Live Blog: PASS Summit–WIT Luncheon

WIT – Women In Technology 10 anniversary PASS Summit Luncheon

Please go to this link for more info on the speakers and content. I am blogging and tweeting from this luncheon to help with exposure of the message and to learn more myself.

Louisiana has a WIT community - http://www.la-wit.org/

11:55AM

Room is filling up, many conversations at tables. Bloggers table is full, actually overflowing and the session should start at 12noon pacific

12:05PM

PASS president Bill introduces Wendy as moderator. 10 years for WIT. Room for 700 people and Wendy reviews how they would recruiter people like the PASS Ambassadors of today. Wendy thanks SQLSentry and volunteers for support. Wendy also recognizes SQLSaturday organizers for running these events.

12:10PM

Stefanie is keynote speaker of WIT luncheon and says how overwhelmed with the attendance. Talks about have 60+ at the first luncheon and now 700+. Talks about her early years in technology and using COBOL.

12:15PM

Up next is Wendy, the VC leader on the WIT chapter. Talks about in 2002 search for a woman at PASS. But, now that has changed. A 24-HOP of women speakers have helped more women speaker at PASS, SQLSaturday and local user groups. Now, promotion of women in IT has grown. About 15% at PASS Summit are women in 2011 and 2012. Denise wants to she more woman create the technology not just support. she is concerned about the amount of women leaving tech jobs.

12:20PM

Kevin Kline is up next. Kevin has been involved with PASS since it started. Talks about the early days not having the money to help but we do have the attitude and heart to help the community. Leads the conversation of not being segregated and compares the different places that have welcome signs but a exclusive. PASS is goodness and we want to share with you

Mentions the need to have women in IT teams in order to bring the a different dimension to the task at hand. As a father of teenage girls, he is trying to find away to encourage them in IT. Always a Work In Progress.

12:30PM

Jen, the PASSion award winner up next. Very soft spoken woman, but experienced with the BI stack from Microsoft. Scottish accent is strong. Talks about the IT job helps her as a single mom to support her family. More diversity helps team dynamics. Mentions government studies in Scotland and US.

12:35PM

Kendra (MCM and MVP) talks about her search for the comfortable in the IT field and the different jobs she worked in. As she started speaking at SQLSaturday, She realized that when an attendee came up and asked more questions, being a consultant was a possibility. The encouragement she gives is start talking about what you know.

Rap Up

Question and answer period continues…

This luncheon was sponsored by

 

WIT Panelists
Stefanie Higgins
Stefanie Higgins has been a PASS member since 1999 and was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve as a PASS volunteer and eventually a PASS Board member from 2000 – 2005. She is one of the founders of the WIT luncheon event at PASS and as a mom of four she has a passion for encouraging working women especially in the area of work/life balance. Stefanie has worked as a Sr. DBA for IndyMac Bank, The Walt Disney Co. and as an IT Manager at DirecTV. She is an MCITP SQL Server 2008 R2, currently working as a Sr. DBA for Disney and enjoys telecommuting days from her home in beautiful San Diego CA.

Kevin Kline
Kevin Kline is a well-known database expert and software industry veteran. A long-time Microsoft SQL Server MVP and noted leader in the IT industry, he is a founder and former president of PASS and the author of popular IT books such as SQL in a Nutshell. Kevin is a top-rated speaker at industry conferences worldwide.

 

 

Kendra Little
Kendra Little is all about data, communication, and creativity. Kendra nerds out on SQL Server full time as a founder of Brent Ozar PLF, LLC, a boutique consulting company. She is a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server 2008 and a Microsoft MVP.

 

Denise McInerney

Denise McInerney began her career as a SQL Server DBA in 1998 and currently works as a Staff Technical Data Analyst at Intuit in Mountain View, CA. Denise, who serves as a Director-at-Large on the PASS Board of Directors, started volunteering for PASS in 2003. She founded the PASS Women in Technology Virtual Chapter (VC) and served as VC chairperson or co-chair for 5 years. Denise received the PASSion Award in 2007.

