Event link at our Meetup page.

Creating CrossTab Queries and Pivot Tables in SQL
a.k.a. Reporting on Steroids

“Data” is useless. It tells you nothing until it’s converted to “Information”.

Knowing how to convert “Data” to “Information” is an absolutely critical skill in the multiple worlds of Data Analytics, Predictive Analysis, and related disciplines.

One of the most common and extremely useful methods of converting “Data” into “Information” is to transform the data into a “Cross Tabulation” or “Contingency Table” or, as it is more commonly known, a “Pivot” or “CrossTab” table. The conversion process is also commonly referred to as a “Pivot” or “CrossTab”.

This session is for newbies and highly experienced folks alike. Here’s a short synopsis and the killer end result:

· Purpose and Basics of CrossTabs (a.k.a. Pivots)
· Create a “Single Column” CrossTab
· Create a “Multi Column” CrossTab
· Why the PIVOT Operator is NOT Your Friend
· Intro to Creating Voluminous Test Data and “Minimal Logging”
· 3 Pre-Aggregation Methods for Serious Increases in Performance
· The “Ultimate Pre-Aggregation”
o “Impossible” Reports on 100 Million rows in Milli-Seconds
o Eliminates ETL
o Always Up to Date
o Tiny Footprint

Jeff Moden

Jeff Moden is an “Accidental DBA” with more than 26 years of SQL Server experience. Jeff helped make the advanced technique known as the “Tally” or “Numbers” Table a household word and coined the term “RBAR”, which stands for “Row By Agonizing Row”. He’s written 44 mostly five star articles for SQLServerCentral.com and, having more than 58,000 posts, is one of the leading contributors on that site. Jeff is renowned for being able to teach extremely complex concepts and techniques in such a manner that even beginners can understand without boring the experts. He’s also a 9 year SQL Server MVP veteran, won the Red Gate exceptional DBA award in 2011, has spoken at the PASS Summit, many SQL Saturdays, and many local PASS chapter meetings on many different SQL Server subjects.

His mantra is “Performance is in the code”.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

How to Troubleshoot SQL Server CPU Problems

CPU is the workhorse of any SQL Server and Azure SQL. CPU handles not only core processing but also worker thread management and parallelism. And yet many of us don’t know the fundamentals beyond “SQL Server take cares of that for me”. So what happens to those CPUs when things go wrong? In this session, we’ll go deep into the internal behavior of SQL Server CPU, including the internal and external memory pressure, worker thread management, and how to troubleshoot CPU problems.

Kevin Kline

Kevin Kline is a noted database expert and software industry veteran. A 20-year Microsoft Data Platform MVP and noted community leader in the IT industry, Kevin is a founder and former president of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS.ORG), as well as the author of popular IT books including the bestseller “SQL in a Nutshell”. Kevin is a top-rated speaker at industry trade shows worldwide and has a monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine (DBTA.com). His product designs for database tools have won numerous awards at industry trade shows and from a variety of trade magazines. He is on social media as @kekline and blogs regularly.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

Mastering TempDB

Have you experienced performance problems caused by contention in TempDB? Have you ever wondered why your TempDB is suddenly 3 TB? In this session, you will learn about all the various components of SQL Server that use TempDB. Whether it be AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Read Committed Snapshot version stores, spills, or simply temporary tables, learn about how to identify what SQL Server or your applications are doing in TempDB. Once you understand all the ways SQL Server uses this critical resource, and how to proper configure it, you’ll be better prepared for your workloads whether it be an Azure VM, a physical server, or a container.

Monica Rathbun

Monica lives in Virginia and is a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform. She has over 15 years of experience working with a wide variety of database platforms with a focus on SQL Server. She is a frequent speaker at IT industry conferences on topics including performance tuning and configuration management. She is the Leader of the Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group and a Mid‐Atlantic PASS Regional Mentor. She is passionate about SQL Server and the SQL Server community, doing anything she can to give back. Monica can always be found on Twitter (@sqlespresso) handing out helpful tips.

You can find Monica blogging at sqlespresso.com or via email at monica@dcac.com.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

Parameter Sniffing: Everything You Have Been Told is Wrong!

Execution plan reuse is one of the most misunderstood aspects of SQL Server. While it serves us well 99.99% of the time, it is very easy to trip up when parameter sniffing results in performance problems.

In this session, we will thoroughly dissect how plan reuse works, discuss parameter sniffing, and the many potential solutions available to resolve it. We will examine the many poor solutions that are found on blogs and web pages all over the internet and why applying a quick-fix may result in long-term performance headaches if not thoroughly researched prior to implementation.

Ed Pollack

Ed Pollack has 20+ years of experience in database administration and architecture, which has developed his passion for performance optimization, database design, and security. He has spoken at many SQLSaturdays, 24 Hours of PASS, and PASS Summit. This led him to organize many SQL Saturday and other Microsoft data platform events. Ed is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP.

In his free time, Ed enjoys video games, traveling, cooking exceptionally spicy foods, and hanging out with his amazing wife and sons.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

PowerShell for Beginners

During this session we will cover the basics of PowerShell and how we can use it to help us do our job. We will go over the fundamentals of PowerShell including some basic commands. We will also go over the places in the SQL Server environment that PowerShell can be used. This session is for the DBA who has little or no knowledge of PowerShell.

