Tag Archives: Presentation

Wheeling, WV to Houston, TX – A SQL Saturday #57 Recap..

Posted on February 1, 2011 by johnsterrett| 3 Comments

Everyone, If you attended SQL Saturday #57 in Houston, TX thank the host and the sponsors. With out their dedication and hard work this event wouldn’t have happened.  Finally, if you haven’t done so submit a speaker evaluation for the sessions you attended.

Now that the basics are covered lets move on to the recap.

Why Houston?

Last week I took a trip out to H-Town to speak at my eighth venue in the last twelve months.  Family was a huge motivator for attending SQL Saturday #57.  Being a graduate of James E. Taylor High School in Katy, Texas I was able

John Sterrett SQL Server 2008 for Developers Presentation

If you build it they will come!

to double dip and visit my parents and my oldest brother.  I flew in on Thursday to surprise my father for his birthday. I got an extra bonus when I arrived.  I found out that this was also going to be the same day my nephew was born.

Venue

On Saturday, we meet up at the church for the first SQL Saturday in Houston. Yes, that sentence is correct.  The Houston Area SQL User Group was able to get the Bammel Church of Christ to host the event. I have to be honest when I found out that a church was going to be used I was skeptical.  Normally, these events are at a community college, university or Microsoft Office.  I wondered if a church be a good venue for a SQL Saturday? I was right, it wasn’t a good venue. It was a fantastic venue.  Kudos to Nancy Hidy Wilson (Blog | Twitter) and the Houston User Group for selecting this venue.

Connecting (Volunteer & Speakers Dinner)

Normally, when I am selected to speak at a SQL Saturday I always attend the volunteer and speaker dinner and the after party. Its a great opportunity to network.  We met up at the Outback Steakhouse in Tomball.  I felt like I was back at summer camp as I hanged out with some friends and also made some new friends. (Thomas LeBlanc, Wes Brown, Ryan Adams, Jen and Sean McCowen, Sri Sridharan, Tim Mitchell and more…)

My favorite quote comes from Sri, “John you cannot say its a once in a lifetime opportunity. Your Steelers are always in the Super Bowl.”

Learning (Presentations I attended)

  • Dean Richards – Best Practices for SQL Server on VMWare
    With the economy changing we all need to find ways to do things cheaper. One of the easiest ways to do this is to virtualize your servers. The concept seams great but SQL Server can be tricky to manage.  How do you configure the guest memory? How does the host share its CPU power with guests? I learned this and a lot more during Deans session.
  • Ryan Adams – Manage Your Shop with CMS and Policy Based Management
    Those of you who know me know I am very excited about Central Management Server and Policy Based Management. I currently use it to evaluate my daily checklist against 100+ instances of SQL Server with 3,000+ databases.  I am extremely interested in seeing how other DBA’s use it.  Ryan is into mirroring and loves the mirroring facets provided with PBM.  I am glad he showed this to me.
  • Thomas LeBlanc – Transition from DBA to BI
    Any time I can sit in the front row on a sofa and watch Thomas speak its a win-win. This talk was special because  I got my learn on and felt like I was at comedy hour.  I enjoyed his path from DBA to BI.  I really liked how he was able to use his DBA skills to make a good first impression.  He also showed us a great spreadsheet out there on the interwebs to build a data dictionary for your facts and dimensions.

Sharing (My Presentations)

  • SQL Server 2008 for Developers (About 30 attendees)
    Every once in a while I submit this topic to see if people are still interested in seeing demos going over the new features provided for developers with SQL Server 2008.  During the presentation I polled the attendees to see who hasn’t migrated to SQL Server 2008.  There still is a crowd that wants to know how to implement DateTimeOffset, T-SQL enhancements,  Merge, Table Value Parameters, Change Data Capture.  I spoke right before lunch and had a few people stay extra to go over a bonus demo.  I also talked with a few of the attendees later in the day and I got some great feedback.If you attend my session please submit feedback.  You can find the slide deck and sample code on my blog.
  • Evaluate your Daily Checklist using CMS and Policy Based Management (5 Attendees)
    My PBM and CMS talk was included in the last session.  This was my first presentation using VMWare Workstation.  I did this for two reasons. One, Brent Ozar made me do it. Finally, I wanted to throw up an instance of SQL 2000 for this demo and I couldn’t do it with Windows 7.  Even though the crowed was small one attendees told me he is going to start using PBM and CMS due to my presentation. This is the greatest complement I could receive. 

