schedule? You said: 31.8% (211 votes): 6 60-minute sessions 31.3% (208 votes): A mix of 45-minute and 90-minute sessions 25.3% (168 votes): 7 45-minute sessions: 25.3% 11.6% (77 votes):…

Poll: what conference schedule would you prefer?

March 13, 2019

There’s a vibrant discussion going on amongst conference attendees and organizers, and you can help. Take this 2-question poll about your preferred session schedule, and see the results.

What sessions do you want to see at GroupBy next month?

March 6, 2019

GroupBy Conference

GroupBy.org is a free online conference run by the community, for the community. You get to pick the sessions by voting. Voting is open now through March 15 for the next event, happening April 11. Here are some of the sessions you can choose from: Just Enough Database Theory for Power BI Linux OS Fundamentals…

The Next Mastering Series is About to Start. Wanna Save $2,000?

February 6, 2019

Company News, Conferences and Classes

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Ever wanted to take my Mastering series of classes? I recommend that you take ’em in a specific order because each class builds on the next. If you try to parachute in out of order, you’re gonna have a bad time. The next rotation is about to start: Fundamentals of Index Tuning – Feb 13…

Wanna see Erik Darling as Freddie Mercury at #SQLbits?

January 18, 2019

SQLBits

Erik Darling is raising money for the Mercury Phoenix Trust, fighting AIDS worldwide to help save lives. If we raise $5,000, he’ll present his SQLbits indexing session dressed like Freddie Mercury: If I hit my goal on this, I'm gonna deliver my @SQLBits indexes session dressed like a proper Freddie. Working hard on my AY-YO.…

From The Server To The SAN

January 3, 2019

Erik Darling

Hardware, SQLBits, Storage

Enter SANdman When people buy SANs, it’s often quite a large investment. Whether it’s all SSD, all flash, or there are tiers of storage that different types of data live on, those disks aren’t cheap. When people visualize their SAN, it’s usually just the server and the pool of drives. But there’s some important stuff…

The Pleasure Of Presenting With Joe Obbish

January 3, 2019

Erik Darling

Execution Plans, GroupBy Conference, Indexing, Videos

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Grouple On At the December 2018 GroupBy I had the honor of co-presenting with one of the smartest guys around, Joe Obbish. Here’s the video of our session, “The Problems With Optional Operators”, and a link to the resources. Enjoy! Resources: Slides and Demos

Going to SQLBits in 2019? Come to my pre-con!

November 20, 2018

Erik Darling

SQLBits

My Favorite Conference I love SQLBits, and not just because it gets me out of the country for a week. It’s about the best conference a training buck can buy. There’s tons of great technical material without a lot of the marketing schtick that tends to sneak in. Head over here to register now. I’m…

PASS Summit 2018 Keynote Day 2: Live Blog

November 8, 2018

Today is the second day of the 2018 PASS Summit, the largest annual gathering of Microsoft data professionals. Yesterday, we got the marketing keynote that caught attendees up with the current state of SQL Server 2019 and Azure services. The attendees I talked to yesterday were impressed with the demo amounts & topics, too. Today is…

PASS Summit 2018 Keynote Day 1: Live Blog

November 7, 2018

Today is the opening day of the 2018 PASS Summit, the largest annual gathering of Microsoft data professionals. Every year, thousands of us gather at the Seattle Convention Center to connect, learn, and share. On this first day of the conference, all the attendees go to the same room to watch the keynote speech. To…

Picking #PASSsummit Sessions to Attend

November 5, 2018

So you’re going to the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, and you’re overwhelmed with the number of session choices. You’re not alone – it overwhelms me too. There are some slots where I wish I could clone myself and attend several sessions at once. Here’s how I do it. First priority: paying back your…

Thank you, #sqlfamily, for donating to The Trevor Project.

October 22, 2018

#SQLPass, Company News

A couple of weeks ago, we told you about how Andy Mallon’s LGBTQ Meetup was raising money for The Trevor Project, and how we’d match up to $5,000 of your donations. This weekend, you did it. You hit the $5,000 mark. I’m so proud of you. This is the caring, welcoming community that I love.…

LGBTQ Meetup at the PASS Summit

October 8, 2018

The SQL Server community is known for its welcoming acceptance of everyone, regardless of their experience or background. The SQL Server family actively reach out to help others and bring folks together. A great example of that is the LGBTQ Meetup organized by Andy Mallon (@amtwo.) Whether you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning,…

Going to Summit? Here’s a Calendar Invite for My Session.

September 6, 2018

At Summit, on Wednesday at 1:30PM in room 6C, I’m presenting “Getting Better Query Plans by Improving SQL’s Estimates.” Add to GMail Calendar ICS file for Outlook or other calendar apps Here’s the abstract: Like Books Online, but with jazz hands You’ve been writing T-SQL queries for a few years now, and when you have…

Free SQL Server Training Next Week at GroupBy

August 31, 2018