The spent Saturday (6/1/2019) at another SQLSaturday. This one in Dallas, TX – #841. Since my session, Execution Plans SQL Server 2017 was the first session of the day, I plan a nice schedule of 5 sessions to attendee and stayed out of the speaker room  

My session went well except the demo on MAXDOP. Apparently, Microsoft has done an excellent job of improving query plans on newer versions of SQL Server. Once I went off script to show how to change the Compatibility level on the database, the query plan cost went from 6+ to 1+.That effected my demo on parallelism. Luckily, I had a separate copy of the AdventureWorks database in the previous compatibility mode, and was able to recovery. Lots of good comments from attendees and especially the questions about indexes. It looks like a lot of people need some good sessions on indexes.

The first session I attended was Ben Miller’s Tips and Tricks for PowerShell DBA. Ben (@DBADuck) is an excellent presenter with tons of knowledge of PowerShell. Definitely learnt something new. He represents the Utah area well. Next was Allan Hirt’s presentation on Modern infrastructure Fundamentals for SQL Server. This was a great overview of Infrastructure (physical, virtual, cloud) which has changed since I first started doing DBA work 15 years ago. Virtualization and Cloud has made things ‘different’. I think I will follow his advice about not taking what he taught and try to inject myself and my opinion in the Infrastructure teams configuration. I’ll have to to be included in future designs. Allan did an excellent job with real-life customer experience.

At lunch, I sat at a table and had good conversations about work and life with some people I just meet. This is always an enjoyable part of my day at SQLSaturday’s. Just talking to some people I did not know previous to this conference. Lunch was followed by Andy Leonard’s Moving Data with Azure Data Factory. This was a great example of using ADF for moving data from a CSV file to an Azure Blob to an Azure SQL Database table. The Triggers (rather than SQL Server Agent Job) was demoed to ‘schedule’ the execution and was very cool feature!!! Andy was Andy if you know what I mean.

Kathi Kellenberger had a session on T-SQL Windows Function Performance in 2019. This was a great session on performance improvements in SQL Server with Windows functions. These analytical functions in T-SQL are very useful in reporting and business intelligence. She demonstrated the execution plans as well as Statistics IO and how to interpret when a worktable was using TempDB and when it just used memory. That was very helpful. Then, she showed additional syntax for OVER() that can improve the performance as well as new performance improvements with Windows Functions in 2017 and 2019.

The last session was Brant Ozar’s What’s New in SQL Server 2019: 100% Demos. Brent is always entertaining and he gave credit to 2019 as a release he is very excited about. He showed about 3 examples of new improvements in 2019. There were also more gotcha’s than talk about a solution to a gotcha which I know he can show, but he did not. He probably saves those for his classes. I thanked him just like I thanked all the speakers who present.

Now, back to work and try to show my boss why I go to these events. Wish me luck.