 

Jen Stirrup

Jen Stirrup is a SQL Server MVP, with a Bachelors degree in Psychology and two Masters in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Jen holds a Europe-wide volunteer role in helping to co-ordinate 'Women in Technology' events as a SQLPass volunteer, which covers WIT events in disparate countries from Sweden to Poland. Jen is a veteran SQL Server Developer with 15 years SQL experience in delivering end-to-end Business Intelligence solutions. Jen blogs for SQLServerPedia as well as her own blog. She has presented in many SQL Server User Groups in the UK.

PASS Summit 2012–Thursday morning

Using SSIS 2012 for ETL in a Data Warehouse

Well, I feel great relief that my session has been completed, and completed successfully. The room was full with people on the floor and along the walls. That was great considering Peter Meyers and Devin Knight had done similar sessions 2 different times before mine. Visual Studio blew up once (at the beginning) and I made a mistake with one OLEDB connection, but was able to recover both times. I had 2 attendees keep track of all the new features of 2012 I demonstrated, and one said 22 and the other had 26. Not bad for 75 minutes. Doing live demos of SSIS 2012 is not the easiest task, but I think attendees rather see demos than slides.

Tuesday – community involvement

Tuesday morning began with with PASS Virtual Chapter leaders, then SQLSaturday leaders and volunteers. The amount of people in these meetings were more than double the amount last year. Folks, there is a lot going on with the PASS SQL Server community. Please get involved. The afternoon was with House of Bricks talking about the methodology, best practice and monitoring of SQL Server on VMWare. I was expecting more technical demos, but it was still worth my time.

After some exercise, I helped man the Virtual Chapter area of the Welcome Reception and signed up 10 or so new members. The time was also spent talking to many attendees I knew or just meet. Hearing other SQL Server professionals talk about their work is indeed interesting and great for knowledge sharing. The room was overflowing and time went by quickly. The evening concluded with the annual SQLServerCentral.com Casino night. Of course, I lost all my play money chips, but the conversations with DBAs was worth it.

Wednesday

This morning started in the PASS Community center at 7AM. Right next to the dining area help with grabbing a quick bite. As I finished at my table, Buck Woody walked up to continue the conversation with the First Timers. I spent some in the speaker room rehearsing my demos for a 3PM session. Carlos Bossy came in as well as Matt Mason. We talked SSIS and Data Modeling which was great. I missed the Keynote, but here is a good link to a BI perspective view – Marco Russo.

The first session was Peter Meyers and Matthew Roche presenting on 10 Extraordinary Things to Achieve in SSIS. The duo was a great combination with a good talker and a demo guru. Lunch was at the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group table where I meet up with Patrick LeBlanc and Mark Verret. There was @SQLCajun and others from Mississippi at the table. Brian McDonald came by to talk with Patrick. Mark’s colleague was there from LSU and talked about us speaking about real world uses on Microsoft BI with their students.

The day concluded with SSAS Storage with Stacia Misner then my presentation at 3PM. The last session I attendee was SQL Server and SharePoint: Best Frienimies(sp?). A SQLCAT member did the presentation and she related it back to her DBA days. I am still not convinced about some of the Best Practices with maintenance but I understand more about why the want us to follow these suggestions 

Thursday

I am starting the morning in the PASS community lounge at 7AM helping new people get involved. Next is the massage chair in the Seattle Convention center. I am hoping to spend an hour there.

The first session is with Carlos Bossy who I meet last year with Steve Jones and he even came to Baton Rouge for our 3rd SQLSaturday. He is going to talk about planning and designing the underlying data base model that is needed for an effect Semantic Model. Next, I am live blogging and tweeting during the WIT Luncheon sponsored by SQLSentry. I rest of the day is up in the air, but the evening concludes with a Microsoft Appreciation event at Seattle’s Music Experience museum.

PASS Summit 2012–Day 1

Morning

Could not sleep past 4:30AM this morning, daylight savings time and 2 time zone changes did not help. So, exercise now in the morning and off to Summit for 7:30AM.

Meet 2 new Summit attendees in the elevator from Los Angles working for Stamps.com. They were both developers of web services for the shipping industry. They were heading to Louis Davidson’s (@DrSQL) Relations Database pre-con. Encouraged them to network and get as much from after hours networking as the sessions.

