If you want more details about any of our previous meetings or about ones that we have coming up then please contact us via the enquiry form on the right of the home page.
November meeting - TSQL x Dave2Our November meeting (Weds Nov 7th) is going to be special as we have to UK speakers that are touring the SQL South West and SQL Soton user groups on two consecutive nights. Doing these back to back presentations are Dave Morrison (@TSQLNinja) and Dave Ballantyne(@DaveBally).
In Dave Morrison's Query Plan Operators session we get a deep and
in-depth look at some of the most common query plan operators. We'll look at what
they do, how they do it and the circumstances in which they are chosen.
We will look at the good and bad aspects of each and why sometimes they aren't the
right tool for the job. Using lots of examples we'll investigate the usage and impact
they have on your SQL Server.
About Dave 1: Dave Morrison is BI consultant for Contemporary.
Having worked in the IT industry for around 11 years his main area of expertise
is SQL Server, namely TSQL, query optimisation, indexing, performance tuning and
internals etc.
Dave Ballantyne will be telling us why "Cursors are Evil"
That's frequent advice given on forums when asking about performance problems. Its
correct advice, but how do you go about removing cursors and what do you replace
them with? That’s the tricky part! By deconstructing a cursor based routine, Dave
will demonstrate a number of TSQL techniques and how they can be applied to generate
a new routine with significantly less overhead.
About Dave 2: Dave Ballantyne is a freelance SQLServer database developer / designer and has
been working in the IT field for over 20 years, the past 15 of which has been specialising
within SQLServer environment.
October's meeting on Thursday 18th (
)
will be a virtual meeting which means anyone in the world can attend if they have
access to a PC with an internet connection. We are pleased to announce that Grant
Fritchey will be giving us 2 sessions. The sessions will have a 30 minute break
between, this will let those that attend have a break and eat some pizza. We encourage
anyone attending the sessions to get their take-away delivered in this gap so that
you get the full 'play along at home' experience! Our pizza is being sponsored by
RedGate as Grant is their
Product Evangelist, sadly you will have to pay for your own pizza unless you come
along to the meeting in person.
Full details of the sessions that Grant will be doing and the Live Meeting URLs will be posted here once they are finalised. The first session will start at 17:30 BST (UTC+1) and the second will start at 19:00 BST (UTC+1). For details of session scheduling across different time zones we recommend World Time Buddy.
September meeting - 10th Sep 2012Our September is on Monday 10th as we are very pleased to be welcoming Andy Leonard to SQL South West for an evening of SSIS. Regular attendees, please note the change of day.
August meeting - 16th Aug 2012We are very pleased to welcome André Kamman the Dutch PASS Chapter Leader and SQL Server MVP. André will be mixing together some content from his SQL Bits sessions to give an overview of what's coming in PowerShell 3, how to manage over 400 SQL Servers and how to tune your servers using PowerPivot.
June meeting - Weds 20th JuneDave Green and Annette Allen will be taking us through database development using continuous integration techniques.
After refreshments there may be time to have an open Q + A session where any attendees with a question or topic they want to discuss can get the groups opinions and advice or hear about their experience.
July meeting speaker arranged - Chris Webb (TechniTrain) booked
For our July meeting (19-Jul-2012) we are pleased to welcome Chris Webb (MVP) to
SQL South West to present his session titled What’s New in SQL Server Analysis
Services 2012?
The 2012 sees Analysis Services splitting into two: the Multidimensional model,
which is basically the Analysis Services of cubes and dimensions that we’re all
familiar with, and the new Tabular model which is very similar to PowerPivot. This
session will cover what’s new in Analysis Services 2012 Multidimensional, provide
a brief overview of the Tabular model, discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses
and help you decide which one is appropriate for your project.
This week we see 5 whole days of free SQL Server training taking place across the
UK. Organised by UK SQL User Group leaders and spread across the UK SQL Relay offers
the best chance in the year to get a whole day of free training on SQL Server 2012.
There are some spaces available at most venues still so visit
http://www.sqlserverfaq.com to register for free training from Microsoft
SQL Server specialists and leading UK MVPs.
- Edinburgh - Monday 21st
- Manchester - Tuesday 22nd
- Birmingham - Wednesday 23rd
- Bristol - Thursday 24th
- London - Wednesday 30th
Two Live Meeting sessions open to everyone on 17th May
Session 1 - Mladen Prajdić (@MladenPrajdić) presents
Awesome new T-SQL candy in SQL Server 2012
SQL Server 2012 brings a whole bag of new features. We'll focus on the awesome new
stuff that will make your T-SQL development a breeze. How did you do your paging
so far? Got mad at the lack of proper support? Not any longer! Now there's OFFSET
to help you with that Remember when you had to do those running totals with CLR,
subqueries, quirky updates or (GASP!) cursors?No more! Enter the new WINDOWING FUNCTIONS
that offer a simple solution to that problem and a bunch of new possibilities. Ever
had identity problems? Let me show you the power of new SEQUENCES! But wait, there's
more! We'll even take a look at the upgraded ERROR HANDLING, new FORMATTING and
CONVERTING functions, awesome METADATA DISCOVERY and more.
