This is the fifth part of the series from my experience with organizing the SQLSaturday #115 Portugal 2012. This post is about the Database Administration track.

In my opinion, there should never be any SQL Server event without some content for the DBA’s, because noone wants to get angry the guys, who are responsible for business running smoothly. We decided to dedicate an entire track to the topic of Database Administration. Let me say that we have had a very strong presenters on this track – a Microsoft CSS, a Microsoft PFE, 2 world known british specialists, one of the most well-known local SQL Server trainers and one more international SQL Server specialist from Austria. Their respective names are: João Loureiro, Luis Canastreiro, Neil Hambly, Mark Broadbent, Bruno Basto, Klaus Aschenbreenner.

We started out very strongly on the DBA track by putting a fearless member of Microsoft Support Escalation team (3rd line), and an extremely nice guy — João Loureiro. He is a very good specialist and is well known in different places – one month ago I have had a conversation with a SQL Server MVP from a european country who told me that he already had a chance to talk to João (while on the support line), and that he was definitely a great specialist with a very deep knowledge on the matters of SQL Server. At SQLSaturday 115, João was presenting one of the most important if not _the_ most important enhancement of SQL Server 2012 – AlwaysOn. At SQLPort we have had a great pleasure of assisting this presentation of his a couple of month ago, and it was definitely a blast!
I confess that during my presentation I tried to convince a DBA who was in the public to go to João session, because it was so good.

Continuing the line of the Microsoft presenters, the next person at the DBA track was a Senior Microsoft PFE — Luís Canastreiro, who brought some light on the Extended Events in SQL Server 2012. This is such an important topic for everyone in the SQL Server universe, especially because the Profiler is depricated and with a new GUI, the Extended Events are finally in the state of catching the general public attention. Luís Canastreiro is quite a reknown presenter – I have seen him a number of times presenting at SQLPort and Microsoft events, and I just pity myself for not being able to find a time to attend his session. Actually I also pity every single DBA who was not there to attend his session haha

How can anyone from the organization team imagine the SQLSaturday#115 without the “weather mascots” aka “compression man” aka “sqlsnooker”, one and only – Neil Hambly? This guy works like a locomotive, and having him at our event was a great great honor and pleasure. Neil’s presentation subject was the compression, so when I have entered the room a couple of minutes before his presentation, I felt that the people started flocking into it. Unfortunately, so far noone of the people I know have pronounced to me personally the details of his presentation, but I am confident that there were no disappointed people in the room.

Mark Broadbent had the right to bring the “dragon” into the presentation room, and I am sure that he did. We were absolutely delighted when he submitted a couple of his sessions for our event, and judging by the feedback that I have got in first person – his session was a very well delivered, professional material of the highest quality.
On a personal note, I just want to add that it was a great experience for me to meet and to get to know Mark – he is an extremely nice guy.

Bruno Basto took over the stage right after Mark has left it, and I am sure that for each and every person who has been to TechDays or other Microsoft SQL Server related events in Portugal in the last ~10 years should have had a lot of opportunities to attend one of his session. Being one of the most senior trainers in Portugal he has definitely left his mark on the progress of the local SQL Server community. His session was focused on the internals of the SQL Server and I assume that the experience of those who attended his session was very positive.

The last presenter of the DBA track was a guy, who has travelled across the europe on Saturday morning, in order to present at our event, and his name is Klaus Aschenbrenner. His session was very important and for me it is definitely one of the top-3 best new features in SQL Server 2012 – the ColumnStore Indexes. This new type of indexes promises some very dramatic improvements especially for the DataWareHouse scenarios. The portuguese SQL Server community should be very grateful for him to dedicate so much of his effort into sharing his knowledge with the rest of the SQL Server professionals.

And if you think that this is the last post in the series on SQLSaturday #115, then next week I shall prove that you are wrong: a lot more stuff is coming up.

I am a kind of sorry that I cannot describe the full quality of presentations from the event that we have organized – I was just too busy running around trying to guarantee that everything was right on track. I have attended … well … none … Well, besides 2 sessions where I was participating actually … One of them was the first session at the Development track, and the other was a lightning talk at the Azure+ track. So today I am going to write about the Development track.

My presentation was the first at the developer track, and it was not because I enjoy being first – no! I have decided to put the portuguese speakers first in order to guarantee a couple of things for the event: local speakers should be starting any event, and knowing that a lot of local guys & girls are late for the event, we can carry on our shoulders the fact of having relatively few people in the audience.