I am attending Rod Colledge pre-con on BI Dashboards. Rod did a session during 24-Hours of PASS that I was able to host and I am excited to learn for a pro. The room is starting to fill up at 7:25AM and an attendee from SQL Saturday in Baton Rouge and Houston is sitting next to me. He has some interesting things to say about SAP and Data Warehousing

PASS Summit 2012–My Schedule

Using SSIS 2012 for Data Warehouse ETL

I have been fortunate to be selected this year to speak at the PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle. This presentation will go mainly over 3 new features: The Change Data Capture and DQS controls as well as deploying SSIS projects/packages to the SSISDB catalog. Throughout the presentation, there will be usage of 10-20 more new features all depending on the demo and questions. 75% of this presentation is demos, so come along for the ride. I love presentations that show how to use SQL Server.

Pre-conference Session – Monday

After arriving on Sunday afternoon, I will go to Rod Colledge’s session on BI Dashboards with Dashboard Designer and PerformancePoint. This will satisfy the first goal of the conference; to take back what I learn and create 2 sets of dashboards for a project at work.

Monday night, I am going to the networking dinner Steve Jones and Andy Warren are hosting. I did this last year and it was a great way to sit with 4-6 SQL Server geeks and enjoy a dinner and conversation.

Community Involvement – Tuesday

Tuesday morning, I will be attending 2 round table discussions with Virtual Chapter leaders and SQLSaturday leaders/volunteers. I am the chair of the Data Architecture VC and have helped with the past 3 SQLSaturday’s in Baton Rouge and spoke at the first 3.

House of Bricks is hosting a SQL Server on VMware boot camp which I have decided to attend to help understand the configurations for the VMs we run at Turner Industries in Baton Rouge.

Tuesday night I am going to float between the Welcome Reception, SQLServerCentral.com/Redgate casino night and a speaker reception.

Main Conference – Wednesday

I am going to start out the morning at the Community Area booth which has been expanded this year in size. It will be great to say hi to Karla and other PASS workers and sign people up for Virtual Chapters and PASS.

The first session I am attending is Sean Boon’s Building Compelling Power View reports Lunch will be sitting at the Virtual Chapter tables talking Data Architecture.  The afternoon starts with Stacia Misner’s SSAS Storage followed by my SSIS 2012 presentation and ends with SQL Server and SharePoint: best Frienenies which should be a fun session.

Wednesday evening will be talking with vendors at their reception for attendees which was a hit last year.

Thursday Sessions

The morning starts again at the Community area early in the morning. The first session (10:15) is Carlos Bossy talking Data Modeling Best Practices for Enterprise Tabular Models which should help me with Data Mart designs for PowerView reports which is another goal for work. During Lunch, I will be Live Blogging and Tweeting from the Woman In Technology Luncheon which should be fun.

The afternoon starts with Running Reporting Services in SharePoint Integration Mode which Turner just had a consultant (SparkHound) install with SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2010. I really wanted to see Deeper Tabular Models with Wayne Snyder (who is a cool dude), but I think the SSRS is more valuable for work. I can always watch the recorded session when I get the DVDs.

The afternoon ends with Dive into the Query Optimizer and Monitoring Analysis Services which are both part of my daily checklist at work. Thursday evening, Microsoft is sponsoring a trip to Seattle’s Music Experience museum for 2-3 hours. The last couple of years it was at a GameWorks, which was pretty cool. I am expecting a good networking evening this night.

Friday Sessions and Homebound

I am leaving around 3:30PM Friday to spending time with family and friends on Saturday, so I will only be at 2 sessions plus lunch. I am getting married in January, so I need to get back to Baton Rouge, plus we (LSU) plays Miss St. at home that Saturday.

The first session (8AM) will be Power(view)ful Tabular semantic Model Development with Mark Davis, then Tim Mitchell learning me on ETL Gone Bad: Handling Errors and Data Anomalies in SSIS. These are 2 great speakers and consultants.

Lunch will have me sitting at a Birds of a Feather table on Data Warehouse Modeling and SSIS ETL.

WOW!!! That is a lot

That seems like a big schedule, but I am not evening doing everything that is available. The first year I attend PASS (07 in Denver), we spent time at the Microsoft First-Aid room working with replication developers on a problem in SQL Server 2005. The following year, I spent time in the Virtual Lab learning SQL Server 2008 new features. There is also visiting with vendors and collecting swag. The exhibition hall is sold out. Then, there are lightening talks which help speakers get a start with presenting as well as Microsoft Chalk Talks. There are pre-conference sessions on Monday and Tuesday.