    If you attend my session please submit feedback.  You can find the slide deck and sample code on my blog.

Bloggers SQL Saturday #57 Posts

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I want your vote for #SQLRally

Posted on January 26, 2011 by johnsterrett| Leave a comment

Hello Everyone, I am John Sterrett coming to you from Wheeling, WV and I need your vote for SQL Rally! I need your vote because I eager to share what I have learned about Policy Based Management and Central Management Server in the past four months.  This presentation will give people the knowledge they need to start evaluating a daily checklist.

Let me take a step back for a second and explain. I am currently responsable for over 100+ Instances of SQL with more than 3,000 databases.  We rarely didn’t evaluated a daily checklists against all of our production databases until I learned about Central Management Server and Policy Based Management.  Now, I can evaluate my daily checklist in the amount of time it takes to get up out of my seat and brew a cup of coffee.  I am eager to show you multiple ways to start evaluating your checklists.

What is SQLRally?

 SQLRally is PASS’ new regional event that fills the gap between our free PASS SQLSaturday 1-day training events and PASS Summit, the world’s largest conference for the SQL Server community. One of my favorite parts about SQLRally is that the community votes for the presentations.

Hopefully, I will be selected to speak at the first annual SQLRally. Regardless, I look forward to presenting this abstract at user groups, virtual chapters and  future SQL Saturday’s. In fact, I am giving this presentation at SQLSaturday in Houston this Saturday. If you would want me to deliver this abstract or one of my other presentations contact me.

How do I vote?

 Click here to vote. You will see my session under the fifth group (PBM).  You get two votes for this catagory so I will also recommend Jorge Segarra  (Blog | @SQLChicken) because I wouldn’t be using PBM without his contrubutions to the community.

What am I voting for again…..

Evaluate your daily checklist against 100+ instances of SQL Server while you get a cup of coffee

Abstract

You will walk away from this session with an understanding of how to use the Policy Based Management and Central Management Server to complete a daily checklist against your whole SQL Server farm. We will cover the basics to evaluate, monitor and apply best practice policies, which are included out of the box with SQL Server 2008. We will also make custom policies to cover additional best practices to evaluate daily checklist items. Finally, we will combine Policy-Based Management and Central Management Server with the Enterprise Policy Management Framework on codeplex to automate the monitoring process and create manager friendly reports to monitor your checklist items against the whole SQL Server farm.

Deliverables

  • You will be able to install and configure Central Management System
  • You will be able to use CMS and/or PBM to complete a daily checklist
  • You will be able to evaluate and build custom policies.

Session Prerequisites:

Session prerequisites assume you are familiar with SQL Server Management Studio, have an instance of SQL Server 2008, and that you have administrative access with SQL Server. You don’t have to be familiar with Policy-Based Management or Central Management Server, you will learn the basics during this session.

Related Posts:

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Un-SQL Friday #2 – My Tech Giants

Posted on January 21, 2011 by johnsterrett| 6 Comments

UnSQL Friday #2

The second round of UnSQL Friday is here and the topic is so good I am typing while I eat lunch rushing to beat the deadline to get this in. UnSQL Friday was created by Jen of @MidnightDBA’s to provide an avenue for SQL Bloggers to focus on a non-technical topic. The topic is as follows:

“Read this blog, and then write whatever you want about Tech Giants. Be sure to mention in your blog that you’re writing for Un-SQL Friday, and link to this post. Oh, and have it up any time before the weekend (Saturday Jan 22) hits, mmkay?”

Jen said, to write about whatever I want so here we go!  I am using this venue as an opportunity to say thanks to a bunch of people who have helped become who I am today. I will also explain how they fit into my definition of a Tech Giant.

There are several other people I could include but I have a deadline so I will have to find another way to thank them later.

What is a Tech Giant?

This definition is subjective and will be defined differently from blogger to blogger so here is my definition. To me a Tech Giant is someone I look up too within IT; someone who has helped me out; someone who is mentoring me; someone who is mentoring me without even knowing that they are mentoring me.

In no particular order here is a list explaining why these individuals peeps are my tech giants:

David Hoerster, Eric Kepes & John Hidey

David Hoerster, Eric Kepes & John Hidey: These are three stand up .NET developers who are highly involved in Pittsburgh .NET User Group and the Pittsburgh code camp for years. To this day I will always remember my first code camp four years ago. The next year they gave me my first public speaking opportunity. Every year the Code Camp in Pittsburgh gets bigger and bigger. This year there were two code camps with over 150 attendees.  David, Eric and John showed me first hand how important it is to give back to your technical community.