Dave Bland

Manager of Database Administrators, Stericycle

Over 20 years of SQL Server experience that includes being a DBA, BI development and Application development using VB.NET. Dave currently is the Manager of the DBA team at Stericycle. Dave is a Friend of Red-Gate for 2019. He is a frequent presenter at SQL Saturday events and user groups around the country. Has been teaching SQL Server since version 2000 and is the SQL Server instructor at Harper College in Palatine, IL. Current certifications include: Microsoft Certified Trainer; MCTS: SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance; MCTS: SQL Server 2008, BI Development and Maintenance; MCSA: SQL Server 2008; MCSA: SQL Server 2016; MCSE: SQL Server 2016 – BI; MCDBA: SQL Server 2000; MCSD; MCSE: Data Management and Analytics.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

OpenAI in Azure Synapse

You have probably heard of AI and ChatGPT with Microsoft’s BIG investments in OpenAI, see how you can use some amazing new AI technology in your own Azure Synapse environment with a live demo! Discussions on other uses for AI in other Azure solutions as well, including Azure Cognitive Search.

Steve Wake

Steve Wake is currently the Principal BI Developer at Brown and Caldwell and has experience in consulting, advertising, media, manufacturing, retail, charities, telecommunications and financial services organizations using the full on-premises Microsoft BI stack. Recent experience with the Azure services: Microsoft Fabric, OpenAI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Snowflake and Power BI. Steve is also very involved in the SQL community, speaking at events around the world.

AI is the big buzz right now, so I figure others probably want to know how they might be able to leverage it in their applications.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:30 pm Meeting

Completing a Performance Assessment and Creating a Monitoring Tool using SSMS, SSRS and just a hint of PowerShell

In this session you will learn how to perform a complete performance assessment on a SQL Server using SSMS and SSRS. We will complete this using a suite of over 140 SSRS reports that includes easy navigation to all report. We will also go over how to create an effective monitoring solution using SSRS, SSM and Powershell. This solution also includes reports that have charts that will make it easy to share with non-technical individuals if needed. Using these reports you will be able to easily identify performance bottlenecks, potential security issues as well as aspects of your server that may not be in line with best practices.
This includes the dashboard you see below as well as a suite of over 180 SSRS reports that can be opened in SSMS.

Below are the many of the reports that are included. We have found these extremely useful in helping us identify performance issues quickly!!!

Dave Bland

Manager of Database Administrators, Stericycle
Over 20 years of SQL Server experience that includes being a DBA, BI development and Application development using VB.NET. Dave currently is the Manager of the DBA team at Stericycle. Dave is a Friend of Red-Gate for 2019. He is a frequent presenter at SQL Saturday events and user groups around the country. Has been teaching SQL Server since version 2000 and is the SQL Server instructor at Harper College in Palatine, IL. Current certifications include: Microsoft Certified Trainer; MCTS: SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance; MCTS: SQL Server 2008, BI Development and Maintenance; MCSA: SQL Server 2008; MCSA: SQL Server 2016; MCSE: SQL Server 2016 – BI; MCDBA: SQL Server 2000; MCSD; MCSE: Data Management and Analytics.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

The Fabric Of Our Lives

Announced at Microsoft Build 2023, Microsoft Fabric is the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for data analytics solutions. Based on the data lakehouse paradigm and incorporating the latest updates to Data Factory, Synapse, and Power BI, Fabric is positioned as the one-stop shop for both professional and citizen data analytics workloads.

Please join us as we explore this exciting next step in the evolution of the Microsoft Data Platform for analytics.

Chris Hyde

Chris Hyde (he/him) is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He works as an independent SQL Server BI and DBA consultant and is the leader of the Albuquerque local Azure Data Technologies group. He loves loud music and cricket, but not usually at the same time.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

A DBA’s Guide to the Proper Handling of Corruption

Corruption can strike at any time. As DBAs how we alert, investigate, and respond can have a profound impact on our company. In this session we will learn how to detect and respond to various types of corruption.

First we will be focus on ways to detect corruption early. This will include understanding tools available to us like DBCC CheckDB as well as the importance of testing your backups. We’ll look at some sample scripts to automate corruption checks and common alerts we should have set up on our instances.

Then we will move onto how to respond. We’ll discuss the importance of incident management and the Disaster Recovery mindset and look at how we can analyze the situation safely as well as point out various pitfalls that trip people up. We’ll also discuss when and how we may be able to fix corruption vs restoring the database. Additionally we will look at a few common examples of corruption and how to fix them.

Brandon Leach

A Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Brandon is a senior member of the Database team for financial company x functioning as a SQL Server Infrastructure Architect/SME. Having worked in data estates of several petabytes across thousands of servers, he puts a high focus on performance tuning and automation at scale. He is a frequent speaker at events like conferences and user groups.

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Event link at our Meetup page.

• 5:30 pm Networking
• 6:00 pm Meeting

Automatically Restore Availability Group Databases Using DBATools

Introduced in SQL Server 2012, Availability Groups (AG) provide high availability and disaster recovery.  One of the challenges when working with AGs is a database needs to be removed from the AG in order to be restored.  For a production system this is usually not a problem, but if you have a test AG environment it can become complicated.  Join me for this session to learn how to leverage the dbatools PowerShell module to remove databases from an AG, restore them from the most recent prod backup, and add them back to the AG.

Frank Gill

Frank Gill has worked with SQL Server for 16 years and has been involved in the SQL community for almost as long. Over the past 9 years, he has worked as a consultant and has focused on deploying and migrating SQL Server workloads to Azure. When not working with SQL Server, Frank loves baseball, live music, art museums, and hanging out with his wife and two cats.

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