Tuesday, December 9, 2014

[Presenting] SQLSatDC (SQL Saturday #347) was a blast!






A gigantic thank you to the whole team at SQLSaturday347, aka SQLSatDC 2014.

I had an absolute blast.  Rubbed shoulders with a bunch of people I know of, chatted with some SQLSat friends, met a bunch of new people I want to see more of, and even managed to take in the sights (and some tapas!).

Let's see, what did I see/do?

Thursday/Friday - tourista!

Friday night - speaker's dinner.  A nice little Spanish/LatinAmerican restaurant.  After a bit of "how do we order", managed to get everything straightened out, and had a blast.  Tapas, Paella, lots of SQL and non-SQL conversations, etc.

Saturday morning - going by the vendor tables, some groups I haven't seen before.   Always nice to see.  Wow, a Linchpin People table! (First time I've seen it, though I've run across at least 5 of them at different events, and they've been uniformly amazing folk)

 8:15am - me!  Standing room only, which as a presenter is honestly pretty cool.  Some good questions and comments, which means I need to incorporate them as well as strip out other things.  At this point I've gotten my presentation up to right at 70 minutes, sans breathing, so it's time to strip out some of the less-important slides.


9:40 - David Dye, Dealing with Errors in SSIS 2012.  Some interesting stuff from a SSIS developer perspective, how to save errors out, prevention, dealing with them, etc, etc.  Less interesting for me as a DBA, though if my devs did those fixes now I'd know where to look.  As is, I have to keep using my own email notifier for SSIS Project Deployment Model failures.


11:05 - Jason Brimhall, Murder They Wrote. It's the one-hour summary of the day-long summarization of a week long training session.  *Whew*!  Very nicely done - while I knew many of them, he did a great job explaining them.  The only odd part was that very few people seemed to know what Clue was(!).  And anybody who can make a "boot to the head" reference (Yay Frantics!) is a hero to me. 

Lunch: Fajitas!  And a head shot!  (Thanks, Chris!) And chatting with one of the attendees for a bit, talking about EN, CI, and other two-letter acronyms. And ended up by getting pinned down by one of the redgate folk and looking at their SQLLitehouse tool, which does a lot of what EN (and therefore my presentation) does.  Wonder if I can steal any ideas?  Is that legit, if I'm doing this for fun?

1:30 - Jimmy May, Columnstore, Flipping the Faster Bit.  Apparently I missed the part where he did a handstand, but I'll tell you what, he was the most animated speaker I've seen in a while.  Very knowledgeable, some useful information (and I'm running CS/CCS!), and I got to pick his brain after.  My only suggestion (and I made this to him already) was that if we're in the session, we don't need as much "marketerization" slides (but he knew that already). But it did explain some of the tuple mover issues I've seen, so... WIN!

2:55 - Samuel Vanga, SSIS Data Flow under the hood.  Something I haven't seen much of, specifically a closer-to-the-metal session about tuning SSIS, almost from a DBA perspective.  I swear I've seen some of it before (Tim Mitchell, probably), but it's nice to see more internals covered.  Normally it's very much a "oh, everything works", but this was more about low-level tuning, async vs non-async, spilling to disk, etc.

Anyhow, I'll definitely try and come back - they had a great turnout with some fantastic speakers!

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