I am pleased to announce a free community event. The week of PASS Summit, a few friends have agreed to come together and host a day of training. This is an event for all data professionals who happen to be in the area the days leading up to Summit but may not be able to attend one of the Summit Precons.  Here are the details for the workshops we will be presenting. All ticket sales are final and non-refundable.

We invite you to attend a day of training presented by this ragtag group of friends. Among us you will find four MCMs, 4 MVPs, and Friends of RedGate. There will be six sessions with a lunch break during the day. While the training is free, we do ask a cover charge for the lunch. The lunch will be $25 per person.

Important: We understand many may not be able to attend an entire day due to meetings or travel or what have you. If you can only attend for half the day or just one session, please don't hesitate to stop in. For those wishing to attend but will not be able to attend the entire day or wish to do something different for lunch, please use NoLunch17 as a discount code so we know you are coming and we can plan for it.

Again, that code is NoLunch17

All (including discounted) ticket sales are non-refundable.

**Light snacks will be provided.

Sessions to be Presented. (While these sessions will be presented, the order of appearance may change.)

In this “demo-tastic” presentation, SSIS trainer, author, and consultant Andy Leonard explains the what, why, and how of an SSIS framework that delivers metadata-driven package execution, connections management, and centralizes logging. Key takeaways: 1) Developers can migrate packages from Development, through their lifecycle, to Production without editing SSIS Connection Managers properties. 2) A metadata-driven approach to SSIS package execution. 3) Demonstration of a centralized logging reporting application.

What is this "SQL Inj/stuff/ection", and how does it affect me?

You have heard all the clamor about SQL injection and just how bad it is, but what is SQL Injection? Is SQL Injection really as prevalent as the news makes it out to be?

Join me on a journey today as I show you how to compromise a server through SQL Injection. I will show you the various different methods that can be employed to cause an injection attack.

After I show you how to hack your server with an injection attack, I will show you how to secure your server to prevent such an attack. Even better, I will discuss possible response plans in the event that you are the victim of an attack. After attending this session, you will likely recognize some possible times you may have seen an injection attack or the fallout of an attack. This session will help better arm you with the knowledge to understand the attack while it is happening and how to prevent it in the future.

Parameter sniffing and other cases of the confused optimiser

The SQL Server query optimiser is incredibly good at its job. It can generate good, fast execution plans for 1 row, three table OLTP queries and 1 billion row, all the tables analytics queries and just about everything in between.

But it’s not perfect, and there are query patterns that will send the optimiser for a complete loop and the query execution times through the roof.

We’re going to look at the more common of those query patterns and see exactly what it is about them that causes problems. We’ll spend some time on ways of identifying such queries in production and we’ll look at a variety of ways to write the queries so that they work with the optimiser, not against it.

Along the way you’ll learn enough about the behaviour of the optimiser to be able to identify other problematic query forms before they cause problems.

Implementing a Hierarchy in SQL Server

One of the more common data structures you will come across in the real world is a hierarchy, sometimes a single parent "tree" or more commonly a multi-parent "graph". Many systems will implement the obvious examples, such as a corporate managerial structure or a bill of materials, however, it turns out that almost any many-to-many relationship can be treated as a hierarchy (for example, a customer to the products they purchased, or the relationship of actors to movies they’ve been in). In this session, we’ll discuss several implementations of trees and graphs using interesting algorithms and built in T-SQL features (CTEs and SQL Graph) that you can use to optimize your hierarchy implementations and put into practice immediately (along with ready-made T-SQL example code.)

Intro to Monitoring I/O: The Counters That Count

For many engineers, interpreting disk I/O is a black art.  Yet analyzing perfmon, virtual file stats, and wait stats can be straightforward. This session provides authoritative, clear guidance on collecting & interpreting disk I/O metrics.  The six authoritative disk counters will be introduced, as well as means by which to leverage two key DMVs to provide the context without which their output is of limited value.

For many engineers, interpreting disk I/O is a black art. Yet analyzing perfmon, virtual file stats, and wait stats can be straightforward. This session provides authoritative, clear guidance on collecting & interpreting disk I/O metrics.

Dolly, Footprints and a Dash of eXtra timE

Do you have database sprawl? Is your database sprawl come with a pinch of data bloat? Is this condition also required to be replicated to your Development environments with regularly refreshes from another environment? These are common symptoms your database may experience when exposed to heavy binging on data. Not only is this condition deadly to your production environment and the storage capacity there, but it is highly contagious and can easily tombstone your available storage in the development environments.

If you are being subjected to any of these symptoms or able to index this syndrome in your environment, this session is for you! I will share, with you, a tool that was designed specifically to cure these problems. This tool is called SQL Clone and was developed by Red-Gate.

In this sesison will demonstrate the use of this tool to reduce the storage footprint required in Dev, Test, Stage, QA, UAT, etc etc etc. Based on client case study involving a 2TB database, we will see how this tool can help shrink that footprint to just under 2% – give or take. I will share some discoveries I met along the way and I even hope to show some internals from the SQL Server perspective when using this technology (can somebody say Extended Events to the Rescue?).

SPEAKER BIOS

Jason Brimhall has 10+ yrs experience and has worked with SQL Server from 6.5 through SQL 2014. He has experience in performance tuning, high transaction environments, and with very large environments. He is currently a consultant specializing in performance tuning, server analysis and problem resolution.  Jason is a Microsoft Certified Master(MCM) and Microsoft MVP for the Data Platform. He has also been the VP of the Las Vegas User Group (SSSOLV).

Wayne Sheffield, a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server, started working with xBase databases in the late 80's. With over 20 years in IT, he has worked with SQL Server (since 6.5 in the late 90's) in various dev/admin roles, with an emphasis in performance tuning. He is the author of several articles at www.sqlservercentral.com, a co-author of SQL Server 2012 T-SQL Recipes, and enjoys sharing his knowledge by presenting at SQL PASS events and blogging at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne

Andy Leonard is a Data Philosopher at Enterprise Data & Analytics, an SSIS Trainer, Consultant, and developer, a Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) developer and BimlHero, SQL Server database and data warehouse developer, community mentor, engineer, and farmer. He is a co-author of SQL Server Integration Services Design Patterns, and author of Managing Geeks - A Journey of Leading by Doing, and the Stairway to Integration Services..

Louis Davidson has worked in the IT industry for over 15 years as a corporate database developer and architect. He has been a Microsoft SQL Server MVP for 10 years and has written five books on database design. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. You can read more about Louis at http://drsql.org.

Jimmy May is a SQL Server Solutions Architect for the Data Propulsion Labs at SanDisk.  He is a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM).  He's formerly a Principal Architect at Microsoft as well as Senior Program Manager for the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQL CAT) where he managed the Customer Lab which hosts the biggest, fastest, & most interesting SQL Server apps from all over the world.  He is a founder of the IndyPASS & IWUG user groups.

Gail Shaw is a Database Specialist focusing on database performance tuning and database recovery, with a particular interest in topics such as indexing strategies, execution plans, and writing T-SQL code that performs well and scales gracefully.

Gail holds a Microsoft Certified Master certification for SQL Server 2008 and is a Data Platform MVP. She is a frequent poster on the SQL Server Central forums, writes articles for both SQLServerCentral.com and Simple-Talk.com, and has spoken at SQL Saturdays locally and internationally, SQL Bits and at the PASS Community Summit.

Gail has been responsible for extending the lifespan of many an application by performance-tuning their databases as well as providing technical guidance on all things SQL Server related.

She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.