This precon is a full day session where we will be talking about all the security best practices.

Signing up for the precon is pretty simple, just do to the URL for the precon and fill out the form.

I hope to see you there,
Denny

If you aren’t going to be attending the event which you’ve been picked as a speaker for, you probably know that you aren’t going to be attending at least a few days in advance, at least the day before as that’s probably when your flight would have been.  You owe it to the event team and to the attendees to tell the event team that you aren’t going to be able to make it and that they should fill your spot with another speaker.

If you don’t tell the event team that you aren’t going to be there, you look like a putz.

In the last year there have been a lot of instances of speakers just not showing up for SQL Saturday events.  It has gotten bad enough that some of these speakers are starting to get a reputation as being people that won’t show up to present their session.  That means that these speakers have skipped their sessions several times, at least.  Just because a SQL Saturday is a free conference doesn’t mean that you can skip on your sessions.  Yes as a speaker you aren’t getting paid to attend, and it’s probably costing you money out of your pocket for airfare, hotel, rental car, etc.  But you knew that this was the case before you submitted, so just because it turned out to be more than you were expecting you need to either figure something out, or give the team as much notice as possible that you can’t make it.

If you have found yourself in this situation I implore you to stop submitting to the SQL Saturday’s unless you are 100% sure that you’ll be able to attend.  It isn’t fair to the event team that’s putting together the event to have to stress out over you not being there.  It isn’t fair to the event team that has to deal with upset attendees that the session that they wanted to attend isn’t happening (if you think that people don’t complain when a session at a free event doesn’t happen as scheduled you are very wrong).  And most importantly it isn’t fair to the session attendees who expected to see a session but aren’t able to because you didn’t show up.

If the event team knows in advance, even a day in advance that you aren’t going to be there they can find a replacement.  The speakers who are there will have all their other slide decks with them.  Odds are there’s another speaker there who can fill in.  If the session that you are scheduled to present doesn’t get presented then you are letting down the people who have cleared a day from their schedule to see you present that session.  You are letting down the event team who have trusted you to give the presentation.  If the event team didn’t trust you they would have given the spot to someone else.

A perfect example happened at SQL Saturday Nashville in 2012.  One of the speakers had to back out at the last minute due to a family emergency.  They told the organizers, and then organizers were able to find another speaker who had a session they could present on a similar topic.  The schedule didn’t need to be changed, the attendees weren’t upset.  Just instead of a woman presenting they got a man.  But they still got the information that they were looking for, and after all that is the most important thing when it comes to these events.

Sadly there isn’t really a great way to fix this, except for speakers to ensure that they present the sessions that they have committed to present.  As speakers if we don’t shape up about this the event organizers are going to start tracking this (I know that some events already do) which means that those speakers that don’t make it to their sessions aren’t going to get picked and it’ll probably end up being impossible to get off that list.  Which will lead to not being accepted for larger and bigger conferences.  As speakers if we don’t police ourselves and ensure that this doesn’t happen the people that run these events that we like speaking at will find a way to police us.  And I’m sure that it won’t be very fun.

Denny

The keynote presentations for this conference will be delivered by Steven D. Levitt, Kamal Hathi and Amir Netz.

This conference is going to be full of some fantastic sessions which will help you use technology to find the information in the mountain of data that your company has been collecting. Without knowing how to get access to the information that is within all the data there’s no hope of running business operations at their peak performance.  Don’t forget the full day pre-con sessions where the speaker can really dive into the topic at hand.

Still not sure that you want to attend, the conference has recorded some previews of a few of the speakers and sessions that you’ll be able to see at the PASS BA Conference which you can watch, for free from the comfort of your home or office.

If you’d like another great reason to attend, I’ve got 200 of them for you through a $200 discount on the cost of attending the conference.  Just use the discount code BAC984BL when you register to save $200 off of the cost of this great conference.  So get registered for the conference today.

Denny

The session which I presented at SQL Saturday was titled “SQL Server Indexing for the .NET Developer” where I talk to a group of mostly application developers about SQL Server indexes, what they do, and some of the overall best practices for SQL Server indexes.

