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ID: 11

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PASS SQLRally 2012 Dallas

Session Date/Time (dd-MM-YYYY 24h)	Speaker	Category	Track	Title
08-05-2012 08:30	Chris Shaw, TJay Belt	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Database Administration (DBA)	How to be a DBA - A Utility Belt of Tools
08-05-2012 08:30	Kevin Kline	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Professional Development (PD)	Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional
08-05-2012 08:30	Denny Cherry	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Database Administration (DBA)	Storage for the DBA
09-05-2012 08:30	Brad McGehee	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Database Administration (DBA)	How to Perform a SQL Server Health Check
09-05-2012 08:30	Robert Davis, Argenis Fernandez	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Database Administration (DBA)	Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices
09-05-2012 08:30	Greg Galloway	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Business Intelligence (BI)	99 Tips for Tuning and Enhancing Analysis Services
09-05-2012 08:30	Louis Davidson	Pre-Cons (7 hours)	Development (DEV)	Relational Database Design Workshop
10-05-2012 08:45	Amy Lewis	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Got a Data Mess the Size of Texas? Data Cleansing Using the "Scrubbing Bubbles" of SSIS
10-05-2012 08:45	Allen White	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell
10-05-2012 08:45	John Welch	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Tuning Analysis Services Performance
10-05-2012 08:45	Kevin Kline	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	SQL Server Internals and Architecture
10-05-2012 08:45	Mark Tabladillo	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Professional Development (PD)	Social Marketing 2012 for Microsoft Professionals
10-05-2012 08:45	Craig Purnell	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Upgrade Roadmap: Let’s Delve into SQL Server 2012
10-05-2012 10:15		Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	The Report Part Library: Increasing Development Productivity in Reporting Services
10-05-2012 10:15	Tim Ford	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects
10-05-2012 10:15	Dmitri Korotkevitch	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Indexes but were Afraid to Ask
10-05-2012 10:15	Bradley Ball	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Transparent Data Encryption Inside and Out in SQL 2012 (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 10:15	Denny Cherry	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Using SQL Server 2012's Always On
10-05-2012 10:15	William E Pearson III	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Overcoming Barriers and Avoiding Mistakes with BI
10-05-2012 13:00	Tim Mitchell	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Introduction to Data Quality Services (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 13:00	David Stein	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Data Warehouse Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make
10-05-2012 13:00	Vicky Harp	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 13:00	Allen White	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Manage SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core with PowerShell
10-05-2012 13:00	Michael Fal	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 13:00	Patrick LeBlanc	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Developing and Managing a BI Semantic Tabular Model in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services
10-05-2012 14:30	Bryan Smith	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Building a Write-Back Application with Analysis Services
10-05-2012 14:30	Grant Fritchey	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing for Better Query Performance
10-05-2012 14:30	Sri Sridharan	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Professional Development (PD)	"Turbo Charge" Your DBA Career (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 14:30	Jorge Segarra	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	STOP! Consolidate and Listen!
10-05-2012 14:30	Ryan Adams	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Manage Your Shop with CMS & Policy Based Management
10-05-2012 14:30	Melissa Coates	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Dashboards: How to Choose Which MSBI Tool (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 16:00	Andy Warren	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Professional Development (PD)	Building Your Professional Development Plan
10-05-2012 16:00	Bradley Ball	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	SQL Internals, Recovery Models, and Backups! OH MY! (Community Pick)
10-05-2012 16:00	Nicholas Cain	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	PowerShell: Are You Checking Out My Profile?
10-05-2012 16:00	Adam Jorgensen, Devin Knight	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Data Mining (It's not the size of your data - it's what you do with it)
10-05-2012 16:00	Andy Leonard	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	SSIS 2012 - Instrumentation and Logging
10-05-2012 16:00	Karen Lopez	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Database Design Contentious Issues
11-05-2012 08:45	Mark Broadbent	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Enter the Dragon: SQL 2012 on Server Core
11-05-2012 08:45	Bob Ward	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	What's New for SQL Server 2012 Supportability
11-05-2012 08:45	Cindy Gross	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Fitting Hadoop into Your Enterprise BI Strategy
11-05-2012 08:45	Kevin Boles	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Death by UDF
11-05-2012 08:45	Neil Hambly	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Compression - Define your Strategy
11-05-2012 08:45	Jen Stirrup	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Business Intelligence in Azure: SSIS & SSRS Focus
11-05-2012 10:15	Grant Fritchey	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	T-SQL Deployment and Continuous Integration Best Practices (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 10:15	Adam Saxton	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Digging into Reporting Services 2012 with SharePoint 2010
11-05-2012 10:15	Julie Koesmarno	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	DirectQuery vs VertiPaq (Cached) Mode in Tabular Model (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 10:15	Sean McCown	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Understanding Backups (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 10:15	Suresh Kandoth	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	SQL Server 2012: Memory Manager Rebooted
11-05-2012 10:15	Brad McGehee	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	How to Monitor Your SQL Server for Performance & High Availability
11-05-2012 13:00	Sean McCown	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	The Backup Tune-up (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 13:00	Greg Galloway	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Making Heads or Tails of Analysis Services Storage
11-05-2012 13:00	Wesley Brown	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Fundamentals of SAN, NAS and IP Storage
11-05-2012 13:00	Devin Knight	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Adapting Your ETL Solutions to Use SSIS 2012
11-05-2012 13:00	Rohit Nayak	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Troubleshooting Performance on SQL Server 2012 with Extended Events
11-05-2012 13:00	Erin Welker	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Professional Development (PD)	So, You Want to Start a Career in BI (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 14:30	Joe Celko	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Advanced DDL Constraints (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 14:30	Adam Jorgensen, Dustin Ryan	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Zero to Cube - Fast Track to Analytics (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 14:30	Sri Sridharan	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Data Governance 101 - Environment, Space and Security (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 14:30	John Welch	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	SSIS Performance Tuning (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 14:30	Kathi Kellenberger	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	SQL Server 2012 T-SQL
11-05-2012 14:30	Ryan Adams	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Mirroring Start to Finish (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 16:00	Trevor Barkhouse	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	Deadlock Detection, Troubleshooting & Prevention
11-05-2012 16:00	Melissa Coates	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Business Intelligence (BI)	Managed Self-Service BI & Data as a Service (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 16:00	Carlos Bossy	Regular Session (75 minutes)	SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)	Using Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2012 (Community Pick)
11-05-2012 16:00	Louis Davidson	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	What Sequence Objects Are (and Are Not)
11-05-2012 16:00	Jennifer McCown	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Development (DEV)	Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos
11-05-2012 16:00	Robert Davis	Regular Session (75 minutes)	Database Administration (DBA)	TempDB: Performance and Manageability