Side Note: How the heck are none of these guys a Microsoft MVP? This almost makes me question the MVP program. I am going to do my part in correcting this by nominating them at the Microsoft MVP site.

Thomas LaRock aka SQLRockStar

Tom LaRock: Last year Tom asked the community if anyone wanted to have a mentor on his blog.  I jumped on this opportunity and we have been skyping (is this actually a word?) monthly. His book (check out my review) and those sessions have shaved years off my learning curve moving from a developer to becoming a valuable Production DBA.

I finally meet Tom in person at the 2010 SQL Pass Member Summit. He introduced me to almost everyone in the community that week. It’s weird, in a way I feel like he is my older brother from another mother.

Tom also has a great blog. In my opinion it’s one of the most entertaining technical blogs out there because he does a good job teaching with stories. A perfect example is “Everything I Needed to Know about Waits and Queues I learned From the TSA.”

Side Note: Other than his addiction to bacon and being a Patriots fan he is a great guy! Can you tell I am a die hard Pittsburgh Sports Fan?

Brent Ozar

I love this book!

Brent Ozar: I ran into Brent virtually two years ago at the Pittsburgh SQL User Group. At the end of his presentation he challenged the crowd to start blogging. I found his intro to blogging series and gave it a try.  A little later I was hooked.  Brent made me a syndicated blogger at SQLServerPedia. People will see this blog post because he took a chance on a new blogger.

Its amazing how much time and energy he puts into the SQL PASS Community with his presentations and blog posts.  His blog is a great resource for SQL Server, Professional Development, Speaking and Blogging.  Did I mention that he also co-authored one of the best SQL Server books (its the image on the left side)?

Side Note: I am working on creating a VMWare Workstation image right now due to his blog post on “How to rehears a Presentation.” Brent, I will be shooting you some question soon :-)

Andy Warren

Andy Warren: The first SQL Saturday in West Virginia wouldn’t have happened without Andy’s help.  Andy and I had several phone calls where he gave me the guidance I needed to make it happen. He helped me from the point where I wondered,can I make this happen up to the week of the event.  Now, I have spoken at three SQL Saturdays and am adding another one to the list next week.  I don’t think this would have happened without Andy’s support.

Side Note: At SQL PASS Summit I learned that Andy is referred to as the godfather of SQL Server. I am not sure why this is true. I will have to follow-up with more at a later date.

Justin Siebert

Justin Siebert: There is no way I am going skip the great state of West Virginia. And there is no one better qualified than Justin. He started his own consulting company to provide Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. He now does business with Fortune 500 companies.  He is a big supporter of LAMP and is doing great things with WordPress.  His website is a perfect example.

Once he found out I was interested in blogging he talked me into using WordPress. Justin gives me several tips on WordPress and SEO and has never asked for money.   He also pulls me aside every once in a while to make sure I am focused on my goals and heading down the right path.

Side Notes: some people call Justin by his name. I call him the SEORockStar.  Justin and I might be the only remaining die-hard Pittsburgh Pirates fans left in Wheeling (Yes the owner Bob Nutting also lives in Wheeling).

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You don’t have to be an expert to speak

Posted on December 9, 2010 by johnsterrett| 7 Comments

Brent Ozar recently posted a great blog post for people who are setting goals to speak in 2011.  His post motivated me to do one for people who are interested in speaking but don’t because they think you must be an expert.  I have a secret for you, I use to be one of those people. If you learn anything from me please check out the next sentence.  You don’t have to be an expert to speak in the SQL Server community.

I am not an expert but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night...

I am not an expert but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night...

I have proof that you don’t have to be an expert to speak.  I did a lightning talk at the world’s largest and best conference for SQL Server professionals and while I strive to be an expert I have a long way to go!

In my opinion speaking is just like playing any sport.  You cannot get better if you don’t get out there and practice, practice, practice. If you don’t practice speaking how can you become an expert speaker? The SQL Server Community is awesome and they have your back. There are several avenues for people to start speaking.  Experts are also willing to give you pointers along your way to help you get better.

What should I talk about?

This one is easy, talk about what you know. A list of tips or best practices you have discovered through your quest of SQL Server greatness would be a great start.   Recently, I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out how I could monitor and apply best practices to my SQL Server farm.  I compiled my notes and a presentation was born.