After me it was the time for Hugo Kornelis to carry the flag, and judging by some of the feedback that I have got in the mean time (and even today, hey José I am talking about you :p) – it was by all means a very fine and informative session. The Merge functionality which exists in SQL Server since 2008 version still one of the least explored ones, so Hugo’s session was right what was necessary for the developers in Portugal.

After Hugo, it was time for Pedro Lopes to take over the stage. Pedro is one of the Microsoft PFE’s for SQL Server in Portugal and he is the author of a very fine maintenance solution — AdaptiveIndexDefrag which is used by a lot of DBAs. Pedro’s session was about the new additions to the execution plans and though I badly wanted to attend it, I have managed to spare just 10 minutes, when he had some technical difficulties trying to assert the font for a quite small screen that the auditory has had. I think that he had resolved it by the time that I had to leave, so once again I have caught nothing, but I am definitely going to check out the presentation slides and scripts for it as soon as I will get some time.

There are not many things that I can add about the sessions after the lunch – Milos Radivojevic was presenting a session on the parameter sniffing and at the same time I was in attendance of the lightning talks where I got a chance to get my extra 5 min of fame. I was told by a couple of people that they wanted to attend the Lightning Talks session but got no chance because the other sessions content was too good to be missed.

After Milos, it was the time for Enrique Catalá to present the new functionalities of the Window Functions in T-SQL. This was definitely one of the session on the top of my list, but as I have written before I have had a different task to do… This is a definitive lesson for all organizers – do not expect to attend any of the sessions of the event that you are organizing.

The last session on the developer track was the Advanced Indexing by our friend Hugo Kornelis, and man – I have got a lot of great feedback by a lot of different people. I was lucky enough to attend this session before at the SQLSaturday#108 in Redmond, so I really felt glad that my fellow countrymen could enjoy this session.

Well, this post is long for somebody who avoided writing posts for a couple of years, but hey I am coming back to writing this year. Tomorrow there will be a post about the BI track – so do not forget to check it out.

As it was written in the first post of this series, we have had 197 people in the attendance of our SQLSaturday, which was almost a double from our first SQLSaturday, which was organized in 2011 – when we have had 109 attendees.
SQLSaturday #115 have had 4 different tracks, instead of just 1 – which was in the case of SQLSaturday#78. The tracks defined for the event were DEV, DBA, BI and Azure+.

We have had some great submissions for every track and the final selection was very difficult: we have had to cut some very high quality speakers, mainly because of the topics submitted (especially if they were not connected to SQL Server 2012), but also the limit of 6 presentations per day at max has dictated some of the choices.

The development track was given the biggest space, because of the research that we did before the event – in order to determine the tentative capacity of each room. We have learned our lesson, as it was the developers who mostly signed up for the event but did not appeared. The development track room has had an official capacity for 132 people, and it has had 2 extra monitors in the second part of the room, which were very useful as the main projector image was extremely small. At this room we have had the following presenters: Niko Neugebauer (me), Hugo Kornelis (presenting twice), Pedro Lopes, Milos Radivojevic, Enrique Catala & Alejandro Leguizamo.

The second biggest room with the official capacity of 75 was reserved for the Business Intelligence track, and I have to say that this was the room which was most of the time close to be full during our event. It is amazing how BI guys & girls were following the presentations. At the BI room the presenters were Pedro Perfeito, Rui Quintino, Allan Mitchel, Andro Morreira & Andre Santana, Jen Stirrup, Alejandro Leguizamo.

The DBA track was reasonably full, which depended more on the concurrent sessions and then, the Azure+ track has had the smallest number of attendees. The DBA track has had the following presenters: João Loureiro, Luis Canastreiro, Neil Hambly, Mark Broadbent, Bruno Basto, Klaus Aschenbreenner. The Azure+ track was completed by the presenters: Etienne Lopes, Alejandro Leguizamo & Ruben Pertusa, Jen Stirrup, Virgilio Esteves, Alexandre Mendeiros.

We have had a couple of changes of our schedule during the week before the SQLSaturday, as unfortun
ately some of the presenters have had emergencies, but we have managed to keep the event quite the way we wanted & planned it to be.

Part 3 of the event will follow very soon!