Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group

Well wishes to our Mascot who is recovering. Let's all wish him a much better rest of the year.

We normally facilitate a small segment of time the third Wednesday of the month to get together and learn about SQL Server and related database technologies. 

We want to start out the first quarter of 2015 a little differently How about we trade you three Wednesday evening 1 hour sessions for 3 full day training classes? Would you take that trade? 

We are finalizing another round of Saturday classes. Back by popular demand, Mike Hotek is giving up more of his weekend time. 

The 3 days of topics coming the last Saturday in Feb and the first two Saturdays in March: 

Real World Data Warehouse Build

You’ve seen plenty of theoretical articles, lots of demos of disconnected snippets of solutions.  We’re going to take all of these items plus a lot more and put them together into something useable and practical to build a real solution from start to finish. This class will provide the knowledge necessary to implement all of the processes you need to quickly, flexibly, and incrementally build out a data warehouse.  You don’t need weeks of contiguous blocks of time, you just need a few hours here and there, directed appropriately to have a large impact. In this class we will cover the following:

Joyous tidings of autumnal coolness to you all. We are ecstatic to have Ryan Adams come out again and show us how to prevent harrowing tales of SQL outage. AlwaysOn has made database availability easier than ever. I encourage ALL of you to maintain your own learning labs, but if you don't want to spin up your Virtual library of lab machines at least check out the Microsoft labs: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/virtuallabs?id=J+avMPtWlXk. Search for "Exploring AlwaysOn Availability Groups in SQL Server 2014"

Abstract:

This session is 90% live demonstrations.  I'll walk you through a complete AlwaysOn deployment.  You will see firsthand how to install and configure an AlwaysOn Failover Cluster.  I'll also show you how to setup an AlwaysOn Availability Group across 5 nodes using both the GUI and T-SQL so you know why and when to use each method.  I'll finish up by showing how you can connect to a readable secondary.

Bio:

Ryan Adams is a SQL Server MVP and has worked for Verizon for 16 years. His primary focus is the SQL Server Engine, high availability, and disaster recovery. Previously he was a Senior Active Directory Architect and designed the company's worldwide Active Directory infrastructure.  He serves on the Board of Directors for the North Texas SQL Server User Group and is President of the PASS Performance Virtual Chapter. He is also a PASS Regional Mentor and holds the following certifications: MCP MCSA MCSE MCDBA MCTS MCITP

See you there,

The folks at the Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group

 Remember, we meet the third Wednesday of most months

Happy autumn everyone! We will not be facilitating any SQL fun this month, but we will be back in October with great stuff from Ryan Adams, so stay tuned. 

Happy birfday to us, happy birfday to us!! Happy birfday dear FWTHSSSWWUuuUG…

Doesn't that acronym just roll off your tongue…and get lodged somewhere in your front teeth?

The Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group (FWSSUG) turns 8 BIG YEARS old this July!

And what could be more fun on your bday than talking about Predictive Analytics? Not just any old predictive analytics, either. We have our very own, over-the-top-excited-about-BI Andy Eggers on stage with his SQL Saturday talk on his real world solutions. Come do a birthday B.I. shot with us!

Applied Predictive Analytics

The session will take a common Business customer loyalty program problem from beginning to end results. We will cover a framework of analyzing the business problem identifying additional sources of data or business considerations. Then applying techniques to identify the potential customers and placing the business problem into an opportunity, which not only helps the customer but also benefits the company. The results of these efforts I was able to generate 40.1 million dollars of additional sales revenue, which translated into 18 million of Earnings before interest and taxes.

Andy Eggers failed to provide me a speaker bio, so I get to cut loose and make up another one!

Andy man is one of the officers of our local users group and about the most enthusiastic supporter of education for the SQL community. Andy always keeps us focused and driving toward education with pure intent. If you want to see this guy get passionately animated, let him start talking about his business intelligence initiatives or educating the community. 

Topic:  One of the new features in SQL Server 2014, In memory OLTP (Hekaton) can change the landscape for applications that need extremely high performance write activity.  In this session, we’ll do a deep dive into Hekaton from the implementation and development side to understand how an in memory OLTP table can work with your applications and the implications it has for application design.

Speaker Bio:

Mike Hotek has lectured, authored and consulted all over the world and is currently the Senior Business Intelligence Architect at CBRE. He is finishing up his 10th SQL Server book this month. He has enabled a huge variety of companies in numerous industries with SQL Server tools since before it was a Microsoft product (long time). 

See you there,

The folks at the Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group

The yellow laptop is back! This Wednesday is yellow Wednesday. Hmmm.... wonder if we can find yellow food again this time? One of our favorites is back to straighten us out on something developers always notice about most database folks. As a group, we are not great about basic source control. 

