If you are using SQL Server in any way and are interested in meeting other SQL professionals in the South West then please contact us.
We are a group of DBAs and developers from Cornwall, Devon and Somerset who get together in Exeter once a month to talk about anything related to SQL. If you live or work in the South West of the UK or are in the area on business or holiday then we'd be happy to see you.
The group is for anyone working with SQL Server or anyone interested in starting to work with it. You may be a full time DBA or developer or someone looking to understand SQL Server things more clearly or maybe you are the guy that didnt run fast enough when the last DBA left.
Latest news:
17-February-2012
Allan Mitchell MVP gave an interesting session on a medley of data tools, covering SSIS, DQS and Barcelona. There will be a video demo of Barcelona from Allan that group members will be able to access in the coming days. March meeting will be on 15th March and we will have John Martin, Mark Pryce-Maher and Annette Allen speaking on Service Broker, Geography and Geometry Data Types and Reporting Services respectively.
19-January-2012
We had an excellent session from Annette Allen on how to start out with SSIS and then after some refreshments we had a discussion of some free tools that are available to help work with SQL Server. The list will be compiled and incorporated into this site in due course.
09-January-2012
January meeting is going to have Annette Allen talking us through a recent SSIS development that she carried out, February we have Allan Mitchell speaking about Denali BI/Barcelona and March we have John Mitchell with a session on Service Broker
08-January-2012
The New Year is starting off as the old one finished - one of our group members
has won a trip to Bletchely Park for the whole group! We will discuss details in
the next meeting or two but at the moment we think we will claim the prize some
time in the Summer.
Jonathan has been invited to speak at the SQL Soton (Southampton) meeting in March. Anyone wanting
to come along get in touch and we can arrange a lift share.
11-December-2011
The Christmas party season has started in fine style for SQL South West members. On Thursday some of us got together for a meal and a chat and then, last night we had a trip to the theatre. Red Gate ran a competition for user groups groups where they offered to sponsor a christmas party, judged on what the party would be. I sent in a suggestion that I'd like to take SQL South West to the theatre and we won!
We went to The Theatre Royal in Plymouth to see Barbershopera and their performance - Apocolypse Noel. What a great show by the four members of the cast. I would certainly recommend them to anyone who has the chance to see them perform.
We also spent some time chatting (and a drink or two) with some of the cast. It was great to hear some stories about their experiences as a company - especially about the reception they got in Korea having had their shows translated into Korean so that subtitles ran above the stage, in time with the performance. There is still some confusion over how a Norfolk/Suffolk joke in the show may have transferred!
Thanks again to Red Gate and Barbershopera you have given us a great start to Christmas 2011.
03-December-2011
Fantastic news for the group - we have won a competition from Red Gate and have been given funds towards our Christmas Party. Some of us are off to the theatre and we are also having a social meeting on the 8th December. On behalf of all members, thanks Red Gate!
18-November-2011
Time to be thinking about the December meeting. It's going to be a purely social event meeting at the local pub for a meal and a chance to have a good chat with all other SQL South West group members.
17-November-2011
A great session with a couple of Lightning sessions from Dave and Keith and then a few thoughts and ideas to help others with problems brought up on the spot. Dave has put a version of his session on his blog so visit http://d-a-green.blogspot.com/2011/11/sql-injection.html to take a read and make sure you are not at risk on any of your websites.
20-October-2011
November and December meetings for SQL South West are taking a different format from other meetings this year. We are doing a DIY approach to content in November and December is going to be a wholly social event. November's meeting (17th Nov) is adopting an open house style where anyone can come along with a problem they want to discuss or a topic they'd like to talk on - Lightning Talk style - and we will spend 10-20 minutes on each. We have a couple of topics already but feel free to bring along an idea of your own and we'll endeavour to cover as many as we can.
December meeting is going to be a purely social event, meeting at a local pub and having a meal and a few drinks together. It will be nice to reflect on the year and discuss plans for 2012. Denali, now formally announced as SQL 2012, will be launched, there will be SQLBits 10 and the 2nd SQL Relay.