The PASS Summit is full of stuff to do during the day and at night. I know a lot of people like #SQLKaraoke and Photo walks plus a #SQLRun on Tuesday morning. It is fun watching the SQL Kilt day and Thursday is wear your SQLSaturday shirt day.

Lastly, meeting and saying hi to friends like John Sterret (That is the back of his head above), Scott Shaw, Carlos Bossy, Patrick LeBlanc, Devin Knight, Erin Welker, Grant Fritchey, Thomas LaRock, Louis Davidson, Sean and Jen McCown, Wesley Brown, Kevin Boles and the list goes on and on. The SQL Community is the best group of technology geeks that love to share the #SQLLove.

Hope to see you there, and please come say hi and introduce yourself to me.

God Bless

Below is a picture from the first SQLSaturday in New York, and little did I know I was with Thoams LaRock, Adam Jorgenson, Grant Fritchey, Andy Leonard and Robert ?

When a Covering Index no longer covers

I received an email from my boss on the morning supervisors approve timesheets. He stated that they are complaining about an error: Deadlock. Searching the SQL Log, I was able to get the details of the deadlocking. We have Trace Flags 1204 and 1222 turned on which provides the details.

Once I got the details and having followed Bart Duncan’s Deadlock Troubleshooting, I found the victim and successful DML statements.

Next, I started a trace to get some parameter values for the victim T-SQL. By the way, the UPDATE statement was the higher priority statement that succeeded and a SELECT was the deadlock victim. Not the classic UPDATE/UPDATE example so many people use to illustrate deadlocking. When I got the Execution Plan for the victim, I noticed the Seek was on a Non-Clustered index with the INCLUDE option (Covering Index). After the Seek, there was a lookup on the Cluster Index.

Now, months ago I added the covering index to help this same SQL statement, but now it needed 2 extra columns from original suggested index.

What changed? Well, before I got the answer on what changed, I dropped the index so the users could proceed and not get the error, with some performance issues (it was taking 5-6 seconds instead of less than one)

What Changed? The previous week, the development team released a new version of the application and add 2 columns to the SELECT statement.

So, here is an example of what happened with the Adventure Works database.

USE [AdventureWorks2012]

GO

SELECT [SalesOrderID], [RevisionNumber], [OrderDate], [DueDate]

  FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader]

  WHERE OrderDate Between '20070101' AND '20070101'

If you run the above query with Include Execution Plan, you will get a Missing Index like the following:

USE [AdventureWorks2012]

GO

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [<Name of Missing Index, sysname,>]

ON [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] ([OrderDate])

INCLUDE ([SalesOrderID],[RevisionNumber],[DueDate])

GO

The Execution Plan is using a Clustered Index scan to find the data with a cost of 0.54

Adding the index, the Execution Plan now does an Index Seek with a cost of 0.0033. Big improvement!!!

Now, when I add a column to the SELECT query that is not in the Covering Index:

The INCLUDE column index (covering index) is used in a SEEK, but then a Key Lookup is added to get the additional 2 columns from the Clustered Index.

So, how does this cause a deadlock. I have seen this problem many times over the last 5-6 years.

The SELECT statement starts to SEEK the Covering Index at the same time an UPDATE statement locks the clustered index to update, then tries to update the covering Index. But, the SELECT statement has a shared lock on the Covering Index (Non-clustered Index) that is now trying to place a shared lock on the Clustered Index, which is locked by the UPDATE statement. BOOM!!! Deadlock!!!

How do you fix this?

First, you can add the 2 columns to the covering index and the SELECT no longer needs a Key Lookup on the clustered index. This is fine, but I wish it could be found in development and not production.

Or, you could just remove the Covering Index (like I initially did) and find other ways with the development team to improve performance. I do not believe they even knew what I did when I added the Covering Index, nor did I know that had added some additional columns to the SELECT statement.

Part II - Louis Davidson (Dr SQL)–Designing for Common Problems in SQL Server…continued

The PASS Data Architecture Virtual Chapter will host part II of Designing for Common Problems in SQL Server by Dr. SQL Louis Davidson as he helps application and database developers design and implement SQL Server databases.

