SQL Saturday #27 – Portland

I will be presenting on two topics at SQL Saturday #27 in Portland, OR this weekend:  Backup and Disaster Recovery for N00Bs and Indexing Dynamic Management Views.  It’s going to be exhausting, but fun: out of Detroit at 8pm EDT – Into Portland around 11pm PDT (that’s 2 AM “real” time folks if you don’t want to do the math) – the reverse red-eye.  I’m then sticking around until early Sunday morning, yet by the time I get home it will already be time for the 8 hours of LOST (thing Superbowl Sunday for Geeks.)

The indexing topic is a complete reboot of the talk I’ve given before.  New slide decks and added content.   Abstracts are below.  Hope to see you there!

Backup and Disaster Recovery for N00bs

This session is targeted for those who have found themselves accidentally responsible for the SQL Server databases where they work, or are generally new to SQL Server. We’ll cover the basics and best practices of the Recovery Models and the Backup & Restore circle of life as well as a high overview of the High Availability architectures available in Microsoft SQL Server including Database Mirroring, Clustering, Replication, and Log Shipping.

Dynamic Management Objects for Index Tuning and Maintenance

Use the right tool from your SQL toolbox to maintain those indexes, determine which indexes are being used (and more importantly which ones are NOT being used), and get recommendations on indexes to create all from Dynamic Management Views. Walk away with scripts you can use in your environment IMMEDIATELY.  These scripts will help you walk up to any SQL Server 2005 & above database server you’ve never seen before and immediately make it run faster.  You don’t have to wait to run a trace, you don’t have to ask the developers what queries are running slow, and you don’t even have to TALK to anybody.  Just query them, and presto, you can be the smartest geek in the room.

The slide decks and scripts will be avalable here once the sessions are hardened.  I’m still playing around with them a bit right now.  I’ll announce them here when they’re posted.  Of course, as has been the case at most of the SQL Saturdays of late I’m in the first slot and last slot of the day.  if Buck Woody’s session is full at 8:00am come by mine.  There should be plenty of open seats.  Depending on how tired I am you may be able to lead the session for me.

Hey Portlandites! Portlanders!  Portarinos!  Locals!  I’m staying in Portland’s Burnside area.  If you can offer suggestions for anything in that area in my downtime I’m listening.  I always travel with my Pentax K10D so I’m on the lookout for interesting things to shoot if time permits.