First, I would like to thank the sponsors for funding the event. Without them the event is not possible.
Confio (Ignite) even invited the speakers and volunteer to a Friday evening welcoming. It was just what was needed the night before the event. Thank you Matt Larson and David Waugh.
Other sponsors included Quest, Idera, Expressor, Redgate, Pearl, XLeratorDB, PASS, Pragmatic Works, TwentySix, SetFocus, Agile Technologies, Microsoft, CozyRoc and Apress.
Biggest thank you goes out to the NJ SQL Server User Group and volunteers, who did a top notch job. Thanks Alex for helping the speakers and SQLDiva for leading the group.
Breakfast was plentiful, coffee, orange juice, milk, donuts, bagels, etc.
The first session I attended with Andy Leonard SSIS Design Patterns. Andy did a great job with 2-3 patterns involving variables and events in SSIS.
Next was Matt Larson(Confio), showing how to use sysprocesses and DMV/DMFs to get performance information from SQL Server. A gentleman from the audience encourage all in attendance to install the trial version on Ignite and we would be amazed with the results from this tool. I am trying to schedule a day or 2 for a trial run.
Lunch was in the speakers room chatting with other speakers and volunteers. Next to me was Thomas LaRock, Andy Leonard, Grant Fitchey, Slava Kokaev, Adam Jorgensen and others. Lunch was box style and worked great.
Grant was up next with a great presentation on More Unnecessary Tuning. Basically, some do's and do not's up front when designing data access.
Andy Leonard continued in the afternoon with Incremental Loads in SSIS, but I had to leave before the end to prepare for my session. The Hash compare for changes interested me.
To close the day, I presented 3rd Key Normal Form: That's Crazy Talk!!! The room was a conference room with a table in the middle and chairs all arounnd with somewhere betwee 20-30 attendees(1 or 2 had to sit on the floor). The session was directed at good and bad DB designs, but I probably only got through the first 10-12 slides before the discussion went to Visio diagrams and SSMS scripting.
The participation from the attendees was great, I just had to keep the focus on the topic - kinda of like leading a meeting at work. It turned out better than I imagined and had 5-6 attendees stay a little while afterwards to thank me and offer some great advice and comments.
One open question was about Attributes on an Entity that vary based on a product type. I have never used XML as a data type, but this seemed to be a good case. Another peson suggested looking into EAVs design. I displayed a design in Visio that got a couple of people saying, 'That is not normal form.' OUCH!!!
It seems like a good session topic for 4th and 5th key normal form, and some industry standards or examples.
Plenty of prizes were given away by the sponsors and the conference.
My next Blog post will be a series on the DB Standards document from my current employer. I could not place this with my session because it belongs to Amedisys.
God Bless,
Thomas
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