SessionID: 2303

How to be a DBA - A Utility Belt of Tools

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Event Date: 08-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Chris Shaw, TJay Belt

Title: How to be a DBA - A Utility Belt of Tools

Description:

There are two sides to being a DBA. Most Database Professionals spend their precious time investing in the skills needed to answer the technical questions they will be presented with day to day. The best skill sets will just go to waste if you are not prepared to face the “Why” or “How” questions that come up. Just a few of Questions that we will help you gain answers to are; why should we upgrade our servers, how much server power do we need, what is the best process to follow, how should we manage our releases.

In this pre conference we will turn the future into one of understanding and planning, removing the use of a "Magic 8 Ball" to predict problems with your SQL Servers. We will do this by starting with a checklist that has proven to foster stable database servers, we will add the database utilities to automate these checklist items. The day will be completed by learning about change management options along with disaster recovery options.

DBA's, Managers, Developers, and Sys Admins will all gain an understanding of these tasks and leave the session with an ability to help improve their systems back home. You will be armed with examples, ideas, suggestions along with actual code, samples, documentation, templates and other tools to assist you. Combined we have 34 years of experience in IT, development and databases we would love to share with you.

Become a hero to your manager and the company that you work for by keeping your focus on proactive measures to avoid problems. We will spend time reviewing real world solution's to real world problems.

SessionID: 2440

Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional

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Event Date: 08-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Professional Development (PD)

Speaker(s): Kevin Kline

Title: Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional

Description:

Most IT leaders earned their promotions based on technical competency, not on leadership or managerial skills. Technical leaders rarely advance into leadership positions with the complex mix of social and soft skills that best facilitate their success and the success of their teams. Successful IT leaders must earn the respect of their team and have a deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals as well as specific skills to lead database professionals competently.

These skills broadly fall into the following categories: Coaching team members to meet goals and deadlines, facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions, promoting communication within the team and with management, keeping teams and projects on task and within scope, dealing with difficult team members, and practicing good time management techniques. This seminar’s training content, fun exercises, and reference material equip attendees to further develop their leadership potential and achieve excellent results for themselves and for their teams.

SessionID: 2206

Storage for the DBA

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Event Date: 08-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Denny Cherry

Title: Storage for the DBA

Description:

One of the biggest issues in database performance centers around storage. It’s also one of the hardest places to troubleshoot performance issues because storage engineers and database administrators often do not speak the same language. In this full-day seminar, we’ll be looking at storage from both the database and storage perspectives. We’ll be digging into LUNs, HBAs, the fabric, as well as RAID groups.

SessionID: 2259

How to Perform a SQL Server Health Check

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Event Date: 09-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Brad McGehee

Title: How to Perform a SQL Server Health Check

Description:

Are all the SQL Server instances you manage healthy, running optimally, and providing the high availability your organization expects of them? If you don’t know, or if you have inherited, or are consulting with some SQL Server instances you are not familiar with, then you need to perform a SQL Server Health Check in order to find out.

Think of a SQL Server health check similarly to a health check with your physician. On your visit, the doctor will record your basic stats, take a medical history, and perform a number of tests. In many ways, what the doctor does is to document your health, and then compares what he finds to medical health best practices, to determine your current health. The next year at your annual check-up, the doctor will examine your again and then compare it to the baseline from the initial checkup. This helps the doctor determine if your health is the same, getting better, or getting worse. A SQL Server health check is very similar.

In this day-long session, you will learn how to document your SQL Server instances and how to determine if your instances are employing generally accepted best practices. Based on this information, you will be able to conclude if your instances are healthy, which means that they are running optimally and providing the level of high availability your organization expects of them. If not, you will learn how to fix any problems you find.

More specifically, you will learn about how to document your instances, and learn best practices in all of the following areas: Hardware Setup & Configuration, Operating System Setup & Configuration, SQL Server Instance Level Settings, Database Level Settings, Security Settings, Database Maintenance, SQL Server Jobs, Logs to Monitor and Review, SQL Server Monitoring, Performance Optimization, and High Availability. In many ways, this session will bring together all the best practices every DBA should know about administering a SQL Server instance.

This session will cover hundreds of health checklist items and their best practices. To help you keep track of all this information, you will be provided with scripts to collect the data, and a spreadsheet in order to collect and analyze the data.

This session is designed for database administrators from novice to intermediate level. After attending this session, attendees will be able to go back to their organizations and begin to immediately perform their own SQL Server health checks.

SessionID: 2254

Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices

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Event Date: 09-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Robert Davis, Argenis Fernandez

Title: Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices

Description:

Being able to evaluate and develop best practices is a critical skill for DBAs. Early in our careers, we followed best practices because people who claimed to know more about SQL Server told us to. Then we realized that for most best practices we found, we could find the opposite advice posted elsewhere. We started evaluating best practices ourselves and began cultivating our own set of best practices.

This workshop is a culmination of what we’ve learned through our experiences, testing, and understanding of how SQL Server operates. We will touch on best practices for all aspects of the DBA realm, from AD configuration to Windows Server deployments to SQL installs with configuration settings galore. We will cover the "why's" behind the best practices, tips to make your daily duties easier, and what to look for in code reviews. And we’ll show you how to evaluate best practices for yourself.

SessionID: 2165

99 Tips for Tuning and Enhancing Analysis Services

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Event Date: 09-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Greg Galloway

Title: 99 Tips for Tuning and Enhancing Analysis Services

Description:

Come hear Greg Galloway share all his best tips for optimizing performance of Analysis Services and for improving the user experience and reach of your cubes. This session is targeted at BI developers responsible for maintaining Analysis Services cubes and to DBAs who are tasked with monitoring and troubleshooting Analysis Services issues. Expect to leave with an actionable checklist of ideas to try on Monday, when you return to work with a deeper grasp of the internals of Analysis Services, with MDX optimization experience, and with best practices that ensure your projects succeed. This pre-conference session will focus on Multidimensional cubes and MDX, but will briefly discuss the advantages and limitations of new Tabular models and DAX in Analysis Services 2012.