Abstract:  Ever wanted to see what has changed since the last time you looked, or work with someone else and realize you've both changed the same stored procedure?   Do you really enjoy searching through folder after folder of obscure .sql files to find the query you might or might not have saved last week?  There is a better way, and it doesn't have to be a hassle.  In this session we'll look at why you would want a revision management system and options (build or buy, free or fee) to implement one for yourself or your team. 

Speaker Bio:

Tim Costello is an MCITP, MCTS specializing in etl and data analytics for Interworks Inc. Tim is an international speaker that is always looking for opportunities to share his passion for SQL Server, Tableau and data visualization. Tim is active in the SQL community and leads a data visualization focused user group in the Dallas area.

If you have ever had a Kerberos or SSPI context error, then you won't want to miss this session.  SQL Server has a large surface area and Active Directory can influence a big part of it.  I will discuss AD DNS configuration, Group Policy Objects, Kerberos (of course), and how all of them affect your SQL Server.  By the end of the session you'll have a check list of things to discuss with your domain administrator when you return to work.

Ryan Adams has worked for Verizon for 16 years. His primary focus is the SQL Server Engine, high availability, and disaster recovery. Previously he was a Senior Active Directory Architect and designed the company's worldwide Active Directory infrastructure.  He serves on the Board of Directors for the North Texas SQL Server User Group and is President of the PASS Performance Virtual Chapter. He also serves as a Regional Mentor for PASS and holds the following certifications: MCP MCSA MCSE MCDBA MCTS MCITP.

Big thanks to Ryan Adams for waking up the neighbors in Fort Worth. 

See you there!

_{6:30 PM Meet & Greet | 7 PM Presentation}

DB_Ops Evolved - Be the Proactive Hero

Everybody thinks of DB_Ops as a necessary evil - the people who run the backups & defrag the indexes.  But that's the tip of the iceberg.  We'll run the gamut, from basic free tools and code you're hopefully already using, to hacking the SSISDB catalog to get useful emails, improving on Microsoft's replication monitoring, centralizing your Eventlogs & Errorlogs, environment-wide monitoring based on scripts you write, even changing settings on dozens of server instantly & painlessly.

And we'll tie it all together with use cases garnered from years of automation.  

Don't just be That Guy - show everyone what Ops can do!

About the presenter

Ah, the presenter declined to give a blurb about himself. How shall we repay such humility? Mwah hah hah ah…

A quick cyber stalking reveals that Michael Bourgon tweets at @Mbourgon  and blogs as the Baking DBA.

This guy will shell your ispacs, do wonders with your eventing and in general rock your environment. You won't want to miss a tour of his fav tools tricks.

See you there!

Remember, we meet the third Wednesday of most months. 

_{^{6:30 PM Meet & Greet | 7 PM Presentation}} 

Our funny valentine this year is Tim Mitchell and his SSIS design patterns will make your heart flutter, so don't miss out.

Handling Errors and Anomalies in SSIS

Even in the most reliable ETL system, it's eventually going to happen: A package will fail, an output row count won't match what is expected, a data anomaly will force a forensic search of the package infrastructure... In this session, we'll talk about some of the things that can go wrong during package execution - and some of the defenses that can be built into SSIS to help head off those errors (or at least make the errors easier to troubleshoot). From error handlers to package restartability, and from logging methods to row count validation and remediation, we'll cover various ways to keep your ETL flowing when problems arise.

About the Presenter

Tim Mitchell is a business intelligence consultant, author, and trainer.  He has been working with SQL Server for a decade, working primarily in business intelligence, ETL/SSIS, data quality, and reporting.  He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M at Commerce, and has been a Microsoft SQL Server MVP since 2010.  Tim is an independent BI consultant and a group principal with Linchpin People.

As an active member of the community, Tim has spoken at international, regional, and local venues including the SQL PASS Summit, SQLBits, SQL Connections, SQL Saturday events, and various user groups and webcasts.  Tim is coauthor of the book SSIS Design Patterns, and is a contributing author on the charity book project MVP Deep Dives 2.  He is an active group member and speaker at the North Texas SQL Server User Group in the Dallas area.

You can visit his website and blog at TimMitchell.net or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/Tim_Mitchell.

See you there!

Remember, we meet the third Wednesday of most months. 

We Meet on the Third Wednesday of most months

6:30 PM Meet & Greet | 7 PM Presentation

A mere 8 days from now we kick off the 2014 learning season with an incredibly seasoned and delightful speaker you don't want to miss.

Bryan Smith is a Business Intelligence Technology Specialist with Microsoft and you see him anywhere SQL Server is on tap. It's not a complete SQL Conference if he's not there and we are honored to have him in Fort Worth.

Wednesday night, January 15th, We will explore Hadoop through a combination of presentation and demonstration leveraging HDInsight and C#. Our objective will be to focus on the fundamentals of the technology so that we might then discuss where Hadoop best fits in an enterprise data platform strategy.