Return of the Beard

It's Battle of the Beards - Return of the Beard. We get the pleasure of Tobiasz Koprowski, Terry McCann, and Rob Sewell showing off beards and doling out some kickass knowledge.

Doors open at 6, pizza arrives around that time, sessions kick off at 6:30.

Terry McCann: TSQL: Tricky SQL, quandaries and lessons learnt

Rob Sewell: PowerShell, SQL and PowerBI - Reducing your Context Switching

Tobiasz Koprowski: The Lazy Guy on a Train

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Terry McCann:

TSQL: Tricky SQL, quandaries and lessons learnt

How often does someone do a session on just TSQL at a SQL Server user group! JUST TSQL, no Powershell, no R, SSIS, just TSQL!

If you work with SQL Server, then you’re probably quite good at SQL. However, can you remember the last time you sat there just watching the cursor blink in SSMS while wracking your brain trying to solve an issue?

How did you fix it, ask someone else, read a book, ask a question online? If it was on AskSSC then I might have answered it and I want to talk about how you can too.

In this session we will take a few tricky questions asked by real users from ASKSSC a SQL Server forum and look at how we might go about solving them.

Along the way we will look at analytical functions, Cartesian products, cross apply and tally tables to name a few. Awesome!

Rob Sewell:

PowerShell, SQL and PowerBI - Reducing your Context Switching

"Could you just tell me……….?"

This may cost 10 seconds of time or it may take several hours but it will definitely stop the current task and impact its completion

A SQL DBA will be required to provide a myriad of information in many different ways to many different types of people, answering questions from technical teams, technology teams, other parts of the business as well as directors and external parties.

In this session you will learn the why, what and how of automating the gathering, storing and displaying of information enabling self-service and reducing the interruptive calls on your time whilst ensuring that the data is correct and trustworthy. I will also show you how you can use this to enable consistency across your estate. This session will be of benefit to the "Accidental DBAs" as well as DBAs looking after large estates

The majority of the session will concentrate on the way I use PowerShell to gather the information and store it. I will also show you how to enable self-service with natural language query using PowerBi.

You will leave the session with all of the tools you need to return to work and convince your boss this is a worthwhile use of your time and to implement this solution to provide a modern way of providing accurate information about your estate

Tobiasz Koprowski:

The Lazy Guy on a Train

A standard work week almost finished. As a lazy guy, I‘m just back from office for a weekend at home. Someone has a birthday tomorrow, I need to be ready to party. Two hours commuting by train... nothing special. On my corporate phone, a small envelope blinks.

Message: "Hi, your BOSS speaking, we will have a security audit on Monday morning, and if I remember well we have some personal data which should be secured. Could YOU please be ready for Monday?"

WHAAAAAAT? Sensitive data? Audit? Personal data? We never focused on this. Damn, encryption, plans, data on premise, data in the cloud, backup... Aaaargggghhhh!!!

The story will continue....