A well known speaker already submitted my topic

Submit your topic anyway.  Speakers usually submit multiple topics expecting to only do a couple presentations. If you submit your abstract it might get accepted so the other speaker can do another presentation.  Andy Warren (blog | @sqlandy) just wrote a blog post about missing an opportunity to speak. Andy thinks that  too many speakers is a good thing.

Where should I speak?

There are several options for you to  speak do your thing:

If you have never submitted a session to a User Group, SQL Saturday, Virtual chapter do it.  Trust me, if I can give a presentation anyone can.

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SQLPASS Lightning Talk Video

Posted on November 10, 2010 by johnsterrett| 1 Comment

Profiling 3rd Party Applications

Today I am giving a lightning talk at the PASS Member Summit in Seattle, WA.  A lightning talk is a quick fire five minute talk given by seven individuals during a single session.  My topic is going to cover using profiler to troubleshoot 3rd party applications.  Profiler can be intimidating when you start to use it.  My goal is to make the use of Profiler easier for people who don’t use it.

If you are not at the Summit or decided to skip out on the lightning talks I have good news for you.  I have uploaded one of my practice sessions for you to see.

Links

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Speaking at PASS Member Summit 2010

Posted on November 9, 2010 by johnsterrett| Leave a comment

I am excited to share with everyone that I am speaking at the PASS Summit in Seattle on Wednesday this week.   The Summit is by far the biggest event for database administrators and anyone who likes to work with data. I would refer to it as the Super Bowl for Database Administrators.  I will be participating in both a chalk talk and lightning talk.

Chalk-Talk is a forty minute interactive talk in the vendor expo hall.  I will be presenting SQL Server 2008 for Developers with a twist.  I will provide a list of topics and the crowd (yes this is you everyone) can pick the topics we cover.  That’s right everyone, even though I think Table Value Parameters is the most under used feature for developers we can skip it if you are more interested in other topics.

Lightning-Talk is a quick five minute talk about anything the speaker wants to talk about.  There is a session each day dedicated to Lightning talks and they will include seven speakers.  I will give a talk over using Profiler to troubleshoot third party applications.  This tip was very important to me when I became a production DBA and I am sure it will help others.

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Wheeling, WV to Dallas, TX? A SQL Saturday 56 Recap

Posted on October 28, 2010 by johnsterrett| 4 Comments

Why would I travel from Wheeling, WV to Dallas, TX to speak at a free SQL Saturday? First, of all SQL Saturday’s in general are bleeping awesome. In a nutshell SQL Saturday is an all day multi-track, multi-session learning opportunity to learn SQL Server.  SQL Saturday #56 was was the first Business Intelligence SQL Saturday in the nation.  Second, I am blessed to have a great mother-in-law and father-in-law in Dallas and I enjoy hanging out with them so this was a huge bonus. Third, I enjoy connecting with people in the SQL Server Community so I can network and talk shop and see how we do things differently.

Facility & Logistics

First of all let me say this Pittsburgh we got gipped. Microsoft’s Campus in Dallas (yes campus not floor) was super cool. When I walk in the main door the first thing I saw was servers. You know I am a geek when I love the fact that servers are the first thing I see when I enter a business building. Anyways back to how the facility worked with the SQL Saturday event. The facility was a great fit for the 200+ attendees. There were several rooms that held 50 or more attendees and a gigantic room for the opening, main events and the end of day raffle. There were also some smaller rooms that brought everyone in closer and made for some good collaborative sessions.

Sessions

I attended Jen McCowen (twitter) SSRS from Ground Zero session and was very impressed especially when I found out Jen only had one day to prepare. I already know the basics in SSRS so I was really interested in picking up a few tips while I see how an experienced speaker gives an introduction session.  I really liked Jen’s style as she just dove straight into BIDS and went over key concepts you need to know to start using SSRS.  I also got to steal a few minutes after the presentation and see how she records her videos for midnightDBA.  For those out there who are interested in recording demos it looks like she uses Camtasia Studio and from what she showed me it looks like it’s not hard to use. More on camtasia a little later.

Another session I attended focused on evaluating use case personas for a new feature coming up in the next edition of SQL Server.  I really enjoyed this session because it basically was an hour group discussion about how we do things in our shop.   I would love to go into more details but I signed an NDA. 

My Session

I gave a talk on SQL Server 2008 for Developers.  Overall I think the session went well and I was glad to take part as a speaker.  The session was interactive as there were great questions from the audience.  I didn’t do a head count so I would estimate that there were about 30 attendees in the session. 