SessionID: 2416

Relational Database Design Workshop

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Event Date: 09-05-2012 08:30 - Category: Pre-Cons (7 hours) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Louis Davidson

Title: Relational Database Design Workshop

Description:

Database design is a seemingly natural process, lending itself to everyone trying it, from an administrative assistant with a spreadsheet to a C# programmer with a copy of SQL Server Express. Unfortunately, the finer points of excellent database design are not intuitively obvious, and the difference between building a spreadsheet and a solid enterprise database is similar to the difference between building a dog house and a 2-story house, or even the Empire State Building. To design a database correctly, you need to understand basic relational theory, gathering and applying requirements, and normalization. But that’s only the start. In this workshop, we will go to the next level and get our hands dirty designing databases too.

We’ll begin with database design fundamentals, and design several databases as a class, in groups, and individually. Then we’ll dig into advanced topics on database design patterns and practices, with more design time.

SessionID: 2290

Got a Data Mess the Size of Texas? Data Cleansing Using the "Scrubbing Bubbles" of SSIS

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Amy Lewis

Title: Got a Data Mess the Size of Texas? Data Cleansing Using the "Scrubbing Bubbles" of SSIS

Description:

Got data that is a mess and that you have been asked to clean up before loading into your data warehouse? Come learn from this demo-packed session the various components and techniques in SSIS for cleaning messy data, including removing duplicates and removing unwanted characters and words. Become less "fuzzy" about the cleansing powers of fuzzy grouping and fuzzy lookups.

SessionID: 2229

Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Allen White

Title: Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell

Description:

We all know how important it is to keep a baseline of performance metrics that allow us to know when something is wrong and help us to track it down and fix the problem. We don't always know how to do this easily and consistently. This session will walk you through a series of PowerShell scripts you can schedule which will capture the most important data and a set of reports to show you how to use that data to keep your server running smoothly.

SessionID: 2494

Tuning Analysis Services Performance

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): John Welch

Title: Tuning Analysis Services Performance

Description:

You’ve got your Analysis Services cube created, and deployed in production. However, you notice that every night, the cube is taking longer and longer to process, and users are starting to complain about their data not being ready when they arrive in the morning. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, or want to avoid being in it in the first place, come to this session. We’ll cover how to benchmark processing performance, track down bottlenecks, and how to tune things to get the best performance for processing your cube.

SessionID: 2450

SQL Server Internals and Architecture

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Kevin Kline

Title: SQL Server Internals and Architecture

Description:

Let’s face it, you can do many SQL Server tasks without knowing how SQL Server works. Many developers, DBAs, and designers do their day-to-day work on time and with reasonable quality while never really knowing what’s happening behind the scenes. But to take your skills to the next level, it’s critical to know SQL Server’s internal processes and architecture.

This fun and fast-paced session will answer questions like: What’s different about 32- and 64-bit systems? What are the various areas of memory inside SQL Server? How are queries handled behind the scenes? What does SQL Server do with procedural code, like functions, procedures, and triggers? How are IOs handled with regard to transaction logs and the database? What happens when transaction logs and databases grow or shrink? And for those topics we don’t cover, we’ll point you to resources for more information.

SessionID: 2452

Social Marketing 2012 for Microsoft Professionals

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Professional Development (PD)

Speaker(s): Mark Tabladillo

Title: Social Marketing 2012 for Microsoft Professionals

Description:

Developing a social media platform is a challenge for high-end professionals and consultants. Come learn from someone who has successfully leveraged web media to establish a blog (http://marktab.net), cofound an online journal (http://solidq.com/sqj), become a paid video presenter, secure a spot at Microsoft TechEd 2011, and earn credit toward his first Microsoft MVP. This presentation introduces today's basic elements of a successful web strategy, starting with discovering your own best personal focus given current market needs. The session includes the speaker's experiences with website development, WordPress blog hosting, leveraging social media services (including Twitter, Linked in, YouTube, and Facebook), and working with Microsoft.

SessionID: 2276

Upgrade Roadmap: Let’s Delve into SQL Server 2012

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Craig Purnell

Title: Upgrade Roadmap: Let’s Delve into SQL Server 2012

Description:

We will review the upgrade process to SQL Server 2012. An upgrade is 75% project planning and 25% execution. Everyone knows that, right? Actually, no. We'll walk through a checklist of considerations a company would likely encounter coming from SQL Server 2005/2008 or R2, as well as the pros and cons of in-place upgrade vs. the build-new approach. There will be many real-world lessons learned from many upgrades and migrations of SQL Server. Key takeaways include: when to upgrade in place compared to build new, usage of and how to gauge the usefulness of Upgrade Advisor, and deprecated features and how to test for them.

SessionID: 2487

The Report Part Library: Increasing Development Productivity in Reporting Services

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s):

Title: The Report Part Library: Increasing Development Productivity in Reporting Services

Description:

Using SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and Report Builder 3.0, report writers can store, re-use, and modify pieces of reports using "report parts." A report part gallery, which is a collection of report parts, lets report writers collaborate on their projects to speed up initial development productivity and to decrease maintenance time. As exciting as the report part gallery sounds, having one provides little benefit without a formal management process. Learn how to set up a formal, user-friendly, and easily maintainable report part library.

SessionID: 2460

The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Tim Ford

Title: The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects

Description:

Taking the periodic table of elements into consideration, I've created The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects as a reference tool for these functions and views that have become so critical for today's SQL Server DBA to performance tune and gain metadata insights into their various SQL instances. In navigating the table, we will examine key DMVs and DMFs of interest: requests, sessions, wait stats, indexes, and system information will all be covered. We will also delve into how these DMOs - just like their elemental counterparts - can be combined to yield interesting insights into your servers. We will also look at how things can also go awry - like mixing vinegar and baking soda, sometimes combining DMOs can cause a big mess too!