Join the Live Meeting at 17:30BST 17th May 2012
Session 2 - Aaron Nelson (@SQLVariant) presents
Time Saving Tips & Tricks for SSMS 2012
SQL Server Management Studio can be really annoying sometimes. Over the years a
few really nice features have been added that you may have overlooked or just couldn’t
find. This session will focus some time saving tips and tricks for SSMS 2008 R2.
We’ll also cover a few great new features being introduced in SSMS 2012.
May meeting - The May Management Studio Mashup
Our May meeting is our first anniversary and to celebrate we are having two Live Meeting sessions from long standing SQL Server MVPs.
Aaron Nelson and Mladen Prajdić have generously agreed to give us sessions looking at Management Studio and TSQL. Some new features that come with SQL Server 2012 and some tips and tricks to help working with SSMS 2008 R2. We will be posting Live Meeting details here when they are finalised nearer the meeting date (17th May), feel free to get in touch and we'll email you the details to make sure you dont miss anything - jonathan@sqlsouthwest.co.uk.
22-April-2012Slides and code samples for the Extended Events session are now available for download ( Whole presentation or code only).
Next meeting dates details:- 17th (Thursday) May - Helping us celebrate our first birthday we are please to have two Live Meeting sessions from MVPs. Mladen Prajdić will be presenting his SQL Server 2012 - TSQL Candy session and Aaron Nelson will be covering time saving tools for working in SSMS.
- 20th (Wednesday) June - speakers TBA
SQL Relay 2012 is rapidly approaching and its by registration only so make sure you visit www.sqlserverfaq.com and get on the list. SQL South West is teaming up with user groups from Bristol, Cardiff and Southampton for a day of free training from Microsoft and some of the UK MVPs on May 29th.
11-April-2012So our April meeting is next week, on Thursday 19th. We will have two sessions from members of our own group, one covering SSRS and the other focussing on Extended Events in both SQL Server 2008 and 2012. Please contact me if you are interested in coming along for 2 or 3 hours of free SQL Server training in Exeter.
Before that meeting however there is high profile virtual meeting being organised
courtesy of PASS, SQLSERVERFAQ and SQLBITS, where Carolyn Chau - a Principal Program Manager in the Reporting
Services team at Microsoft - will be giving a session on Monday 16th at 20:00 BST
(www.worldtimebuddy.com). Registration
for this event is being provided via
www.sqlserverfaq.com.
"In this session we'll explore the new capabilities of Power View and how you can
create the right interactive reports to tell stories with your data."
Plenty going on in the SQL community at the moment; 24 Hours of PASS is currently on and keep an eye on the website for when the 24 hour long sessions become available for download, SQL Saturday #105 is happenning this coming weekend in Dublin and then from 29th to 31st March SQL Bits will be taking place in London.
15-March-2012We had a jam-packed meeting this month; John Martin (@SQLServerMonkey) presented his new Service Broker session first, promptly following the refreshment break Annette gave us her Report Services session which turned into an excellent work shop with the whole group contributing ideas for how she might make alterations so that her session at SQL Bits goes smoothly and then Mark Pryce-Maher (@TSQLTidy) did a very rapid run through the Geography and Geometry data types to close the evening.
17-February-2012Allan 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.
21-March-2012Plenty going on in the SQL community at the moment; 24 Hours of PASS is currently on and keep an eye on the website for when the 24 hour long sessions become available for download, SQL Saturday #105 is happenning this coming weekend in Dublin and then from 29th to 31st March SQL Bits will be taking place in London.
15-March-2012We had a jam-packed meeting this month; John Martin (@SQLServerMonkey) presented his new Service Broker session first, promptly following the refreshment break Annette gave us her Report Services session which turned into an excellent work shop with the whole group contributing ideas for how she might make alterations so that her session at SQL Bits goes smoothly and then Mark Pryce-Maher (@TSQLTidy) did a very rapid run through the Geography and Geometry data types to close the evening.
17-February-2012Allan 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-2012We 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-2012January 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.
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-2011Fantastic 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-2011Time 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-2011A 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-2011November 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-2011SQL 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-2011The 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-2011August 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-2011The 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-2011July 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...