Again, thank you very much to all of the attendees to my session on indexing.

Likewise thanks to all the people that have thanked me at GameWorks for presenting on this topic.

As I said at the presentation, I was pleasantly surprise by the turn-out.

Finally a big thank you to Julie Koesmarno for co-presenting with me. I hope to do a session with her again soon. It was great fun!

Session:

I hope to get invited to speak at SQL PASS Summit in 2012.

Safe travels and happy journeys,

Victor

First and foremost, thank you very much to all of the attendees to my session on indexing.

And thanks to all the people that have thanked me for it throughout the week at the conference. I am glad that you both enjoyed it and found it useful.

Session:

I hope to get invited to speak at SQL PASS Summit in 2012.

Safe travels and happy journeys,

Victor

Thank you to all who attended my session and for your positive feedback.

Again, apologies for cutting into your lunch time!

As discussed, the rationale for the slide deck was to have a reference for your DBAs to use when designing your SQL Server infrastructure. So hopefully it will prove to be a handy print-out or “cheat-sheet” when liaising with your SharePoint developers.

As always, I would love to hear about your experiences in the field with SharePoint 2010.

Planning Your SQL Server Infrastructure for a SharePoint 2010 Solution  SharePoint is becoming more ubiquitous in the market as a critical core business application. Consequently it is more important than ever for DBAs to be cognisant of SharePoint’s architecture and how to best provision, configure and manage the SQL Server infrastructure . In this session Victor Isakov (MCA, MCM, MCT, MVP) will explore the SharePoint 2010 architecture and considerations that every DBA should know, including capacity planning, performance management, configuration, disaster recovery and high availability.

First of all, thank you to Peter Myers for delivering an informative presentation.

A big thank you to Tony Finnemore for “minding the store” while I was abroad at the MVP Summit.

Congratulations to Ade from NPG for winning the major door prize at the last meeting, a license of the Idera SQL Admin Toolset (valued at AUD $432) that was generously provided by Idera (www.idera.com) and Tony Finnemore from SQL Tools (www.sqltools.com.au).

News

DBD: Delivering Self-Service Managed BI with PowerPivot One of the pillars of the SQL Server 2008 R2 release is Managed Self-Service BI. The SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel add-in is a key offering in this pillar, and delivers an entirely new analytic experience to Excel 2010. The add-in allows analysts to load and prepare large volumes of data from various sources to create a multidimensional model.The model can be enriched with sophisticated calculations. Then the model can then be used as the source for PivotTable and PivotChart reports. And yet that’s not the end of the story. With the SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint add-in, the Excel workbooks that host the PowerPivot model can be catalogued in SharePoint and exposed as a data source for other Excel and Reporting Services reports. These SharePoint hosted models can then be managed by IT with scheduled data refreshes from the originating data stores.In this session, you will be introduced to the two add-ins. An end-to-end series of theory, demonstrations and discussion will describe how you can effectively leverage the add-ins with your own analysis and reporting requirements.

Thank you to all that attended the first meeting for 2011.

It was certainly one of the most vocal sessions as people voted and debated the various “myths” about SQL Server. Hopefully the myths we confirmed or dispelled will help in both design and operational considerations.

Congratulations to Nathan for winning the major door prize at the last meeting, a license of the Idera SQL Admin Toolset (valued at AUD $432) that was generously provided by Idera (www.idera.com) and Tony Finnemore from SQL Tools (www.sqltools.com.au).

News

DBA: SQL Server Myths and Misconceptions As a DBA you have heard of plenty of myths and misconceptions about SQL Server. From how “you can improve transaction log performance with instant file initialisation” to whether “non-logged operations still exist in SQL Server”. In this session Victor Isakov will go through over 30 different myths and misconceptions about SQL Server and explain what actually happens in the background. This should be a great session to both test your SQL Server knowledge and to learn how to best administer and configure SQL Server.

The idea is to provide the recipient access to all of the tools needed to improve his/her skills, an opportunity to gain practical experience, the potential to earn a recommendation and/or referral –and to positively contribute to society as a form of ‘give-back’. No free lunch, just sweat equity –the kind that makes us all feel good for the effort

With Arnie’s support, Rod Colledge is proud to run the Australian and New Zealand arm of the program.