SessionID: 2384

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Indexes but were Afraid to Ask

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Dmitri Korotkevitch

Title: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Indexes but were Afraid to Ask

Description:

No system ever performs well even on the most powerful hardware unless the database is efficiently indexed. But what does "efficient indexing" mean? Database Professionals impress customers by use of magic buzzwords such as “Indexing strategies” and “Performance tuning” and happily contribute to the myth that those are very complex subjects. But with all complexity involved it’s not Rocket Science – the key point is to understand how SQL Server works with indexes and look at them from SQL Server standpoint. Every system is unique however the main principles remain the same and can be applied everywhere.

In this session Dmitri dives into the internals of Storage Engine and Query Optimizer and covers various topics related with indexes. He demonstrates the physical structure of the indexes, explains how and when SQL Server uses them and, most importantly, discusses how to design efficient indexing strategies and perform index tuning of the system.

SessionID: 2173

Transparent Data Encryption Inside and Out in SQL 2012 (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Bradley Ball

Title: Transparent Data Encryption Inside and Out in SQL 2012 (Community Pick)

Description:

Security is a very important part of your job and in how data is utilized. We have many tools to make data more secure, and starting in SQL Server 2008, we were able to add Transparent Data Encryption to that list. Find out what it does and doesn’t do, how it effects read-only filegroups, performance, and compression (backup and row/page), what the X.509 encryption standard is and why you should be careful of what you store and where, and other advanced features and management tips.

SessionID: 2208

Using SQL Server 2012's Always On

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Denny Cherry

Title: Using SQL Server 2012's Always On

Description:

In this session, we will look at the functionality provided with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 as part of the "Always On" features, including site-to-site configurations to allow a large-scale high availability solution without the need for any high-end SAN storage solution.

In addition, we will look at the ability to have redundant servers, which can be used for reporting or taking backups, reducing the load from the production database. We will also discuss a unique use case, using SQL Server 2012's Always On feature to scale out the reads to synchronous read-only copies.

SessionID: 2219

Overcoming Barriers and Avoiding Mistakes with BI

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): William E Pearson III

Title: Overcoming Barriers and Avoiding Mistakes with BI

Description:

A Dynamic Dialog session: Whether you’re considering implementing business intelligence for the first time, have completed projects in the past (and are perhaps looking at later phases), or are somewhere in between, an investment of your time in this session will likely pay dividends. BI architect and Microsoft MVP Bill Pearson leads a dialog about common pitfalls or traps that we can encounter in designing and implementing BI. We’ll discuss, as a group, environmental and other challenges we have experienced, and share ways to avoid or minimize them in our ongoing efforts with BI.

SessionID: 2345

Introduction to Data Quality Services (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Tim Mitchell

Title: Introduction to Data Quality Services (Community Pick)

Description:

In this session, we will take a quick tour of the new data quality tool released with SQL Server 2012. With SQL Server Data Quality Services, data professionals now have an easy-to-use framework with which they can analyze and maintain data quality. This session will serve as an introduction to this new product - we will discuss DQS concepts and architecture, review the server and client components of DQS, and will demonstrate the DQS component for SSIS.

SessionID: 2459

Data Warehouse Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): David Stein

Title: Data Warehouse Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Description:

Many data professionals understand the basics of Data Warehouse design, including Dimension and Fact Tables, slowly changing Dimensions, and the use of meaningless surrogate keys. However, it isn’t until you’ve created a dimensional model and put it into production, that you realize just how much of an impact seemingly trivial mistakes can make. They can hobble performance, allow inaccuracy, and perhaps worst of all, inhibit adoption and usage of the new system.

Learn how to avoid many common mistakes, from someone who’s made them and then found ways to correct them.

SessionID: 2249

Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Vicky Harp

Title: Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional (Community Pick)

Description:

Are you confident that your application performs as expected on Leap Day? Do you know how long it would take to run out of identity values in your major tables? Can you support case-sensitive collations and non-standard sort orders? If not, odds are good that you are not edge and corner testing your application. In this session, learn how to define the edges of your application and start to stretch those boundaries by setting up challenging test and development environments. For database administrators, learn what configurations in your environment may be a source of bugs in application code and what you can do about it. Learn about edge cases that you can start hardening your code against on Monday morning!

SessionID: 2231

Manage SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core with PowerShell

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Allen White

Title: Manage SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core with PowerShell

Description:

Windows Server 2008 introduced Server Core, the operating system without the Graphical User Interface. SQL Server 2012 is the first version of SQL Server to support Server Core. To gain the maximum efficiency from your servers, you want to make use of Server Core, and with PowerShell you can effectively manage SQL Server in that environment. This session will demonstrate how to manage SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core and provide scripts to help you perform the common tasks you need to perform on that platform.

SessionID: 2176

Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Michael Fal

Title: Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning (Community Pick)

Description:

Is your table fat? Do you need to manage a table that has billions of rows within it and are overwhelmed by index rebuilds that take more than 12 hours? SQL Server's table partitioning gives the DBA the tools to manage this beast and support very large tables in a way where index management and data retrieval does not become unwieldy. This presentation will take you step-by-step through choosing an appropriate partitioning key, setting up the partitioning on the table, and finally maintaining the partitions.

SessionID: 2325

Developing and Managing a BI Semantic Tabular Model in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Patrick LeBlanc

Title: Developing and Managing a BI Semantic Tabular Model in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services

Description:

In SQL Server 2012, Analysis Services can now run in a Tabular model, allowing IT professionals to quickly develop and deploy analytic models. In this demo-centric session, I will explain how to build a model, implement various levels of security, and deploy the model onto the server. In addition, you will see how to leverage a new reporting tool to create visually appealing and interactive reports.

SessionID: 2304

Building a Write-Back Application with Analysis Services

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Bryan Smith

Title: Building a Write-Back Application with Analysis Services

Description:

Write-back is a powerful feature of Analysis Services that provides the ability to input data directly into complex models. In this session, you will learn the basic techniques for Analysis Services write-back and how these techniques may be applied to address various business needs.

