Its been a couple of weeks since SQLBits XI happened in Nottingham and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts for posterity. First the venue. I think its fair to say that the overall consensus was that the East Midlands Conference Centre was the best SQLBits venue these has been so far – I’ve been to more than half of them and based on my ...

Yesterday I gave my session to the fine folks in Nottingham, UK. Below is a zip file containing the deck and samples: Bertrand_BitsXI_BadHabits.zip

Regular readers of my blog might have realised that I am a huge advocate of subscribable calendars and the data format that underpins them – iCalendar. On 8th Feb 2012 I wrote a blog post entitled SQLBits now publishing all SQLBits agendas as an iCalendar where I told how the SQLBits committee had published the agenda of the forthcoming SQLBits ...

Over the last year or so it will not have escaped my regular readers’ attention that much of my blogging has centred around SSDT database projects. SSDT (and its variously named forebears) is a tool that I have been using in some way, shape or form since 2007 and in that time I have built up what I feel is a sound body of knowledge and experience; ...

Ever heard of SQLPeople.net? It is a website set up by Andy Leonard to showcase members of the SQL Server community by asking them the following questions: Everyone’s an accidental DBA (or database professional) – what’s your story? How’d you become a SQLPerson? What’s your favorite part of your current gig? Complete this sentence: “If ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions last Friday and Saturday at SQLbits! It was great to meet many new people, not to mention spending some time exploring one of my favorite cities, London. Attached are the demos for each of the two talks I delivered: Query Tuning Mastery: The Art of and Science of Manhandling ParallelismAs a database ...

Three weeks ago I published a blog post Get the SQLBits agenda in your phone's calendar where I said: If you want to get the SQLBits calendar onto your smartphone then the easiest way to do it is add my calendar [containing all SQLBits sessions] to whichever calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google) you have got synced to your phone and ...

For SQLBits 8 in April 2011 I published a calendar containing all of the sessions from the conference; anyone could subscribe to that calendar on their phone or calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google Calendar). For the upcoming SQLBits X conference I have done the same again by adding all of the sessions to that same calendar. If you are ...

I ran across this recording about 3 months ago.  It is a recording that is open to everyone.  It was recorded at SQLBits 7 with Christian Bolton as the speaker for a session entitled: ''Consolidating data collection with SQLDIAG and analysing it all with SQLNexus''.  I found it very informative and hope that you will ...

I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting. Instead, I’m going to pick a few people ...