One last piece of great news is that I have had confirmation from Allan Mitchell, Integration Director at Copper Blue Consulting (@allanSQLIS|http://www.sqlis.com) that he will be coming down in February to give us an evening of "... SQL Server 2012 BI, maybe a medley of SSIS , DQS, Barcelona...".
07-October-2011
The SQLRelay 2011 is now over, it was an epic event to be involved in, getting 16
user groups across the UK to all have their local meetings over 3 days and then
to meet in London for a national get-together was an immense achievement. The user
group leaders that I worked with all did an amazing job getting it all organised.
The assistance from other parties such as the sponsors (WROX, REDGATE, COEO and
SQLBITS especially) needs to be noted and is very gratefully appreciated. MVPs Chris
Testa O'Neill, Tony Rogerson and Martin Bell were fundamental in getting the ideas
converted into reality so thanks to them and Claire Smyth from the Microsoft MVP
programme.
SQL South West members had a great few days, on Wednesday there was a mountain of give-aways for everyone to take thier pick and three lucky attendees won prizes in the draw. Tony Rogerson was kind enough to do the draw and the picture shows the lucky winners Ian (PASS 2010 DVD), Jamie (SQL Server 2008 Internals from Wrox) and Keith (SQL Bits Friday ticket) with Tony. One SQL South West attendee was also lucky enough to be a national prize winner, Pavol, one of the first people to talk with me when I was thinking about starting the group, was a winner. He now has a ticket to the next SQL Bits conference to be held in 2012.
03-October-2011
SQL Relay is happening right now. Across the whole of the UK there are local user groups meeting on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October and then getting together in London for a national conference on the 6th. SQL South West is hosting its SQL Relay meeting on Wednesday 5th October. It's all for free. For more details about the SQL South West meeting contact jonathan@sqlsouthwest.co.uk or for details of the whole SQL Relay calendar take a look on sqlserverfaq.com
21-August-2011
The August meeting with Alex Whittles was a great success with a lot of people going away to try out the ideas that Alex presented. Anyone interested in using PowerPivot or QlikView for buidling BI dashboards will enjoy this session at SQLBits.
Our next meeting is part of the SQL Relay event, on October 5th, with Tony Rogerson MVP. Tony will talk about High Availability in SQL Denali, he will also cover backgrounder HA topics so it will be relevant to other editions too, but all demos will be in SQL Denali and concentrating on the new features. In his second session of the evening he will talk about what SSD's mean to database professionals and the game changer that they are creating.
03-August-2011
August meeting will be held on 18th same time and location as always. We will be having Alex Whittles visit us to talk about QlikView and PowerPivot. This is a preview of the talk Alex will be giving at SQLBits in Liverpool. I have had an email that the session I submitted has been voted for and accepted so I will be doing my first full SQLBits session about using LogParser. All details are on www.SQLbits.com
19-July-2011
The agenda for the July meeting has been sent out and judging from the responses to that email and comments I have seen on Twitter there is a good chance that we will have our biggest attendance yet at the meeting on Thursday. Looking forward to seeing everyone there.
04-July-2011
July meeting date has been confirmed as 21st July, meeting from 17:00 for a 17:30 start as normal. We have had our sponsorship from RedGate extended for another month, for which we are very grateful. Please get in touch if you want to come along and need any details.
There is some great news for the future of the group - we have been incorporated into the SQL PASS organisation so SQL South West is now a SQL PASS Chapter. Hopefully all the people that attend our meetings are registered as individuals with PASS as there are some great resources on their site.
In other news, SQLBits 9 has been announced. This time SQLBits - SQL across the Mersey, will be held in Liverpool. Details as always from the SQLBits website.
18-June-2011 - The June meeting was a great success with two very interesting talks, StreamInsight and PowerShell. Next month's meeting will be on 21st July at the same location and will feature a talk from SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master Christian Bolton.
08-June-2011 - For our next meeting we have been offered sponsorship from RedGate software so there will be funds to provide some pizza and soft drinks for all attendees. Please be sure to check out the tools available from RedGate by clicking their logo above.