SessionID: 2170

Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing for Better Query Performance

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Grant Fritchey

Title: Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing for Better Query Performance

Description:

Parameter sniffing is a misunderstood issue on SQL Server. Most of the time, parameter sniffing is helping performance on your servers. But sometimes, circumstances change and what was helping you is now hurting you, bad. In this session, we’ll gain an understanding of what exactly parameter sniffing is and why it’s usually so helpful. Then, we’ll explore how parameter sniffing can go wrong, and I’ll show you seven different ways you can deal with it when it does. You’ll bring back a wealth of knowledge so that you can identify and resolve bad parameter sniffing in your own environment.

SessionID: 2402

"Turbo Charge" Your DBA Career (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Professional Development (PD)

Speaker(s): Sri Sridharan

Title: "Turbo Charge" Your DBA Career (Community Pick)

Description:

This session will focus on things you can do to boost your SQL career. While it is targeted at new DBAs and SQL developers and things you can do to take your career to new heights, experienced DBAs can also learn a thing or two about "re-charging" their SQL careers.

SessionID: 2438

STOP! Consolidate and Listen!

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Jorge Segarra

Title: STOP! Consolidate and Listen!

Description:

In today's economic times, we are being asked to do more with less. Less budget, less hardware and yet our data needs keep growing! So how do we keep our database infrastructure humming along given these restrictions? In this session we will talk about different options of consolidation including: database-level consolidation, instance-level consolidation, and virtualization. Additionally we will also talk about some of the tools and methods you can use today to help you consolidate your SQL Server environment and do more with less!

SessionID: 2381

Manage Your Shop with CMS & Policy Based Management

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Ryan Adams

Title: Manage Your Shop with CMS & Policy Based Management

Description:

In this presentation we talk about Central Management Server and how it can help you manage a disperse environment. We will also cover what Policy Based Management is and how you can leverage its power to better manage your environment. With PBM we’ll see what it can and cannot do to help you enforce standards in your enterprise. We will cover and demonstrate PBM for the beginner from creating and evaluating policies to receiving alerts on policy violations.

SessionID: 2258

Dashboards: How to Choose Which MSBI Tool (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Melissa Coates

Title: Dashboards: How to Choose Which MSBI Tool (Community Pick)

Description:

The Microsoft BI stack has a few choices for visualization. We will explore options, flexibility, limitations, and ease of use for creating dashboards and scorecards with the following: PerformancePoint Services 2010, Reporting Services 2008 R2, SharePoint Server 2010, PowerPivot, and Power View.

SessionID: 2204

Building Your Professional Development Plan

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Professional Development (PD)

Speaker(s): Andy Warren

Title: Building Your Professional Development Plan

Description:

Ready to take the next step in your career? Ready to build a plan that will get you there? This session will show you a process for building a comprehensive professional development plan - a road map to get to where you want to go!

This session is designed to help you build a professional development plan using the same techniques that are used for building business plans. We'll talk about obtaining and managing resources, setting realistic goals, tracking progress, and what to do when you get off plan.

We're going to look at more than pure technical learning. We'll discuss how and when to modify your plan to include networking, writing, social engagement, and managing and leadership skills - and talk about the most effective ways to do it.

We will also discuss changing how you look at your career, adopting the mindset of the consultant even if you prefer to retain your status as an employee. It's not an easy change, but it's a powerful one, and that is an important component of a professional development plan.

At the end of this session you should be ready to spend a day building a plan that will help you move your career forward to a goal that you've selected.

SessionID: 2172

SQL Internals, Recovery Models, and Backups! OH MY! (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Bradley Ball

Title: SQL Internals, Recovery Models, and Backups! OH MY! (Community Pick)

Description:

The more you know about SQL Server, the more you understand how it works. SQL Server is a product we use every day, and most of us know the big concepts. At the 10,000-foot view, we know what databases, tables, and columns are. But what makes up those databases, tables, and columns? What are records, pages, extents, and allocation units? What are Full, Simple, and Bulk-Logged recovery models? What are the differences between Full, Transaction Log, Differential, and Filegroup backups? What is a piecemeal restore? This is an introduction to these concepts using SQL Server 2012. In this session, you will learn about the internal structure, recovery models, and backups and be better prepared for future learning and managing SQL Server.

SessionID: 2316

PowerShell: Are You Checking Out My Profile?

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Nicholas Cain

Title: PowerShell: Are You Checking Out My Profile?

Description:

PowerShell is a very powerful management tool, and you can spend hours writing magical scripts to do all the things you want. Frequently forgotten is the PowerShell profile, a place where you can add your own functions that can provide you lightning fast access to information. We'll talk about the power a profile puts at your fingertips. I will also demo (and share) a bunch of short functions that I use frequently for common tasks. I'll show you my PowerShell profile if you show me yours.

SessionID: 2472

Data Mining (It's not the size of your data - it's what you do with it)

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Adam Jorgensen, Devin Knight

Title: Data Mining (It's not the size of your data - it's what you do with it)

Description:

This all-demo session will focus on data mining from non-traditional sources. Many of you can mine from a nice clean dataset, but we will use the new Tabular model to consolidate data from disparate sources and perform some basic cleansing and mining that an end user can do once they know how! This sesion will be total audiece participation - not a slide lecture and not one silly demo!

SessionID: 2369

SSIS 2012 - Instrumentation and Logging

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Andy Leonard

Title: SSIS 2012 - Instrumentation and Logging

Description:

This session is for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers who want to learn more about the options available for capturing execution and performance metadata from SSIS in Integration Services 2012. The session is labeled "Level 200," but it is for SSIS developers who are new to SSIS and those new to SSIS 2012. The session will demonstrate methods for instrumenting SSIS packages in Integration Services 2012, including SSISDB data collection, built-in logging, and custom logging.

SessionID: 2367

Database Design Contentious Issues

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Event Date: 10-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Karen Lopez

Title: Database Design Contentious Issues

Description:

Are you opinionated? Are you usually right? Do you wish you could tell others about your database design beliefs? If so, this session is for you! In this highly interactive and lively session, attendees evaluate the options and best practices of common database design issues such as: natural vs. surrogate KEYS, how long is too long, VARCHAR minimums, Identity crisis, NULL or NOT NULL, and more. We, as a group, will vote on a range of options, discuss the voting trend as a whole, then debate the pros and cons of each possible vote.

Bring your votes, your debates, your opinions... and comfortable shoes - there's physical effort required here.

