If you haven’t already heard about the concept of SQL Saturday, I suggest you rush of to www.sqlsaturday.com and dive into the numerous opportunities to attend free Microsoft SQL Server training sessions.
One such SQL Saturday is comming to Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 29th 2014 where I have been so Lucky as to get selected to speak in one of the slots. My session is going to be about Security in Analysis Services, a session I have done a couple of times before, so now it should have matured and hopefully improved 🙂
The Friday before the Free event, there is a Pre-Con held at the same location, where you at a bargain can attend one of the following session:
Scaling SQL Server 2014 – Glenn Berry (MVP)Â Â Â Â
Blog: www.sqlskills.com/blogs/glenn
Twitter: @GlennAlanBerry
Level : 300
Description
SQL Server implementations can quickly evolve and become more complex, forcing DBAs and developers to think about how they can scale their solution quickly and effectively. Scaling up is relatively easy (but can be expensive), while scaling out requires significant engineering time and effort. If you suggest hardware upgrades you may be accused of simply “throwing hardware at the problem”, and if you try to scale out, you may be thwarted by a lack of development resources or 3rd party software restrictions. As your database server nears its load capacity, what can you do? This session gives you concrete, practical advice on how to deal with this situation. Starting with your present workload, configuration and hardware, we will explore how to find and alleviate bottlenecks, whether they are workload related, configuration related, or hardware related. Next, we will cover how you can decide whether you should scale up or scale out your data tier. Once that decision is made, you will learn how to scale up properly, with nearly zero down-time. If you decide to scale out, you will learn about practical, production-ready techniques such as vertical partitioning, horizontal partitioning, and data dependent routing. We will also cover how to use middle-tier caching and other application techniques to increase your overall scalability.
Create Solutions with Power BI – Marco Russo (MVP)Â
Blog: sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo
Twitter: @marcorus
Level : 300
Description
Microsoft Power BI is a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that provides data analysis and visualization capabilities. It contains a set of add-in that you can use in Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map), plus a set of services integrated in Office 365 to share, collaborate, get answers and insights (such us publishing data, Power View visualization in HTML5 and Q&A) and a mobile app that improves access on any device.
In this full-day seminar, Marco Russo guides you in creating a complete solution step-by-step, using all the features of Power BI. Starting from scratch, you see how to leverage on Power Query to import and integrate data from many different sources, with a particular attention on leveraging existing data in the company, transforming data in order to improve the resulting model and sharing the results of the queries created, so that they will be easy to reuse. Then you see how to create a Power Pivot model following the best practices and using the resources available on the web in order to accelerate the creation of tables and formulas that are shared in many models. The reference data model will improve over the day, adding metadata to improve the usability of other Power BI features.
Once the data model is ready, you see how to create dashboards in Excel, leveraging pivot tables, Power View and regular Excel formatting. After publishing the result on Office 365, you see how to refresh the data on the cloud using the Data Management Gateway, including all the details about correct configuration and best practices for moving on premise data to the cloud in a secure way.
Once the model is published, more analytics are available: you see how to use Power View and Q&A, learning how to optimize the data model for a better user experience during data exploration with these tools. Q&A enables queries written in natural language, and it might require some information in the data model in order to disambiguate similar names or similar relationships.
Finally, you see how to display data on maps using both Power View and Power Map, which offers visualizations that are more advanced and enables the production of a video, useful for a high impact presentation. At the end of the day, you will be ready to start using the entire Power BI stack in your company, choosing the right feature for each requirement and applying the best practices in each step.
Understanding Execution Plans – Hugo Kornelis (MVP)Â Â Â
Blog: sqlblog.com/blogs/hugo_kornelis
Twitter: @Hugo_Kornelis
Level : 300
Description
For troubleshooting long running queries, looking at the execution plan is often a good starting point. Once you know how the query is executed, you know why it’s slow and what you can do to speed it up. But what if the execution plan is just beyond your understanding? What if it uses operators you have seen before, but do not really understand? What if you look at the execution plan, but just don’t see the problem?
In this full-day workshop, you will learn everything you need to be able to read and understand any execution plan. We’ll start with an overview of execution plans as a whole, and then dive in and look at all the components, and how they fit together. This will increase your understanding on why the optimizer picks a plan, and what you can do to make it pick a better plan.
Whether you have read your share of execution plans or whether you wouldn’t know where to find them, this workshop will teach you everything you need to know about execution plans. Attend this workshop if you want to hone your tuning skills!
Throughout the day, we will have several exercises to help you get an even better understanding of the theory. In order to get the most out of the day, attendees are advised to bring a laptop, with SQL Server (any version, but if you use SQL Server Express, you will need the advanced tools as well) and the AdventureWorks sample database pre-installed.
Price: 800 DKK (early-bird price: 600 DKK, if you register before 31 January 2014)
Register for the pre-con at : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sqlsaturday-275-denmark-pre-conference-registration-9776266075?ref=ebtn
Register for the Free event at: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/275/eventhome.aspx
But be quick as seats fill up quickly 🙂
