SQL Saturday in Washington D.C. December 8, 2012

This is my first time attending a SQL Saturday event and I’m quite excited. If you live in or near the D.C. Metro area I hope to see you there. If you have not registered, you still have a chance:

http://sqlsaturday.com/173/eventhome.aspx

I’ve put together a short list of the sessions that I am planning to attend with some brief reasons why. Hope to see you all there!

9:00 AM Session – Mike Walsh
DBA Worst Practices, Disasters and Horror Stories – Although this is a course labeled for beginners, I’m always looking for ways to improve my own understanding. The best way to make yourself a better DBA is to know what could make you a worse DBA and not to do it!!

10:15 AM Session – David Klee
Virtualizing Business Critical SQL Servers – Virtualization is a hot topic these days and there are plenty of “how-to” and best practices videos. I’m more interested in learning the Business reasoning behind these sorts of decisions. I’m not a huge fan of Virtualizing production SQL Server systems, but I don’t want my bias to cause me to over look something that maybe very good in my environment. Let’s see if David can convince me.

11:30 AM Session – Allen White
PowerShell 101 for the SQL Server DBA – I’ve played with PowerShell before, and it is quite intimidating. This is a great chance to finally get a crash course in PowerShell from a SQL Server MVP. There are lots of other SQL professionals talking about and using PowerShell. I’d like to start to learn about it and how it can be important to my work as a DBA that has many servers to manage.

12:30 PM – LUNCH – I’m actually going to leave at this point because I have other plans for the rest of the day. However, if I were to stay, these are the sessions I would consider attending.

1:30 PM Session – Two choices actually intrigue me.
William Pearson – Getting Started with MDX: The (Very) Basics – I’m definately a fan of SSAS and I would love to learn about MDX from scratch so I can make better use of it in the Cubes I develop. However, I don’t use SSAS that frequently so this is a nice to have.
Derek Dai – “ColumnStore” Indexes for Fast EDW Query – ColumnStore is an awesome addition to SQL 2012 and is also used heavily in the PDW application. I’ve learned about it before, but I would love to dig in deeper and figure out places where this may help in our Data Warehouse/Datamart environments when we move to SQL 2012. Again, no pressing urge since we’re not at SQL 2012, but a definite good to know.

2:45 PM Session – Stacia Misner
Taking BI to the Next Level: Collaboration – This is definitely a session that I’m sad I won’t be able to attend since I have to leave early. We have all these great BI Dashboards/Reports and other products that we’ve put together over the years. But this scattered approach makes finding and correlating information more difficult. It would be nice to have a collaborative platform to use BI where everyone in an organization can benefit and produce better decisions with the BI data provided.

4:00 PM Session – Andy Leonard & Darryll Petrancuri
Loading Data Warehouse Partitions with SSIS 2012 – Now this is darn cool! Lots of folks (including myself) have a DW or DM environment where data loads are done through T-SQL using partitioned tables. How about loading them with SSIS, using SSRS to report on Partition metrics, and using SSIS to create some Dynamic SQL? Sounds really interesting and useful for my current needs.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and let us know what sessions you are going to attend and why.