SessionID: 2190

Enter the Dragon: SQL 2012 on Server Core

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Mark Broadbent

Title: Enter the Dragon: SQL 2012 on Server Core

Description:

In 1982 the Dragon 32 entered the home computer market but unfortunately there was one small problem ...lower-case letters were almost impossible to access. Two years later, Dragon was no more.

In 2008 Microsoft released Server Core which provides a fast and streamlined (but reduced functionality) edition of Windows with minimal GUI support. As of SQL Server 2012, installation to Windows 2008R2 Core is now a supported option and will mean the biggest administrative change to a DBA since the release of SQL 2005 ...or will it?

In this session we will discuss and demonstrate:- Configuration of the OS through Command line utilities and PowerShell Installation of SQL Server on Server Core Remote Administration of SQL Server and Server Core Clustering on Server Core

Will the lack of GUI support send Server Core in the same direction as the Dragon 32 or does it spell a bright new beginning for Windows Server based computing and SQL Server?

Attend this session and this time, listen to the Dragon roar!

SessionID: 2273

What's New for SQL Server 2012 Supportability

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Bob Ward

Title: What's New for SQL Server 2012 Supportability

Description:

SQL Server 2012 provides many new enhancements for administrators to use in maintaining and troubleshooting issues for the SQL Server Database Engine. This session includes information and demonstrations for the followinng topics and more: new Extended Events across the engine, new "Health" Extended Events log, new Dynamic Management Views, new Query Plan debugging enhancements, new Always-On support features, review of code design enhancements, and how to fix your setup without really trying.

You will walk away from this session with information you can use immediately to help maintain and solve problems with your SQL Server 2012 Database Engine installation.

SessionID: 2257

Fitting Hadoop into Your Enterprise BI Strategy

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Cindy Gross

Title: Fitting Hadoop into Your Enterprise BI Strategy

Description:

What is this Big Data thing and why should you care? Learn about Microsoft's Hadoop connectors, our Hive add-in for Excel, what Pig and Hive are, and more. Big Data is an exciting foray into the world of data previously too big to load and query in an affordable manner. With the new Big Data tools you can expand your BI reach be the hero who helps your company make better business decisions.

SessionID: 2429

Death by UDF

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Kevin Boles

Title: Death by UDF

Description:

What can I say? Using User Defined Functions in your database code is like playing Russian Roulette with 5.97 bullets in the gun! There are sooooo many ways they can kill you: staggering performance degredation, tempdb allocation issues, and bad data (at least two ways that I know of). Oh, did I mention performance issues? Those include row-by-row processing under the covers, bad estimates leading to horrible query plans, voiding parallelization in the engine, and more. We are going to cover all this in a jam-packed session. We will also cover several ways you can get rid of them. And if you MUST use UDFs, I will also cover some potential ways to lessen their badness.

SessionID: 2196

Compression - Define your Strategy

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Neil Hambly

Title: Compression - Define your Strategy

Description:

The Enterprise-only Compression feature can make dramatic differences to your SQL Server storage requirements. While examining this feature in some detail, we will investigate the why's and when's of integrating this feature into your company's SQL data strategies, find the objects on which you might apply this feature, discover the compression savings, and look at index usage information, fill-factors, and more for achieving a balanced strategy. This session will not only cover the core principles of SQL Server's data compression feature, how it functions, what options you can control, and how it performs under differing workloads; we will also discuss challenges you might encounter, examining the all-important performance aspects and the other configuration changes to consider along with SKU edition requirements.

SessionID: 2180

Business Intelligence in Azure: SSIS & SSRS Focus

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 08:45 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Jen Stirrup

Title: Business Intelligence in Azure: SSIS & SSRS Focus

Description:

What does Azure offer to Business Intelligence developers and those who use BI every day? Come to this session to see how you can transfer your skills in SSIS and SSRS to add Azure to your existing BI skill set. We will look at the differences in developing SSIS packages that use Azure as a source and as a target, developing SSRS reports deployed to Azure, and mobile devices (such as tablets) and Azure. Come see the similarities and differences in using Azure SQL BI and learn to avoid some of the "gotcha!" pitfalls.

SessionID: 2169

T-SQL Deployment and Continuous Integration Best Practices (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Grant Fritchey

Title: T-SQL Deployment and Continuous Integration Best Practices (Community Pick)

Description:

While most T-SQL developers focus on writing quality T-SQL code and efficient queries, what they often forget is how it should best be deployed. This includes deployment of new applications, as well as upgrades and bug fixes. In this session, you will learn many best practices involving the principles of continuous integration, such as maintaining a code repository, automating builds, self-testing, auditing, automated deployment, and much more. This session is designed for both DBA administrators and developers who want to optimize their T-SQL deployment process.

SessionID: 2255

Digging into Reporting Services 2012 with SharePoint 2010

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Adam Saxton

Title: Digging into Reporting Services 2012 with SharePoint 2010

Description:

In this session, we will go through a deployment of Reporting Services 2012 with SharePoint Integration and how this differs from previous versions. There will be some gotcha’s to look out for and tips to assist with planning. We will also look at how things work now that we are a Shared Service with SharePoint as opposed to a separate service. If you deal with Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated mode, this is a must-see talk.

SessionID: 2347

DirectQuery vs VertiPaq (Cached) Mode in Tabular Model (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Julie Koesmarno

Title: DirectQuery vs VertiPaq (Cached) Mode in Tabular Model (Community Pick)

Description:

The new and flashy Tabular Model for Analysis Services has been highly pitched, with the in-memory (VertiPaq) capability allowing for complex queries to run very fast. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using in-memory cache to store and query data? Is DirectQuery the answer to address in-memory cache mode? What are the restrictions on DirectQuery tabular model? When can a hybrid mode be used? How can the selected mode affect the Processing option during deployment?

In this session, all the above questions will be answered with live demos, comparing the two modes and the scenarios that are applicable to them. It also discusses how partition plays an important role in DirectQuery mode and choosing the correct processing mode when deploying a Tabular Model solution.

