Anthony Howcroft

SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse is quickly gaining traction as a leading solution for delivering consistent, high performance data warehousing. It was launched in February 2009 with seven reference architectures from HP, Dell/EMC and Bull, offering a selection of architectures with storage capacities from 4 to 32 TB  and up to 32 CPU cores. Customers have seen excellent price-performance, faster time to value, and consistently high performance right out of box through the pre-tested ‘appliance’ approach. The Fast Track systems are being deployed in both SME situations as a core data warehouse platform, and also in larger enterprises as part of a hub & spoke architecture. This session looks at the advantages of Fast Track, gives some case studies, talks about the practical considerations of an implementation, and also looks at what’s next for this new SQL Server platform.

Allan Mitchell

Common Integration Services Problems and Solutions

Jamie Thomson

This is intended to cover 3rd party SSIS Tasks and Components, it will not cover BIDS Helper [http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper] (which could take up a day all of its own)!

Allan Mitchell

In this session I want to go through some of the powerful things you can do in SSIS in SQL Server 2008 that will make your ETL requirements simple. We will look at the features you are going to use every day and not "cool but random" ones.  Very interactive.  I want everyone to understand why using SSIS makes sense. 

Simon Sabin

SQL 2008 Development Features

Martin Bell

SQL Server 2008 introduced Powershell into the database with a new mini-shell for SQL Server.... so what?

If you are like me, you’ve gathered along your career path a host of techniques, methods and scripts that have provided a trusty and faithful toolbelt for solving problems and carrying out everyday tasks. So when SQL Server 2008 included this feature it probably wasn’t your top priority to learn and find out about, in fact it might not have even made the list!!

This presentation will give show how useful Powershell can be for DBAs and developers and show how easy it can be to use. Maybe it’s time to update those old tricks??

Simon Sabin

This session looks at some of the common scenarios when query plans can go wrong leading to your performnce suddenly hitting the wall.
We will talk through

• what happens
• why it happens
• ways in which you can avoid it happening.

 

Tom Pullen

You can read the Microsoft marketing messages about how wonderful the HA options are in SQL Server. So what are they like in the real world? This session will discuss the theory, and see how it works in practice, related to my experience of Failover Clustering, Database Mirroring, Log Shipping and other "HA" options that exist. The session will also cover business considerations, like how expensive the solutions are, both for hardware purchase and software licensing.

James Rowland-Jones

Interested in Optimistic concurrency but not really sure how it works? Then this session is for you.  Optimistic concurrency was introduced in SQL 2005 but it is rarely spoken about or well understood.  However, you can buck that trend by coming along to this session where you will learn about how you can be Optimistic DBA. Now there's an oxymoron if ever there was one....

Session will cover the following

• Architecture of Optimistic Concurrency
• Limitations and restrictions
• Optimistic Isolation Levels
• Row Versioning and the Version Store
• Impacts in TempDB
• Taking out the trash - Garbage collection
• Monitoring Row Versioning

Brent Ozar

Colin Chapman was a true Formula 1 pioneer whose innovations included the aerodynamic wing spoiler.  Enzo Ferrari once said, "Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines."  The Stig, well, he never says anything out loud, but his actions speak volumes.

In this session, Brent will use quotes and lessons from racing icons like Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, and The Stig to illustrate SQL Server performance tuning concepts.  Find out how to "add lightness" to your database by using DMVs to eliminate unneeded indexes, how to get out of the pits faster with Database Mirroring, and why skipping performance monitoring is like overdriving your headlights.

Satya Jayanty

Achieving maximum availability and near immediate recovery from a disaster is essential for maintaining our revenue stream. Service Management principles must be worked hard to eliminate all single points of failure in architecture, and developed procedures for patching servers, upgrading software, and implementing application changes that preserve high availability. Based on these efforts, you can achieve 99.99 percent uptime, including both planned and unplanned downtime.

This session covers the decisions and procedures that are employed to maintain maximum availability with minimal downtime. This information will be of interest to senior IT managers, project leads, architects, and database administrators (DBAs). All the content is presented from my own experience and industry best practices, it will sum up a great deal of procedures to achieve high availability and disaster recovery.

Andrew Couch

In this talk we will contrast and compare developing WebForm applications using Visual Studio 2008 with different types of datasources. We will be looking at design issues relating to concurrency control and updateability when using key Visual Studio controls such as the FormView and ListView controls. So if you don’t know where to start in choosing between SQL, LINQ and Entity datasources then you will by the end of this talk. We will also take a look at techniques for the seamless integration of ASP.net security with SQL Server Login security for web applications using LINQ.

General topics:-

• .net database interfaces in a browser
• Design philosophy and strategies
• Datasources; SQL,LINQ and EDM
• Factors in design choices
• Multiple-tiers in design
• Integrating SQL Server security with .net

Detailed topics for contrasting datasources:-

• View updateability
• Concurrency control
• Exploiting CSS
• Language syntax
• Navigation
• Foreign key syntax
• Model updates
• Handling null values and controls
• Dropdown lists and data integrity

 

Alastair Aitchison

So you heard about the new spatial functionality in SQL Server 2008, rushed back to your database and added geography and geometry columns to all your tables, eager to create the next Google Earth-beating application. After putting the finishing touches to your spatial query, you click the Execute button and wait.
And wait.
And wait some more. (You get the idea).