You can download the slide deck from my site.

If you attended the SQL Saturday I hope that you had as great a time as I did, and if not hopefully I’ll see you at the next SQL Saturday.

Denny

Denny Cherry – SQL Server Security

Dave Ballantyne and Dave Morrison – TSQL and internals

Mladen Prajdić – From SQL Traces to Extended Events – The next big switch.

André Kamman – Powershell 3.0 for SQL Server Administrators and Developers

Christian Bolton and Gavin Payne – Mission critical data platforms on Windows Server 2012

I hope that you’ll select to attend one of these great pre-cons (mine is right there at the top of the list) as well as the full day of training provided on Saturday for free.

Denny

During this full day precon we will review a variety of ways to secure your SQL Server databases and data from attach.  In this session we will review proper network designs, recommended firewall configurations, and physical security options.  We will also review our data encryption options, password protection options, using contained databases, and AlwaysOn Availability Groups security.  There will also be discussions about additional measures which should be taken when working with Internet facing applications.

From there we will move to the most dangerous attack vector SQL Injection including all the ways that attackers can use SQL Injection to get into your system and how to protect against it.  The security options for database backups is the next topic on the list followed by proper SAN security designs.  We will then finish up by reviewing the auditing options which are available and how they can be used to monitor everything else which we’ve just talked about during the course of the day.

If you are interested in attending the precon check out the precon page on the SQL South West website which has the registration link.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Denny

All of the keynotes from this years conference not only are the keynotes being streamed live, but many of the sessions are also being streamed live via the SQL PASS website on PASS TV.  The full schedule can found on the PASS TV page.

Bill Grazino told us turning his keynote that pass has sponsored 9 non-PASS events around the world.  Including these 9 events, pass has provided well over 500,000 hours of training to members of the community, much of it like SQL Saturday’s, User Groups, etc. being available to the attendees free of charge.  PASS has created a business analytics specific conference which will be held April 10-12 2013 in Chicago, IL.  More information will be available on the SQL PASS website shortly.

When Ted Kummert took the stage he talked about some of the great products that Microsoft has released this year including SQL Server 2012, the Surface, Windows Server 2012, Office 2013 as well as many others. 

Ted announced that SQL Server 2012 has been released as of today.  This release aligns with Office 2013 and the new SharePoint 2012.  Ted also announced project Hekaton which is a new in memory database engine which will be introduced within the next major release of SQL Server.  Project Hekaton is a fully in-memory database engine which will greatly improve OLTP performance.  While this new engine is a part of the SQL Server database engine, this portion has been totally rewritten to really maximize the hardware under the SQL Server database engine.

Including Product Hekaton is the Hekaton AMR Tool which (when renamed) will help identify bottlenecks which can be resolved by converting the database to a Hekaton database engine.  Because the Hekaton engine is running with the entire database being in memory latching has effectively been removed.  Hekaton also supports recompiling stored procedures from running T-SQL to running as native machine code.  This allows the stored procedures to run much, much faster without any actual code change.  While not all workloads are going to be right for the Hekaton database engine, but those that are should see a massive performance improvement.  Because project Hekaton runs within the same database engine that we have today if you know SQL Server you will already know how to work with a project Hekaton database.

Another great announcement is the clustered column store which will be introduced in the next major release of SQL Server.  Along with the clustered column store index we will also be able to update tables which have column store indexes created on them, no matter if the column store index is a clustered column store index or a non-clustered column store index.  This will introduce massive performance improvements to real time data warehouses and make data warehouses much easier to setup and performance tune; even with the largest workload.

For the non-relational side of things you can today download the Microsoft HDInsight Server CTP which is Microsoft’s Hadoop offering.