SessionID: 2446

Understanding Backups (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Sean McCown

Title: Understanding Backups (Community Pick)

Description:

One of the most important functions a DBA can perform is the backup. And far too many DBAs rely on the wizard to perform this task. Here I'll take you through everything you need to know about understanding command-line backups, writing backup routines, and making the right decisions on how to do what kind of restore and when. I will take you through basic backup syntax and fully explain how things work the way they do and why. If you ever wanted to understand the ins and outs of SQL Server backups, then this session will give you what you're after.

SessionID: 2287

SQL Server 2012: Memory Manager Rebooted

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Suresh Kandoth

Title: SQL Server 2012: Memory Manager Rebooted

Description:

Troubleshooting and understanding the various mechanisms of SQL Server memory management is often a complex task. It is increasingly becoming a requirement for database administrators to properly understand the memory requirement and usage profile of SQL Server specific to the applications they support. SQL Server 2012 introduces several welcome changes in this area. The internal architecture of the memory manager has undergone changes. This session will take you through all those changes introduced in SQL Server 2012 and how you can use these changes and new tools in your day-to-day database administration. We will also look at how various configuration options and knobs behave in SQL Server 2012.

SessionID: 2185

How to Monitor Your SQL Server for Performance & High Availability

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 10:15 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Brad McGehee

Title: How to Monitor Your SQL Server for Performance & High Availability

Description:

Is your phone ringing off the hook your first sign of SQL Server performance or availability problems? Let’s hope not. As a proactive DBA, it is your job to regularly and thoroughly monitor your servers. In some cases, close monitoring can help you detect small problems before they become big problems. In cases outside of your control, you will want to be notified immediately of the problem so you can take quick action to resolve it. In this session, you will learn what aspects of your SQL Servers you should monitor, and how best to monitor them. In fact, you will be presented with a checklist that you can follow to help ensure that you are monitoring the right things in the most efficient manner.

SessionID: 2451

The Backup Tune-up (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Sean McCown

Title: The Backup Tune-up (Community Pick)

Description:

Have you gotten tired of your 1TB database taking 4+ hours to back up? Are you sick of having your users breathe down your neck for 2 hours because it’s taking too long to restore a database? You don’t have to worry about that anymore. I’m going to show you some little known tricks, methods, and trace flags you can use to tune your backups just like you would a query. Backups actually have kind of an execution plan that you can access if you know how, and knowing how to get the individual portions of your backup process down will allow you to knock 80% and even more off of your backup and restore time. I’m not holding anything back in this session. This is a method I’ve used for 15 years to tune my backups, and I’ve had great success with it.

SessionID: 2160

Making Heads or Tails of Analysis Services Storage

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Greg Galloway

Title: Making Heads or Tails of Analysis Services Storage

Description:

If you are about to start a new Microsoft business intelligence project, you have more Analysis Services choices and flexibility than ever before. Come learn what's new in Analysis Services 2012 and learn the advantages and limitations of the new Tabular models compared with classic Multidimensional models. In this session we will take a deep dive into storage modes in Analysis Services. We’ll discuss the two storage modes a Multidimensional model can use: MOLAP and ROLAP. We’ll discuss the storage modes in new Tabular models: VertiPaq and DirectQuery. We’ll preview the new columnstore index in SQL Server 2012 and discuss how it impacts Analysis Services. And we’ll take a deep dive into two successful Analysis Services deployments at two Fortune 500 companies and discuss why one chose ROLAP and the other chose MOLAP.

SessionID: 2238

Fundamentals of SAN, NAS and IP Storage

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Wesley Brown

Title: Fundamentals of SAN, NAS and IP Storage

Description:

You have two major options for storage with SQL Server: direct-attached storage that isn’t shared with any other servers, and network-attached storage that can be shared. Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storage have their own challenges and rewards. We will go through the fundamentals that can be applied to most network-attached storage setups. What exactly is a SAN? What separates a NAS from a SAN? How does iSCSI fit into this picture? We will also cover different strategies for setting up your storage as it applies to SQL Server.

SessionID: 2295

Adapting Your ETL Solutions to Use SSIS 2012

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Devin Knight

Title: Adapting Your ETL Solutions to Use SSIS 2012

Description:

With all the great new features added to SSIS in SQL Server 2012, it is important to understand how they can make your development life easier. This session will not only highlight what is new in SSIS but will also show how your existing solutions can be adapted to utilize the latest features. Topics will include changes to usability, deployment, configuration, and management.

SessionID: 2262

Troubleshooting Performance on SQL Server 2012 with Extended Events

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Rohit Nayak

Title: Troubleshooting Performance on SQL Server 2012 with Extended Events

Description:

Have you heard of Extended Events (XEvents)? Has it been hard for you to figure out how to take advantage of them to get a handle on your performance issues on SQL Server? SQL Server 2012 has the answer for you! This talk will start by looking at the new XEvents introduced in SQL Server 2012. We will also look at the new XEProfiler tool that you can use to configure and view results from XEvents. After that, we will dive into some scenarios showing how to use XEvents to troubleshoot some common performance problems on SQL Server.

SessionID: 2313

So, You Want to Start a Career in BI (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 13:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Professional Development (PD)

Speaker(s): Erin Welker

Title: So, You Want to Start a Career in BI (Community Pick)

Description:

So you want to start a career in Business Intelligence? Or maybe you're a DBA who suddenly has administrative responsibilities for a data warehouse. Where do you start? How do you gain experience? I don't have all the answers, but I have been asked these questions many times and have discussed the topic with other BI professionals. This session will give you lots of ideas on how to get started, no matter what your background is. The agenda will cover why BI might be for you, BI terminology and methodology, how to learn the skills, and how to get some experience.

SessionID: 2271

Advanced DDL Constraints (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Joe Celko

Title: Advanced DDL Constraints (Community Pick)

Description:

Most SQL programmers do not use the full power of DDL and therefore have to put needless work into the application code and risk that two applications will not be in agreement. The optimizer can use the DDL but not procedural code, so this ignorance is expensive.

This session will start with the basics: NOT NULL, DEFAULT, Simple CHECK(). We'll look at the choice of data types: DECIMAL and NUMERIC vs FLOAT and REAL, CHAR(n) vs VARCHAR(n), Unicode, and COLLATION. Then, we'll round out the session by discussing using CASE in CHECK() constraints, function calls in CHECK() constraints, WITH CHECK OPTION on VIEWS, DRI Actions, and State Transition tables.