The host crew did a great job with speaker evaluations.  I even recieved my evaluations a few minutes after my session was complete.  In fact, I had a really helpful evaluation from an attendee who mentioned I should have went over Change Data Capture and MERGE in more detail and skipped the other features.   Being that this was a BI SQL Saturday I agree so I am going to evaluate Camtasia and see if I can record a video over these features and add them to my blog over the next two weeks.

Networking

On of my favorite parts of attending SQL Saturday is networking.  I was able to meet a lot of great people.  I apologize in advance as I am sure I am leaving some super cool people off this paragraph.  I meet Ryan Adams and had a great discussion about how he uses visual basic to perform actions on alerts with MOM for SQL Server. I also shared some information about our TFS configuration with Robert Crocker during lunch.  I also meet Thomas LeBlanc, Tim Mitchell, David Stein and had several great conversation in the speakers room and at the after party.

Other Posts

The following is a short list of other bloggers recaps on SQL Saturday 56

Conclusion

In conclusion this was a great event. The North Texas SQL Server User Group did a great job.  I would love to speak at another one of their SQL Saturday’s.  I cannot believe they are going to have three within a twelve month period.

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Recap: PGH.NET August 2010 Meeting

Posted on August 12, 2010 by johnsterrett| 1 Comment

On August 10th 2010 I attended and presented at the PGH.NET User Group meeting named “5 Guys with Code.”  According to one of the PGH.NET leaders tweet it looks like the headcount was 60+

Twitter David Hoerster @brittrking Awesome mtg la ..

The following are some thoughts and highlights from the presentations.

Presentations

  •  
    • John Sterrett (Blog | Twitter) – Table Value Parameters with SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft .NET  

    • I presented a feature that is included in SQL Server 2008 and underused by many developers.  This presentation shows developers how to pass a  DataTable, DataReaders and Lists to SQL Server database objects with only two extra lines of C# or VB.NET code. 

    As promised below are some reference links

  • David Hoerster (Blog | Twitter) – jQuery Code Snippets in Visual Studio 2010

Time is money and David’s fifteen minute tip might just save you a lot of time and money.    He covered several tools that will help you generate some awesome JavaScript. 

I  really liked the jsFiddle.NET tool.  It looks like a great tool to mockup some a user interface (more on user interfaces later).

  • Rich Dudley (Blog  | Twitter ) – A Quick Look at the New SQL CE Engine

Being addicted to databases I very happy to see that I wasn’t the only one presenting a topic based on databases.  Rich did a great job explaining what SQL CE can do and what it cannot do. 

Rich blogged about his experience (post includes photos, slides and more)

  • John Hidey (Blog | Twitter) – Layout Controls for XAML

I have to admit that XAML and I don’t get along well.  We had a fling a few years ago.  XAML cheated on me and I haven’t been the same since.

Ok seriously, I tried XAML a few times and found it very hard to understand.  John did a great job going over the common things that are hard to understand when you get started with XAML.   John started with some very basic controls and then built a final example that included all the basic controls.

At this summers PGH.NET Code Camp we had a speakers session where one of the presenters said, “Code is considered legacy code when TDD is not applied.”  Eric bowling for TDD example showed how anyone can start developing TDD.

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Pittsburgh SQL User Group: Data Warehousing Presentation

Posted on November 16, 2009 by johnsterrett| 1 Comment

Today, I am giving my first presentation at my local SQL Server User Group.  Below are links to the slides.  I will also add some more resource here after todays presentation.

Introduction to Data Warehousing slides

DEMO: Build Your First Cube

Below is the description of the discussion.

November’s presentation will include an Introduction to Data Warehousing with SQL Server presented by John Sterrett, a Database Administrator and Web Engineering Specialist for Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.  If you are interested in learning how Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services can provide Business Intelligence this meeting is for you.  We will start with the basic concepts of data warehousing including key terms and definitions.  Next, we will cover some sample business cases while we walk through the process of designing a data warehouse.  Once this session is complete you will be able to develop your first cube.

Date: Monday, November 16, 2009

Time: 11:45 a.m. Registration; 12:00 PM – 2:00 p.m.

Venue: Council Training Room, 2000 Technology Drive, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Cost: No charge

RSVP: Email Heather Jones at Heather_Jones@Dell.com

If you have any questions, need more information, or would be willing to participate in any upcoming presentations or discussions, please Heather Jones at Heather_Jones@Dell.com.

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