Ted also announced a new update to the Microsoft PDW which will be available in the 1st half of 2013 and will be called the SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse.  This update will include some of the features which will be included in the next major release of SQL Server such as the updatable column store index.  Another big enhancement of the new SQL Server 2012 PDW is that SQL Server Management Studio will now be the query tool which is used to run the queries against the PDW system.  During the demo against the PDW doing a simple count against a 1PB table the query ran in just a few seconds.  Doing data aggregations against the same table for a real world style reporting query the query again ran in just a few seconds.

The next announcement was Polybase.  Polybase allows you to query data from an external source from within the SQL Server 2012 PDW.  This will allow you to create an external table which simply links to a Hadoop cluster.  This will be done with the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE  statement which accepts the schema that you want and a hdfs URL to Hadoop without needing to create a linked server to the Hadoop cluster.

The next step of BI is here in SQL Server 2012 SP1 and Office 2013.  Office 2013 includes PowerView natively within the product.  It also supports some new mapping features natively within Office 2013 without any additional downloads or plugins.  This support includes term extraction which is done through HDInsight.  This allows us to view text data and extract names, sentiment, locations, etc. from simple text data and use those extracted strings in order to build PowerView reports.  PowerView also now supports DAX queries to a MOLAP cube straight out of the box.

Stay tuned for more updates from the PASS Summit through out the week.

Denny

What this sponsorship means is that the drinks are paid for, provided that you have a wristband which you have picked up from the Idera booth in the Exhibit hall Wednesday during the day.  If you don’t get a wristband, don’t worry you can still come and have a great time, the event isn’t limited to those with a wristband.  The only catch if you don’t have a wristband is that you’ll have to buy your own drinks.  Now don’t worry about singing, singing isn’t a requirement of attending SQL Karaoke.  Trust me. I can’t sing at all (see the videos below if you don’t believe me).

If you sing or don’t, if you have a wristband or not, the night is a great night, with some great singing, and some truly awful singing (this one probably isn’t safe for work) (yes I’m in all awful videos, this should give you an idea of my singing ability), it’s some awesome singing and an awesome night, and isn’t to be missed.

Now to be fair Bush Garden is small, cramped, hot, and the service can be a tad on the slow side (ok, that’s being pretty generous), but the vibe in the place is just right and SQL Karaoke just isn’t the same anywhere but Bush Garden (though we will try really hard next year in Charlotte) and pretty much everyone who attends has a great time.  If you don’t believe me, watch the videos above to get some idea of the insanity.

Spread the word, SQL Karaoke is just 6 days away.  Be there!

Denny

P.S. Don’t forget to head over to the Idera booth Wednesday during the exhibit hall hours to get a wristband for the drinks.

Do note that you’ll want to use the low-res version.  The high-res version doesn’t work.

The recording will be available there until October 2013, but you’ll probably want to watch the video before the summit.

See you at the summit,

Denny

However in order to get the free drinks you’ll need to go and see the fine folks at the Idera booth during the day while the exhibit hall is open.  At the Idera booth you’ll be able to pick up a wristband which is good for one night, and one night only.  After that the only thing you need to do is have some dinner and at about 9:30pm Wednesday night head over to Bush Garden.  Wristbands are given out first come, first served using what ever criteria the fine folks at the Idera booth come up with.

Bush Garden is about a 30 minute walk (I’d recommend walking in a group if you want to walk) from the convention center.  From the convention center walk down Pike (towards the water) and turn right on 6th.  Walk for about a mile then turn right on Jackson, then left on Maynard.  It’s about 2 1/2 blocks down on the left.

Unfortunately Bush Garden isn’t in the best of neighborhoods so do use caution.

Personally I recommend a taxi as I’m lazy and it’s a long walk.  A cab should cost you about $5 or so to get there from the convention center and/or hotel.

If you are looking for a great way to unwind and watch some people do some great singing (and some others make total fools of themselves) this is THE party to go to.  It’s also a great place to meet some of the MVPs as well as some of the folks from the product group.  If you aren’t sure what you are getting in for by attending, don’t forget to check out the website.

The wristbands to come with a budget attached, so drinks will be first come first served.  As always please don’t go overboard with drinking.

See you at Bush Garden,

Denny