SessionID: 2470

Zero to Cube - Fast Track to Analytics (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Adam Jorgensen, Dustin Ryan

Title: Zero to Cube - Fast Track to Analytics (Community Pick)

Description:

This session has been updated for SQL Server 2012. It is consistently a top session from previous events, including SQLRally and PASS Summit. Come interact with your speaker and audience like you never have before. This session is 100% demo, packed full of fun, and will get you up and running on Analysis Services 2008R2 and 2012 right away!

SessionID: 2400

Data Governance 101 - Environment, Space and Security (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Sri Sridharan

Title: Data Governance 101 - Environment, Space and Security (Community Pick)

Description:

Data governance is a set of processes that ensures that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. Come to this session and learn about simple things that can help DBAs "govern" their SQL environment, put the right data governance solution in place to help manage your environment in a proactive manner, and build your own meta data repository for all your SQL Servers. Since this is a vast topic, we will only cover environment, database/disk space, and security.

SessionID: 2493

SSIS Performance Tuning (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): John Welch

Title: SSIS Performance Tuning (Community Pick)

Description:

Tuning the performance of Integration Services packages can be challenging. You have to consider not only the packages themselves, but also your database servers, file system, and system resources. During this session, we will cover a method for evaluating performance of your packages consistently, as well as scripts and utilities that support this method. We’ll also cover the top candidates for performance improvements in real world scenarios, and specific tuning that can be performed when you identify performance bottlenecks in SSIS. We'll also cover how SSIS 2012 impacts tuning.

SessionID: 2225

SQL Server 2012 T-SQL

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Kathi Kellenberger

Title: SQL Server 2012 T-SQL

Description:

SQL Server 2012 has something for everyone with AlwaysOn, the Column Store Index, the BI Semantic model, and more. But did you know that Microsoft has also added many enhancements to the T-SQL language? Attend this session to learn more about the new functions and features of SQL Server 2012 T-SQL!

SessionID: 2380

Mirroring Start to Finish (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 14:30 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Ryan Adams

Title: Mirroring Start to Finish (Community Pick)

Description:

Mirroring can be an integral part of your high availability and disaster recovery planning. We’ll cover what mirroring is from start to finish, how it can fit into a HA/DR plan, the rules surrounding its use, and configuration via the GUI and T-SQL, as well as how to monitor mirroring. This presentation is designed to not only give you an overview of mirroring, but to also walk you through a basic implementation. At the end, you will have learned what mirroring is, how it can fit into your environment, what business requirements it solves, and how to configure it.

SessionID: 2434

Deadlock Detection, Troubleshooting & Prevention

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Trevor Barkhouse

Title: Deadlock Detection, Troubleshooting & Prevention

Description:

As an enterprise application grows and load increases, some concurrency issues are bound to surface. Deadlocks are one of the more aggravating of this class of problems. Fortunately, each release of SQL Server includes better tools for troubleshooting deadlocks. This session will provide a strong foundation on deadlocks and then demonstrate approaches for handling them in SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008/2008 R2.

SessionID: 2256

Managed Self-Service BI & Data as a Service (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Business Intelligence (BI)

Speaker(s): Melissa Coates

Title: Managed Self-Service BI & Data as a Service (Community Pick)

Description:

You know BI, right? Well kids, traditional Business Intelligence is changing! You heard about the ambitious data analyst down the hall who created a mashup of data from the internal data warehouse, plus Excel, plus an Azure feed? Empowering knowledge workers is Microsoft's vision of delivering "BI for the Masses." In this session, we will dismiss the hype and examine how this new world of "managed self-service BI" complements Corporate BI in SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2010.

SessionID: 2443

Using Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2012 (Community Pick)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: SQL Server 2012 and Beyond (SS12)

Speaker(s): Carlos Bossy

Title: Using Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2012 (Community Pick)

Description:

Columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 will allow you to significantly improve the processing time of common data warehousing queries without creating cubes, aggregated tables, or other techniques normally used to improve performance. This session will show how to implement this new type of index in SQL Server and demonstrate their advantages compared to traditional solutions. It will also cover the scenarios for which columnstore indexes should be implemented to provide powerful but flexible BI solutions.

SessionID: 2412

What Sequence Objects Are (and Are Not)

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Louis Davidson

Title: What Sequence Objects Are (and Are Not)

Description:

SQL Server 2012 adds a new object to our arsenal called a sequence, which can give us the capability to implement automatically incrementing values. However, it cannot replace a lot of functionality that we have used a numbers table and windowing functions for (though they can be complementary to one another). In this session, I will demonstrate the uses and performance characteristics of sequences, including how they complement the use of number tables and windowing functions to create surrogate key and sorting values, and more.

SessionID: 2458

Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Development (DEV)

Speaker(s): Jennifer McCown

Title: Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos

Description:

Once upon a time, you inherited an application or a database that was filled with chaos and inconsistencies. The T-SQL code is overly complex and impossible to ken. The architecture is painful to behold, and grueling to code for. One might optimistically say that query performance is “spectacularly mediocre”. If you’re without good documentation or system architects to guide you, how do you break the curse of confusion? In this session you’ll learn several methods for conquering chaotic code, and how to seek and destroy some of the nastier coding mistakes and inefficiencies. We will break complicated queries into key pieces, turn them upside-down, and reform them into something sensible. We will vanquish major issues like data abuse and index negligence. We will restructure joins, tame subqueries, and refactor dynamic SQL. We will emerge victorious!

SessionID: 2279

TempDB: Performance and Manageability

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Event Date: 11-05-2012 16:00 - Category: Regular Session (75 minutes) - Track: Database Administration (DBA)

Speaker(s): Robert Davis

Title: TempDB: Performance and Manageability

Description:

Misconceptions and inconsistent advice on tempDB abounds - even highly skilled DBAs cannot always agree on how to best configure tempDB. Part of the problem is that there is no single solution that can be applied to every situation. How many files should tempDB have? Should it be on RAID 1? RAID 10? How about Solid State Drives (SSDs)? This session will give you the tools to determine the optimal configuration for tempDB. Also covered is how to detect, prevent, and monitor for common tempDB performance problems.