SQL South West

A user group for SQL Server professionals in the South West of the UK, meeting monthly in Exeter.

Currently sponsored by Red Gate software.
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August 16th

André Kamman MVP will be joining us to talk about his experiences and techniques for working with large numbers of servers. Managing approximately 400 SQL Server means that André has identified many ways of bringing efficiency to the regular tasks that face a DBA.

September meeting

Our September is on Monday 10th as we are very pleased to be welcoming Andy Leonard to SQL South West for an evening of SSIS.

September, October and November

Previous Meeting details.

Summary of past SQL South West meetings and and associated resources such as downloads and links

July

Chris Webb MVP from Technitrain gave us an evening of entertainment on what's new in SQL Server 2012 SSAS.

June

Dave Green and Annette Allen gave us a sneak preview of their session for SQL in the City. People who attended the event in London can see the video of this session by visiting the SQL in the City website.

May

Two Live Meetings - Aaron Nelson and Mladen Prajdić helped us celebrate our first anniversary with two great session. Aaron's was a preview of a session he is working on showing some tips and tricks when working with SSMS and Mladen gave us his SQL Server 2012 TSQL Candy session. This was a re-run of the same session that is available for download from the SQL Bits website - here.

April

Meeting description and downloads/links

March

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.
Meet from 17:00 for 17:30 start.

Please contact me for more details of next meeting or directions - jonathan@sqlsouthwest.co.uk

February 16th

Allan Mitchell MVP and Principal Consultant for Copper Blue Consulting Ltd used the whole meeting to talk about SQL Server BI with 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.

December 8th

December meeting is a wholly social event, some time for the attendees to just have a chat and relax. We are meeting at the pub closest to the offices where we meet. Places need to be booked in advance and there is a £5 deposit. Even if you have yet to attend a SQL South West meeting please get in touch and join us for an evening of food, drink and chat.

November 17th

The SQL Surgery format was a great success. We had two new speakers do what amounted to a Lightning Talk on a topic of their own interest and we talked over some problems and thoughts from other attendees too. This is a format that we will certainly look to use in the future. Keith gave us a session on the reporting environment in use at his work. Dave started off the evening for us with a very good session about the risks presented by SQL Injection attacks. He 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.

October 5th

Tony Rogerson MVP - (Blog|Twitter) 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.

18th August 2011

Alex Whittles - Purple Frog Systems | Twitter | Blog
Alex worked through making a useful BI dashboard in PowerPivot and QlikView, comparing and contrasting their strengths and short-falls as he went.

As this was a preview of the session he will be doing at SQLBits 9 the code produced will not be available on this website until after SQLBits has taken place. User group members can receive a copy by email on the understanding that it is not for further distribution without express permission from Alex.

21st July 2011

Christian Bolton - SQL Server MCA, MCM and MVP (Blog|Twitter|Book)
Christian gave us a very detailed session on Parallelism in SQL Server and some details on how to troubleshoot the CXPacket wait type. Some key points being that, it is not necessarily bad to have this wait type, you CANNOT 'fix' it by setting MAXDOP to 1, you should use temporary tables in preference to table variables unless there is a good reason not to. A video of this session that Christian presented at SQLBits 8 - Brighton is available on the SQLBits website.


16th June 2011

Leo Pasta (Blog|Twitter)
Leo started the meeting with a very intersting presentation on StreamInsight, explaining some requirements and conditions along with some applications for this new Complex Event Processing technology that comes with SQL Server 2008 R2.


We had a brief break to eat the pizza kindly sponsored by RedGate.


Aaron Nelson - SQL Server MVP (Blog|Twitter)
Aaron presented PowerShell for Data Professionals as a Live Meeting session which had a lot of interest on Twitter and attracted about 40 online attendees in addition to our group. The session had some great examples and was a good introduction to an administration tool that is a key skill for the modern DBA.

May 18th 2011

Jonathan Allen (Blog|Twitter)- How a third party monitoring tool helps a busy DBA.
Jonathan spoke about the need for, and problems of, performance monitoring and demonstrated how SQL Monitor from Red Gate can help address these issues.

Download slide deck

Mike Cassey - DataWarehousing - What you need to consider before you start to build one.
Mike gave us the benefit of his experience with many database systems and projects concerning Data Warehousing and some of the common pifalls that such projects encounter and ways to avoid them so that your project is successful and doesn't become stagnant and lose funding.

Thomas Rushton (Blog|Twitter) - Kill Frenzy - How to give any user the license to kill.
Thomas explained to us his solution to a problem encountered when consolidating servers and having to allow 'new' users the ability to kill processes in their own database but not any other whilst not making them server administrators.

Download slide deck
Jonathan Allen
E: jonathan@sqlsouthwest.co.uk
T: http://twitter.com/fatherjack
Jonathan Allen © 2011 - 2013