August 2021 Meetup

We will be teaming up with Southampton User Group for our meetup. As we won't be seeing each other in person it allows us to join the communities and host a joint user group.

Agenda

18:15: Welcome and Intros
18:30: Jeff Moden - “Black Arts” Index Maintenance – GUIDs vs
Fragmentation - ​They’re not the problem… WE ARE!
20:00: Kevin Chant and Sander Stad - GitHub DevOps Duet - Reading
and Southampton Edition
21:00: Finish

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18:30: Jeff Moden
“Black Arts” Index Maintenance – GUIDs vs Fragmentation - They’re not the problem… WE ARE!

"This is NOT your typical presentation on the fragmentation problems of Random GUIDs.

No… Instead we’re going to destroy the myth of GUID fragmentation and identify the real problem and the two fixes for it. We’ll prove that Random GUIDs actually behave in manner like most people expect a good index to behave especially when it comes to OLTP performance. In one of the most ironic/heterodoxical turns of knowledge you’re likely to come across, we’ll see how you can use GUIDs to actually prevent fragmentation of your clustered indexes! In the end, you’ll witness the results of some simple testing that demonstrate that you can easily insert literally MILLIONs of rows into a Random GUID clustered index with almost no page splits (not even supposed “good” ones) and LESS THAN 1% Logical fragmentation!

In the process, we’ll explore what people are currently calling “Best Practice” index maintenance and we’ll prove that the use of REORGANIZE is one of the very worst things you can do to your Random GUID indexes even if you’re limited to the Standard Edition of SQL Server. As an interesting sidebar, we'll demonstrate that the use of ever-increasing index keys could be a major source of many of your fragmentation problems.

We’ll also learn how to use a new tool that I created to actually see what an index looks like at the page level for all pages in a single graph."

About the Speaker: I am also a frequent writer/blogger/speaker and technical reviewer for subjects based on MS SQL Server and Microsoft Azure – Data Platform.

20:00 Kevin Chant and Sander Stad
GitHub DevOps Duet - Reading and Southampton Edition

Welcome to GitHub DevOps Duet, a scenario where two teams (dev and ops) are going to start using GitHub Actions for Data Platform deployments.

They need to figure out how to implement their processes within GitHub and make it work for all parties.

We will discuss:

• the challenges of implementing DevOps
• setting up a database solution project
• testing your database releases using tSQLt
• setting up your GitHub Actions workflows
• deploy database artifacts to multiple Data Platform solutions

As part of the session we will cover the GitHub services you get including:

• Actions
• Projects
• Security

The session will cover how to setup projects for your tasks, set up workflows in Github Actions, security and so much more.

If you want to find out more about how Github can be implemented for your DevOps process than come to our session

21:00 Finish