I saw Louis at the first PASS Summit I attended in Denver in 2006. He and Paul Nielsen help me see where data models and normalization can increase the efficiency with storing and retrieving data.

They also encouraged me by their presentations to start talking about database design at work and in the SQL community.

Please join us on Thursday October 11th at Noon Central for another informative presentation.

Subject: Designing for Common Problems in SQL Server Part II 

Start Time: Thursday October 11th, 2012 12:00 PM US Central Time

End Time: Thursday October 11th, 2012 1:00 PM US Central Time

Presenter: Louis Davidson

Live Meeting Link: Live Meeting

Designing for Common Problems in SQL Server II 

In this session, I will do a design and code review of several common patterns of solving problems that a typical programmer will come up against. Problems like coding for hierarchical data, data driven design, dealing with image data, structure generalization, user specified schemas, dimensional reporting, and dealing with uniqueness beyond what you might deal with using a simple uniqueness constraint might allow you to deal with.

Louis Davidson

Louis has been in the IT industry for 17 years as a corporate database developer and architect. He has been a Microsoft MVP for 8 years and has written 5 books on database design and has spoken on the topic of database design and implementation at SQL PASS, SQL Rally, many SQL Saturday events, as well as Devlink. Currently serves as the Data Architect for the Christian Broadcasting Network supporting offices in Virginia Beach, Virginia and Nashville, Tennessee. Louis has a bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in computer science. For more information please visit his website at drsql.org.

24 Hours of PASS: Hosting Rod Colledge–BI in Sharepoint

The Virtual Chapters of PASS are asked to host sessions during this Fall’s 24 Hours of PASS preview for the PASS Summit in Seattle, WA Nov 5th-9th. The Data Architecture VC gets to host Rod presenting on BI Architecture With SQL 2012 & SharePoint 2010. This is a good preview of Rod presentation skills for the pre-conference session, Dashboards with Dashboard Designer & PerformancePoint Services 2010 [BID-398-P], he is doing on Monday during the Summit. I am actually attending the session to help with some PerformancePoint dashboards I am working on at Turner.

The Data Architecture virtual chapter has monthly webcast by SQL Server experts in the community. October will have Dr. SQL – Louis Davidson – presenting part 2 of his session on Designing for Common Problems with SQL Server.

The 24 Hours of PASS have being going on for the past 3-4 years with the fall session representing some of the pre-conference and spotlight sessions for the PASS Summit. I really enjoy going to at least one of these precons each year while at the Summit. It has always been a good one day training on a subject.

Please go register for 24-Hours of PASS and the Summit and get some training for SQL Server

BI Architecture With SQL 2012 & SharePoint 2010
This session will cover new BI features in SQL Server 2012 including Power View, PowerPivot, Report Alerts and SSRS Integration with SharePoint Server 2010. It will then focus on the importance of Self-Service BI and how it fits into an overall enterprise Business Intelligence architecture. This session will be rich with demos of all the new BI tools and the use of PerformancePoint Services to create Business Intelligence Dashboards. Attend and discover the awesome power of the latest release of the Microsoft BI Platform.

Rod Colledge
Principal Consultant, StrataDB
Rod Colledge is the Director and Co-Founder of StrataDB, a leading Australian-based provider of SQL Server solutions to clients in the Corporate, Government, and Education sectors. With over 15 years of SQL Server experience, Rod's ongoing commitment and depth of knowledge was recognized in 2010 with a Microsoft MVP award for SQL Server. Rod leads StrataDB's Business Intelligence practice and has authored or contributed to three books, including the "SQL Server MVP Deep Dives" series. He's a sought-after speaker at both local and international SQL Server conferences.

BI Dashboards with Dashboard Designer & PerformancePoint Services 2010 [BID-398-P]
Session Category: Pre-Conference Session (full day)
Session Track: BI Information Delivery
Speaker(s): Rod Colledge
During this demo-rich dashboard design deep dive, we'll begin with an introduction to Business Intelligence and PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010. Then, we'll cover the basics of creating dashboards with the Dashboard Designer tool. We'll look at some of the more advanced areas, including SQL Server Reporting Services and Excel Services dashboard integration, before taking an in-depth look at the process of creating scorecards and KPIs. We'll finish up with a look at how we can get the different items on a dashboard page to interact with each other, and the power of Time Intelligence.