All selected developers will receive a Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN subscription (~ $12,000 USD value), and some or all of the following;

• Telerik Ultimate Collection for .NET,
• Prometric exam voucher, redeemable for any 070-xxx exam,
• Additional details to follow shortly …

Project Criteria:

• Client is an Australian or New Zealand non-profit, school or church,
• Solves a problem or satisfies a need for the client,
• Client desires the project and is supportive,
• Uses any combination of .NET 4.0, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, or Windows Phone 7,
• May be a new software solution, or an upgrade to an existing software solution,
• Additional consideration given projects that will be posted on Codeplex with a GPL license

An eligible developer may submit project proposal information here.

An eligible non-profit may submit a project proposal here. Eligible developers without a project proposal may select from one of the available projects listed below:

• Victorian Caravan Parks Association

The Victorian Caravan Parks Association exists to represent the body of individual caravan park operators in legislative lobbying and to assist / provide advice to members on a whole range of operational issues associated with running a caravan park (www.vicparks.com.au). We have a small staff of 3 people servicing over 400 member parks. We are currently using a customized Access database to manage members and membership data. The author of the application is no longer available and the functionality is insufficient in this day and age. We need a system to manage our membership data, billing / aged debtors, CRM, Conference management and website integration. Although there are a number of high end systems available, these are designed for organisations with hundreds of employees and are priced way outside our budget

• Australian Volunteer Coastguard

The Australian Volunteer Coastguard requires a system to record and manage vessel trip information including vessel type and registration number, number of passengers, departure time and location, destination location, estimated time of arrival, etc.

Supporting MVPs;

• Greg Low, Melbourne, Australia
• Arnie Rowland, Portland, Oregon, USA
• Darren Gosbell, Melbourne, Australia
• Rod Colledge, Brisbane, Australia

For more information on this project, email me or read this post and this one.

Hi all,

I am currently in New York for work. I will be flying back to Seattle on the 1st of December. Additionally, the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts is having an Art Exhibition this week, so the venue is unavailable.

Consequently there will be no user group meeting for the month of December.

Originally I was considering having a Live Meeting session, but that will prove difficult to organise with me being on a plane. So apologies for that.

A travel tip, if you fall sick in New York do not go to the Emergency Ward in a hospital. The starting price to be seen will be USD $1,099! Go to a Duane Reade PharmacyRX where you can see a doctor for USD $130. More information can be found at www.DRwalkin.com

Otherwise, thank you for your attendance and support in 2010.

Again, I would like to thank Idera (www.idera.com) and in particular Tony Finnemore from SQL Tools (www.sqltools.com.au) for all his support and sponsorship.

Have a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year’s celebration!

I will undoubtedly see you in the New Year,

Victor

Advanced Physical Database Design for SQL Server 2008

Thank you very much to Arnie Rowland for giving me the opportunity to present in a very, very wet Portland. I think I saw more rain in Seattle/Portland in 24 hours than I have in Sydney in the last 10 years. I am NOT kidding…

DBA: Performance Tuning and Optimization Techniques

Thank you again for such a large turnout.

Apologies about the lack of demos and/or my computer crashing during the session.

I really wanted to demonstrate RML Utilities and SQL Nexus. What I might do is demo them in future sessions in the initial 15 minute time slot reserved for case studies and vendor presentations. Or post some video demonstrations. I will keep you posted.

Congratulations to Tim Davidson for winning the major door prize at the last meeting, a license of the Idera SQL Admin Toolset (valued at AUD $432) that was generously provided by Idera (www.idera.com) and Tony Finnemore from SQL Tools (www.sqltools.com.au).

The content from this month’s meeting is posted below.

Abstract:

How do you troubleshoot performance issues in SQL Server? What is the impact on performance when using DMVs, SET options, SQL Profiler or Perfmon? In this session Victor Isakov will answer these various questions as he goes through the main tools that DBAs can use to troubleshoot performance, including SQLNexus, PAL, RML Utilities and SQLDiag. Victor will also briefly cover Performance Data Warehouse, missing indexes, query plans and the important new feature introduced in SQL Server 2008 – Extended Events.

Presentation:

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