Sessions

Allan Mitchell

What has changed for the better and worse.

Chris Webb

Analysis Services 2008 will contain no radical changes from Analysis Services 2005, but there will be some important (if no necessarily ground-shaking) improvements in the area of query performance, manageability and ease-of-use. This session will describe these improvements and, where possible given the current CTP, demo them.

Martin Cairney

Many SQL Server installations have been done with either little or no consideration to securing the installation itself. Although your internal SQL Server data may seem to be secure, the way that your installation itself has been configured may inadvertently allow malicious or simply curious intruders. This talk will look at some of these gaps - all from real world experience - and show how you can secure your existing SQL Server 2000 installations and also will contrast the improvements made with SQL Server 2005 to make it more secure out of the box.

Martin Bell

How to use Perfmon, Visual Studio Team Edition, SQL Profiler, DTA, Analysing Trace Output and ClearTrace to identify poor performance areas in your system.

Simon Sabin

Recently the SQL MVPs put together their list of myths about SQL Server. If you think you know everything about SQL then come along and see if you're right.

Andrew Fryer

Due to the uncertaintity of whats will be publicly available in October we don't have the specifics of this session. Areas likely to be covered are change data capture for ETL, enterprise reporting, star join, MERGE, better reporting experience. We will update this session nearer to the conference.

James Rowland-Jones

Data Volumes...Distribution...Cuddly Toy... In this one hour slot you'll see a lot passing on the conveyor. The session will focus on the issues of Data generation for meaningful tests. It will be based on the data generation features of Team Edition for Database Professionals and will look at various ways this framework can be used and extended to meet the needs of your environment. We will examine the pro’s and con’s of the tool and discuss any shortcomings encountered. We will conclude with some example unit testing to demonstrate the value in the data we have generated.

Dave McMahon

‘Top of the Pops’ might be dead, but Dave will give you his own countdown of his 10 most useful/favorite SQL keywords. No secrets to giveaway here, suffice to say that you will know some of them (but maybe not used this way) and some may be unfamiliar to you. The whole ‘Countdown’ will be demoed and Dave will explain why they make his top 10. This is a session for people who use SQL regularly as Developers, know the standard DML but maybe never had the chance to peek around the corner to see what else was there! Both SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 syntax will feature, so this is stuff you can take away and use today ...

Martin Bell

SQL Server 2005 introduced features for Encryption, Impersonation and using Certificates which were not available as part of the product. This presentation will show where and how these features can be used and their advantages and limitations.

Daniel Fisher

The DataSet – even if domain objects are proven faster – has a complete integration in Visual Studio. To increase the acceptance of domain models several gaps need to be filled. This session will wrap up how to build you own business layer, generate your domain models and fully integrate into Visual Studio.

Richard Siddaway

Administering SQL Server with SMO and Windows PowerShell SMO is a set of .NET objects introduced with SQL Server 2005 that give programmatic access to the administrative functionality exposed in the SQL Server Management Studio. Windows PowerShell is the .NET based command line shell and scripting language that is being built into the latest Microsoft products such as Exchange 2007 and Operations Manager 2007. Until recently SMO was only available to developers willing to write full blown .NET programmes but as PowerShell is .NET based it can access and utilise SMO from the command line as well as in scripts. This session will introduce Windows PowerShell, including its very powerful WMI capabilities, and SMO. There will be some slides during the introduction but the majority of the session will be demonstrations of the technologies in action including graphical, on screen representation of the data from with the command line environment.

Sutha Thiru

How do we handle early arriving facts? If you are an experienced DW developer you would have come across this many times, if you are a novice you are certain to face this challenge in the near future. Each organisation makes decision to handle this scenario as suited to them. I have handled this scenario in one of these 3 categories. 1. Ignore early arriving facts all together? Is that the right way to do it? 2. During load process populate the dimension table with the Natural Key and default values and map surrogate key to the incoming fact record. 3. During fact load map default surrogate key and load those records into the “Rejected” table. I would be conducting a demo for point 2 and 3. In depth analysis on what happens to the records in the Rejected table and what do I propose to resolve these records? What is Business Intelligence Service Centre (BISC) and their involvement is going to mission critical for the success of your BI project?

Darren Green

This session is all about developing for SSIS, writing .Net code to create your own tasks. We cover by way of introduction the different component types you can develop, and the common approach you can use. We will walk through examples of task development highlighting best practice and lessons learned. You will also find out how to create user interfaces and interact with the SSIS design-time environment for a rich user experience. As well as getting real-world insights into developing for SSIS, you will learn the practicalities of installing and managing components.

Jasper Smith

Being able to effectively and transparently capture schema, security and configuration changes in SQL Server got a lot easier in SQL 2005 with the introduction of Event Notifications which leverage the Service Broker architecture to allow asynchronous capture of all server and database level DDL (Data Definition Language) statements. In this session I’ll cover Event Notifications in detail and demonstrate how we can leverage them to build a scalable audit application to capture changes across multiple SQL instances. A working sample application and reports are provided along with all source code.

Hue Holleran

If you haven't discovered yet what partitioning can do for you in SQL Server 2005 - then this session is for you. Many resources teach the basics of partitioning - BUT this session gives a view of partitioning from the trenches - ie. how it's been used in the real world to solve very difficult problems. This session is comprehensible even for those that have not used partitioning yet - as it starts with a 5-minute overview. Partitioning is a simple concept to grasp and this session goes beyond the concepts and shows in-depth how partitioning has been implemented in the real world. The session uses real case studies of very different and difficult to solve problems and it is shown how partitioning solve these problems in an elegant and simple way and more importantly how to keep a partitioned system performing optimally. By drawing on real case studies with which the presenter has direct experience the session shows many lessons learned from implementing partitioning that go beyond the basic concepts and show how real world problems were really solved by using partitioning.

Satya Shyam K Jayanty

Do you have a challenge of performing Business Continuity (BC) (Disaster Recovery) Management in your Enterprise? Does your IT support have Business Continuity measures? This session covers Business Continuity challenges, recovery strategies to use and document plans for BC exercise & maintenance. It will be useful for anyone responsible for developing and maintaining a business continuity program. This session also covers implementing business services like systems monitoring, operations (including support), technology adoption and Trustworthy computing. Leave the session with a measuring success method and develop a strategy for a consistent implementation of Business Continuity standards to drive your business efficiently. Adopt latest technology and industry accepted (best) practices in using SQL Server 2005 efficiently.