In July and October, I will be doing my "How To Design a Relational Database" full day conference in two places. First on July 26 for the East Iowa SQL Saturday, and then for the big daddy SQLPASS Summit in Charlotte, NC on October 14. You can see the entire abstract here on the SQL PASS site. It is essentially the same concept as last ...

Today at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta I presented a new brand new session, ''SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches.'' This session is designed to help people quickly analyze query plans and find likely culprits without being query tuning experts; I find that in a huge number of cases the root ...

On Friday, May 10 I will be speaking for the Knoxville SQL Server User Group, and on May 18, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday in Atlanta. Both days, my session is my old chestnut “Database Design Fundamentals”. It is my favorite session to do because of two things. 1. I love to talk about database design 2. No demos :).  The abstract is: ...

Here are some things that have piqued my interest on the interwebs over the last few days. Parameterized queries and Security in Data Explorer Chris Webb put a post up on the Data Explorer forum asking about parameterizing queries in Data Explorer and Miguel Llopis from the Data Explorer product team replied with some useful information: ...

May 18, SQL Saturday returns yet again to the Atlanta area. At this point I've become a bit of a regular at Atlanta's events; this will be my third one in a row. The team that puts them together is amazing, and produces top quality, super fun and educational days every time. Plus: Taco Mac. Friday, May 17, the event is running a few ...

This year Data Education is offering a few more classes with Itzik Ben-Gan, the world's foremost T-SQL instructor. Our first offering has just been announced: Atlanta, May 13-17. Neither Itzik nor his class needs much introduction, but click through for a full outline and other details. We think that Atlanta is a great city, with an amazingly ...

SQL Saturday returns to the Boston area this April, with what is certain to be an exceptional speaker and session lineup. (The actual schedule will be posted soon, but in the meantime you can see the submitted sessions.) The free event ($10 if you'd like to eat lunch) will take place on Saturday, April 6. Highly recommended for anyone in the area ...

The last PASS board meeting for the year has happened, and the portfolio handovers are well under way. Sadly, having new board members elected means having existing board members step down, and this last board meeting was the last one for both Allen Kinsel (@sqlinsaneo) and Kendal van Dyke (@sqldba). In 2012, these guys had the portfolios of ...

Today was SQL Saturday #146, put on by Mike Walsh, Jack Corbett, and a host of other volunteers and organizers. Scott and I missed the speaker dinner last night, but we headed up from Rhode Island at 6:00 AM and made a good day of it. We had lots of great conversations with both existing friends and potential customers. After lunch I ...

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays  were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog).  On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server.  I also delivered a session on SQL Server ...