Another great event from the SQL SouthWest team this year. Great atmosphere at the pre event Surf Part on the Friday night, catching up with old friends and making some new ones. Those who had a go on the mechanical surfboard seemed to enjoy themselves, unfortunately my knee injury meant I couldn’t have a go.
As I’ve mentioned before I was given the opportunity to try something a little bit different. So I was presenting a double session on “PowerShell for the curious DBA”, which I’d targetted as a short introduction to PowerShell for SQL Server DBAs who’d never really met it before. I’ve uploaded the deck and scripts here if you’d like a copy.
Feedback on the session and the format from the attendees was good, and I’m looking forward to seeing the ‘official’ feedback from the orgs as well. I though the format of the session was great, allowed a topic to be covered in more depth, but wasn’t such a long session that you were ‘comitted’ to missing lots of other sessions.
Talking of other sessions I went along to the following:
Hugo Kornelis (b | t) – Good session on using Windowing functions to work around some more complex tasks in T-SQL, definitely something you want in your toolbox.
Kevan Riley(t) – Exploring some of the darker parts of SQL Server explain plans. Turns out it’s well worth checking the underlying XML as well as the nice graphical views.
Kevin Chant (t) – Certainly looks like anyone wanting to generate proper management reports will want to be checking out SharePoint and PowerView
Allan Mitchell (t) – Finally a proper explanation of how Hadoop hangs together, much more information than lots of reading around on t’tinternet.
Whittling down to that selection from the available sessions (here) was quite a task as well, lots of quality content was on offer so it could be a hard task picking which session to go to.
Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the post event Curry as I had a 4 hours drive back to Nottingham, but the photos make it look like a lot of fun, so already planning a 2nd night’s stay if there’s a 2015 event.