SQL Saturday #130

This weekend I attended my first SQL Saturday event here in Jacksonville.  I highly recommend anyone that has an opportunity to attend one of these events to go ahead and attend.  The sessions were great and I was also able to network with people that are as enthusiastic about SQL Server as I am.

My company was actually nice enough to spring for the SQL Saturday Pre-Conference, which was a presentation from MVP Kevin Kline.  Kevin gave an excellent all day presentation on Troubleshooting & Performance Tuning SQL Server.  This presentation included an explanation of wait stats, monitoring, DMVs, and many other topics.  Unfortunately I was forced to leave the Pre-Con a bit early to officiate a play-in game in Orlando for the Florida State lacrosse tournament but I still came away with a few takeaways from the presentation.  


The actual SQL Saturday conference was as informative as the Pre-Con.  I followed the DBA track all afternoon but there were also tracks for personal development, BI, and BI & Data Warehouse that were available.  My morning started with a presentation by Gareth Swanepoel on column-store indexes.  The next presentation was done by Bradley Ball, aka @sqlballs, on page and row compression.  This presentation I found to be very informative because it explained page and row compression at the storage level as well as providing a demo of the enabling page and row compression.Christina Leo was up next on SQL Server Internals followed by SQLRockstar with a presentation on monitoring in a virtual environment.  My old manager, Chad Churchwell, presented next on SQL 2012 high availability groups.  I then switched to the BI track to catch a presentation from Brian Knight on developing faster with SQL 2012.  Let me just tell you, I hope I can become as relaxed and natural presenting as Brian Knight is.  I'll have to keep practicing to reach that level so keep your eye out for one of my presentations coming soon.

All in all a great day and oh yeah the after party was fun too. 

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Welcome to my blog.  Here I hope to periodically write posts regarding SQL Server and other IT and perhaps some non-IT related things that I find interesting.  I hope you enjoy the posts.