Nottingham SQL Server User Group

This months speakers and sessions are: Rich Benner will be talking about Scrapeing Reddit for Testing Data using SQL Server and Python: You’re lucky enough to have Test environments but you don’t want to spend forever creating test data to use (because you’re not using live data right?). Let’s use SQL Server with Python to scrape data from Reddit to fill those tables. We’ll go through; 1. What you’ll need installed to use Python with SQL Server. 2. Basics of the Python language (You don’t need to know Python in advance) 3. The python libraries we’ll use 4. I’ll give you the code and walk through it 5. I’ll then show you how you can apply this in your environment. And our second speaker will be Phil Grayson, topic TBC shortly We'll be in the Golding Room, which is down at the left end of the bar. If you want to grab dinner feel free to order at the bar and they'll bring it in when it's ready We'll be kicking off at 18:30 with Speaker 1, quick break about 19:30 to grab snacks and drinks, and then speaker 2 starting about 19:45. Times may move around but we aim to be done by 21:00. More details to follow

We'll be in the Golding Room, which is down at the left end of the bar. If you want to grab dinner feel free to order at the bar and they'll bring it in when it's ready We'll be kicking off at 18:30 with Speaker 1, quick break about 19:30 to grab snacks and drinks, and then speaker 2 starting about 19:45. Times may move around but we aim to be done by 21:00. We're pleased to announce that Paul Andrew will be speaking at this meeting. He'll be presenting his Introduction to SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters sessions, which he describes as: The world of data is moving quickly and traditional relational database technology can be a limiting factor in responding to change. Teams want to move quicker, work with a wider array of data, handle massive datasets and augment their code with open-source libraries and projects. Data delivery and demand for immediate insights mean we no longer have the luxury to extract, transform and load datasets before we need to realise the value locked within our data. SQL Server 2019 has made radical architecture changes to meet these challenges, introducing in-built data lakes, spark clusters, massive data ingestion engines and the ability to harness massively parallel processing architectures. These engines are all implemented behind a single, scalable interface that streamlines data acquisition, transparently and without costly movement operations. In this talk we will outline the problems that can be tackled with the new SQL Server Big Data Clusters, provide an overview of how they have been implemented and discuss how SQL Server can now handle your Big Data problems. We will be drawing parallels to the Azure Data Platform and highlight where we can adopt similar patterns in our on-premises data platforms. Also presenting will be Chris Webb talking about: Q&A in Power BI: gimmick or game-changer? You have probably seen the Q&A feature in Power BI demoed many times, but is it just a demo feature? Do users really want to type questions and see Power BI visuals generated for them automatically? In this session you’ll learn: What Q&A is, where it can be accessed by users and who it might be useful to How the design of your dataset and reports can influence how well Q&A works How advanced features like Synonyms and editing the Linguistic Schema file can enable more complex interactions Whether it’s worth your time and effort to use Q&A in your Power BI deployment

We'll be in the Golding Room, which is down at the left end of the bar. If you want to grab dinner feel free to order at the bar and they'll bring it in when it's ready We'll be kicking off at 18:30 with Speaker 1, quick break about 19:30 to grab snacks and drinks, and then speaker 2 starting about 19:45. Times may move around but we aim to be done by 21:00. More details to follow

We'll be in the Golding Room, which is down at the left end of the bar. If you want to grab dinner feel free to order at the bar and they'll bring it in when it's ready We'll be kicking off at 18:30 with Speaker 1, quick break about 19:30 to grab snacks and drinks, and then speaker 2 starting about 19:45. Times may move around but we aim to be done by 21:00. First speaker announced is David Alcock, who's session is: What have guillotines and satellite navigation got to do with querying SQL Server? Well, in this session you’re going to find out! We’ll be looking into query performance and that means reading query plans, but in order to do that we also need some background knowledge of how the query optimiser works. With that in mind we’ll be jumping right into optimisation stages, hints and rules. We’ll also learn how to keep track and influence how the engine optimises our queries, and we’ll see if it’s a good idea or not. Second session/speaker TBC