SQL PASS Detroit

Setting up a SQL Server Test/Dev Environment in Windows Azure

Overview
Victor will conduct a brief overview of Azure while comparing and contrasting some of the options (IaaS and PaaS)for running SQL Server in the Azure cloud. He will also review important infrastructure components required to run SQL in the cloud and then discuss how you can leverage azure to provision resources. The evening will include a demonstration of the Azure management portal to provision and manage Azure resources and a discussion and review of SQL Server Hybrid scenarios (combination of on-premise SQL with SQL in Azure).

Speaker Bio
Victor Szalma is a Windows Azure Technical Specialist with Microsoft. He has spent 29 years in Information Technology, the last 16 years with Microsoft. At Microsoft Victor has had a variety of roles in both sales and delivery capacities. As an Azure Technical Specialist he currently spends his time helping customers understand cloud computing and how they can leverage Azure to meet their business and technical needs.

Victor’s previous Microsoft experience includes acting as a Technical Strategist for large enterprises where he spent time understanding an enterprise’s industry, business and technical objectives and helping them leverage Microsoft’s software, devices and services to meet those goals. He spent the previous 10 years as a consultant at Microsoft helping customers build strategies and implement Microsoft technologies.

Prior to Microsoft Victor spent 13 years as a technical consulting helping customers in a variety of industries including automotive, health care and insurance. Most of that time was spent architecting and developing solutions using a variety of technologies.

This meeting was sponsored by SPID and Microsoft

Livemeeting (.wmv 22 MB)

Partitioning "WORM" Tables

Overview
"Partitioning” is a process whereby very large tables can be broken into smaller, more manageable objects known as “partitions”. Partitioning is super easy. Anyone can do it and SQL Server even has a “Partitioning Wizard” to help you. Unfortunately, some of the incredible capabilities that can be provided by partitioning of the (usually) largest tables in any database, “Audit” or “Worm” tables, are frequently lost in such simplicity. There are also a huge number of “gotcha’s” that make it seem impossible that such capabilities could ever be realized. This is an advanced T-SQL “Black Arts” session on not only how to partition a table and reduce index maintenance times, but also how to reduce backup and restore times to a very small fraction (1-2% typical) of what they currently are all while avoiding the “free space” penalty when using 1 file per FileGroup. You’ll learn how to shrink a partition file without fragmentation, how to rebuild the clustered index in a new partition without the 110% “free space” penalty, how to avoid related log file bloat, how to move these behemoth tables to less expensive storage with virtually no down time, be introduced to the concept of “Online Piecemeal Restores”, reduce the size of restores to Dev boxes, and learn some new tools that will make monthly partition cycles and troubleshooting partitions a whole lot easier and efficient.

Speaker Bio
Jeff Moden is a long standing member of SPID and has shared his “Black Arts” methods on many different subjects with us before. He has been an SQL Server MVP since 2008 and was awarded the Red-Gate “Exceptional DBA” award in 2011. He’s one of the leading posters on SQLServerCentral.com and has 33 - mostly 5 star - articles where he has gained worldwide recognition for his ability to breakdown and teach complex subjects in T-SQL in an easy" to learn fashion. Come join us for this first release of his new presentation on “Partitioning “WORM” Tables”.

This meeting was sponsored by EMC and Microsoft

Powerpoint Presentation and Sample Code (.zip 479 KB)
Livemeeting (.wmv 42 MB)

Squeezing Top Performance from Your Virtualized SQL Server

Overview
Just about anyone can click through a SQL Server installation and get it working, but more than a little tuning is required to get the most performance out of your servers. Once virtualized, additional tuning can help get even more performance out of that virtual machine. David Klee (@kleegeek) will discuss valuable details for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V on how to tweak and tune your virtual infrastructure for business-critical virtualized SQL Servers. Tips on configuring your SQL Server installations for maximum performance when virtualized will be covered. We will also present tips on monitoring and capacity management so you know when you need to add more hardware to keep your database servers running at their peak performance.

Speaker Bio
David Klee, VMware vExpert 2013, is a SQL Server performance and virtualization expert. With over sixteen years of IT experience, David spends his days handling performance and HA/DR architecture of physical and virtualized mission critical SQL Servers as the Founder and Chief Architect for Heraflux Technologies. His areas of expertise are virtualization and performance, datacenter architecture, software engineering, security, and business process analysis. You can read his blogs at davidklee.net and linchpinpeople.com, and reach him on Twitter at @kleegeek. David speaks at a number of national and regional technology related events, including the SQL PASS Summit, VMware Partner Exchange, numerous SQL Saturday events, SQL PASS virtual chapter webinars, and many SQL Server User Groups.

This meeting was sponsored by SPID, Redgate and Microsoft

PDF Presentation (.pdf 820 KB)
Windows Media Player (.wmv 20 MB)

Manage Big Data with SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse

Overview
Big Data is a hot topic in the news today. Many organizations are trying to develop their big data strategy but there is much confusion over the definition of the term and how it aligns to technology. Microsoft’s SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) provides a platform upon which to build your big data solution. This session will peel back the covers and discuss what big data means and provide a deep dive into the architecture of PDW.

Speaker Bio
Chris Campbell is the Analytics Platform Practice Lead at BlueGranite, Inc. His team focuses on data warehouse and big data solutions specializing in SQL Server, SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse and Hadoop. BlueGranite is a premier Microsoft partner with expertise in data analytics and business intelligence solutions on the Microsoft data platform.

This meeting was sponsored by SPID, BlueGranite and Microsoft.

PDF Presentation (.pdf 2 MB)
Windows Media Player (.wmv 26 MB)