04-June-2011 - The next meeting is 16th June, details will be sent out to group members, if you are not on the email list then please contact me. This meeting is going to be pretty special as it will include an online LiveMeeting session with SQL Server MVP Aaron Nelson (Web|Twitter) who will be giving a presentation on working with PowerShell and SQL Server. As this is a LiveMeeting event it's not only SQLSouthWest members that can attend, anyone can join in and hear what Aaron has to say. If you are interested and want more information then I can email them to you once the times and other details are finalised - contact me. Many thanks to Aaron for offering to host this session and giving us his time.
18-May-2011 - Our first meeting! Thanks to the speakers, sponsors and all who attended. 3 speakers and good discussion from everyone. See the meetings page for details. We have decided to aim for monthly meetings on the 3rd Thursday of each month so the next meeting is provisionally booked for 16th June, make a note in your calendars.
11-May-2011 - Jonathan was speaking at the Southampton user group on the benefits of using a 3rd party backup application.slide deck
03-May-2011 - Great news! We have a venue so everything is now in place for our first meeting. FirstDataBank(FDB) have very kindly offered to host our first meeting and potentially others following that while both the User Group and FDB are happy with the suitability of the arrangement. There will obviously be some 'house rules' that user group members will need to observe whilst at meetings. Let's hope it all work out in everyone's favour. I will email directions and so forth to all members today. If you haven't got the details or are not on my email list then please contact me at the email address above and I'll send the details to you.
20-Apr-2011 - Well it's been a long time since an update here and my apologies for that. I have been around - on Twitter (http://twitter.com/fatherjack) and on the forum at http://ask.sqlservercentral.com and blogging at http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/jonathanallen/default.aspx. I have been to SQLBits (http://www.sqlbits.com) and met plenty of great people. Some of whom were from the South West but not many. You can see some details gathered at the conference illustrated here. The really good news is that we have our first meeting scheduled. The venue is still to be confirmed so I can't advise anyone for certain on those details yet but it will be on 18th May in or very close to Exeter. Please get in touch via the email at the bottom of this page to get on the list of people that I will be sending details to in the next few days.
02-Feb-2011 - So, the January meeting was cancelled as we didn't get enough people able to make hiring a room viable. I have however, met a couple of people for a quiet drink/meal and a very informal chat about SQL Server and work in general. We also spoke about how to build on the network of people involved in this group. One thing that has been mentioned to me is that people may be put off getting in touch as they feel this may be a group of 'high-brow' or 'intellectual' DBA's talking about awfully complex processes and techniques that are more akin to rocket science than day-to-day DBA activities. Let me assure you this is NOT the case. We will endeavour to cover any part of working with SQL Server that is of interest to group members, we wont shy away from the technical aspects and will undoubtedly get into deep-dive conversations at times but we will equally focus on best practices on how to do the more routine jobs around SQL Server too.
It's also noted that some people will find it difficult to get to the meetings due to any variety of circumstances. In order to address this, I would like to offer a resumé of each of the meetings that can be emailed to anyone who requests it and will be made available as a download from this site. When we have a guest speaker visiting us I would also make sure that any presentation slides that they can release will be made available for all group members. This can also be forwarded to anyone showing interest in getting meeting content emailed or downloaded.
17-Dec-2010 - Looks like we might be able to get our first meeting in a room at Exeter University which I think is an excellant option. Email me if you have any reason to support this or another venue for our first meeting. I am also proposing the last Thursday in January as a potential date. Let me know if this is suitable or not for you.
09-Dec-2010 - OK, I am now about to try out direct emailing large companies in the area, in the hope of finding SQL Server professionals. Still hoping to get things sorted for January for our first meeting.
20-Nov-2010 - So, more tweeting and a few more signs of interest from some people. Going to have to think up some other ways of contacting people using SQL Server.
29-Oct-2010 - Today I have tweeted again and seen a lot more response, some from the US and some from much more local. Hopefully this will continue over the next 6 or 8 weeks and there will be a group meeting in January.
28-Oct-2010 - I already have two volunteers for speakers for the inaugural user group meeting. Things are looking up. I just need some other people to come along and learn with me...