Spatial data is a rather unique beast, and designing efficient spatial queries requires specific techniques when compared to other, more traditional types of data.
In the first part of this session, we'll start by examining how the SQL Server database engine satisfies spatial queries, the theory behind spatial indexes, and seeing how a spatial index can provide a primary filter to pre-select or discard rows from the need to perform expensive spatial operations.
We'll then move onto the practical application of this knowledge, demonstrating the effects of altering the bounding box and grid resolution of a spatial index, and interpreting the results of the spatial system DMVs and stored procedures to tune a spatial index for effective spatial query performance.

Allan Mitchell

Microsoft have an add-in to Excel 2007 that allows you to interrogate mining models in both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005.  They have also included some very powerful visualisations that make it very easy for you to go from zero to hero when looking at mining models.  In this fun session I will show you some of those features and show you just how funky it can be.

Chris Webb

So you've built your cube, designed aggregations and partitions, and spent piles of dosh on start-of-the-art hardware. But still, the first time you run that really complex query, it's slow - even though the second time you run it it runs instantly. What can you do? You need to warm your cache and this session will show you how. You'll find out about the different types of caching Analysis Services is capable of, what to avoid doing to make sure you can cache data, and various methods of warming the cache.

Martin Cairney

In this presentation we will look at how SQL Server 2008 implements Policy Based Management and then by using Powershell and Central Management Servers, how we can take these policies and extend them out to SQL 2000 and 2005 instances.

This will also show where the EPMF can integrate with your repository database to ensure that you know all the instances installed and that they are all complying with your Company's SQL Server policies, making use of simple dashboards showing compliance levels and leaving you to study Books Online with your feet up!!

Brent Ozar

Learning Performance Monitor and Profiler are the first step in performance tuning.  Brent Ozar will show you how to get started with these tools, how to slice and dice the results, and even how to data mine the results to look for interesting trends.  Whether you like to monitor performance with native tools or third party utilities, knowing how the native tools work will help you get better results.

Attendees will learn why Perfmon is like a Nissan GT-R's dashboard, how to interpret the best Perfmon counters, and how to use free tools like ClearTrace and data mining to take your tuning to the next level.

Andre Kamman

Henk van der Valk from the Unisys performance lab will  be my special guest for this session.

He has a test system that we all would like to have at home, probably until you get the first electricity bill :-)
The ES7000 has 96 Cores and half a Terabyte of RAM (!). 
 
We will look at various ways to push SQL Server workloads by methodically detecting and resolving bottlenecks.
 
A number of tips, tricks and testing methods that Henk tought the (Dutch) SQL Server community over the past years I applied successfully on various troubled systems.
Together we will show you how you can take some lessons learned and apply them on mid-sized and even smaller systems. 
(We’ll even try some of them on a laptop, and of course we will remote connect into the big machine )
 
In this session you will:

• Learn how to measure what the next bottle-neck is so you don’t have to guess. (Using perfmon and waitstats)
• Hear about optimization tips that will get the most out of your hardware to speed up your ETL process. 
• Learn some magic to speed up tablescan  speed from disk and memory (!) significantly.

Andrew Fryer

Although SQL 2008 R2 is primarily a BI focused release there's still new features to get excited about for traditional DBA's and Developers. In this session we will cover three new enhancements to the core Database Engine.

Application and Multi-Server Management introduces new capabilities for managing, monitoring and exploiting your SQL Server Infrastructure through the new SQL Server Control Point and enhancements to SSMS and Policy Based Management and Data-tier application packages.

SQL Connection Plans allow you to logically refer to a specific instance of SQL Server in connection strings making migration of database applications across your SQL Server infrastructure much easier by having one central point to change connection strings regardless of whether they are referenced by client applications, Integration Services and Reporting services

Unicode compression enhances the native data compression capabilities introduced in SQL 2008 for Unicode data using SCSU (Simple Compression Scheme for Unicode Data), a standard compression scheme for Unicode data.

Justin Langford

This session provides attendees with details on how to approach a SQL Server virtualisation project.  Discussing topics central to server virtualisation such as performance and scalability considerations.

Here's a summary of the session:

Vincent Rainardi

A demo on BIDS of how to build an SSAS cube (DB) from an operational system (normalized database) such as Operational Data Store (ODS) or directly from the transactional business system, without building a star schema Data Warehouse first.
Targeted specifically at SSAS developers (those who have developed cubes on top of star/snowflake schema data mart/warehouse). DW architects would also be able to benefit/take away the idea as a new concept.

Satya Jayanty

This session helps you to build a strategy and learn how the SQL Server 2008 new feature is addressing the needs of storing large volumes of unstructured data, while still retaining relational control over it. These solutions enable you to reduce both capital and operational costs for large stores of unstructured data. In this session we also cover the best practices in such storage kind of projects.