This is a list of sessions that I can present for usergroups and conferences. If you’re UK based there’s a pretty good chance I can make it your group in person, if not I’m happy to do a remote presentation for you. For the rest of the world, remote is going to be the easiest option. Topics are split SQL Server/PowerShell, but some of them cross over the lines or can be targeted more towards a DBA crowd or PS audience as required.
As well as these I’ve older sessions I can bring back to life, and can usually pull something together on a topic if you’ve a specific request. Feel free to get in touch to talk about it.
Data Platform Sessions
PowerShell Sessions
Data Platform Sessions
Slacking for the DBA
No, not that sort of slacking. The Slack.com type of slacking. We’ll be ignoring the gifs and looking at how using Slack, PoshBot, dbatools and a little bit of PowerShell glue you can build a simple solution that enables you to quickly respond to and fix problems from anywhere without having to carry anything more specialised than your smart phone. And we’ll see how you can then extend that to allow you to hand off tasks to other users and teams in a safe secure manner.
Divide and conquer – Partitioning
Struggling to cope with extremely large tables? Is performance tuning a nightmare? Struggling to delete old data?
The solution you’re looking for could be Partitioning. Properly introduced to SQL Server with the 2005, and available in all editions since SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1, partitioning allows you to split your tables into manageable chunks without having to rebuild you code and applications
In this session I’ll take you through the benefits of partitioning, implementation best practices, pitfalls to avoid and strategies you can take away to use.
Data Masking
You’ve got a database full of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or corporate confidential data, and you need to move it into dev and test environments. How are you going to ensure that you keep the information confidential and not break GDPR.
We’ll look at using Data Masking to migrate the data, hiding PII while ensuring that the database is still consistent and a good equivalent for testing and development
Testing Backups with dbatools
A backup that’s not been tested isn’t worth the disk space it’s wasting.
To make sure you can recover from a disaster you need to have confidence that your backups are working properly, and that you can restore them in the time you’ve promised your management. Testing this used to be really tricky, but with the dbatools project we’ve tried to make it as simple as possible.
In this session I’ll show why testing your backups regularly and frequently is a vital part of a Disaster Recovery plan. I’ll explain how this can be used to ensure you can meant RTO and RPO, strategies that will stop you worrying about how long a recovery will take and proving to your boss and auditors that your recovery strategy is rock solid and reliable.
Service Bus and Logic Apps
Need to allow easy access for cloud based systems to write data or trigger actions in your on premise databases, then Azure Service Bus and Logic Apps have the answer
Applications are becoming more and more decentralised with app servers on different cloud hosts or outsourced to 3rd parties, but the data often still needs to come back to an on premise database. How do you achieve this without a morass of firewall rules and permissions? Azure Service Bus and Logic Apps that’s how
In this session I’ll introduce you to Azure Service Bus, and massively scalable enterprise service bus you can use to transactionally capture rich messages full of data from any service. We’ll then process these message using Logic Apps and securely write them into your secure on premise data store.
PowerShell Sessions
It’s good to talk – ChaOps in a PowerShell world
Drowing in information? Team secrets squirelled away in individual inboxes? Fed up of having to jump between apps and windows to get information quickly?
ChatOps is billed as a solution to that, allowing you to consolidate and filter useful information, allow teams to communicate in a a searchable manner and let you fire off operational tasks from the same window. The really cool thing is being able to easily get information from a bot, want to know if a user account is active in AD? Want to check the status of a service quickly? Or mayb just find out who’s out of the office today?
Everybody’s API Now
Every service you need to automate part of you workflow is available online, and all of them will have an REST-API available. With some simple knowledge you can quickly and easily tap into these services even if they don’t offer a PowerShell native interface
In this session we’ll walk through the what and whys of RESTful APIs, before moving on to work through examples of how you can incorporate them into your workflows and applications
Git for the PowerShell developer
We’re all happy with Git basics and there’s plenty of graphical tools out there. But knowing what’s happening under the hood is essential for those moments of blind panic when you need to revert a merge or have committed to the wrong branch (we’ve all done it!).
We’ll cover the underlying basics of git before moving on to looking at common tasks, and more importantly the uncommon tasks that crop up at those moments you really don’t want to. All based on real world examples.
