WesleyB's Blog : Community

SQL Server Day 2009

wesback — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:27:00 GMT

The Belgian SQL Server User Group is organizing the second SQL Server Day on the 3rd of December. Last year about 200 people gathered for this event and of course we hope to have even more this year!
Please visit http://www.sqlserverday.be for more information and registration (coming soon).

There will be in-depth sessions on SQL Server 2008 as well as a glimpse of the future with SQL Server 2008 R2, Project Gemini and more! Currently there are 2 tracks, one for the DBA and one for the Business Intelligence people. Obviously there will be some great speakers like Dirk Gubbels, Henk van der Valk, Chris Webb, ...

Hope to see you there!

Next UG event: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition - The Azure Services Platform and SQL Services - Jun 4th, 2009

wesback — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:34:00 GMT

The Belgian SQL Server User Group is organizing another great technical evening.
I am looking forward meeting you there.

From their website:

This evening will be split into 2 sessions as follows:

Session 1: Overview of Visual StudioTeam System 2008 Database Edition
Brought by Gill Cleeren , Microsoft Regional Director and MVP ASP.NET
Microsoft's Visual Studio for database professionals was originally designed to fill a gap in database development by providing features for managing lifecycles as well as tools for collaboration and testing.
In this session, Gill will show you the most important features of the product, including data generation, testing and its integration in Team Foundation Server.

Session 2: The Azure Services Platform and SQL Services
Brought by Kurt Clayes, Solution Architect and Competence Leader ‘CloudServices’ at ORDINA.
A new initiative for a development platform is coming from Microsoft. The Azure Services Platform. This platform enables to build applications for the cloud and offers a scalable hosted infrastructure for deploying and managing these applications and their data stores. Microsoft SQL Data Services (SDS) is a cloud-based relational database platform built on SQL Server technologies. With SDS, you can easily provision and deploy relational database solutions to the cloud, and take advantage of a globally distributed data center that provides enterprise-class availability, scalability, and security with the benefits of built-in data protection, self-healing and disaster recovery. In this session we will have a brief overview of the Azure Service Platform and see the new concepts behind Microsoft’s SQL Services vision. We will discuss the infrastructure architecture to enable scalability and the global reach of data sources.
Kurt CLAEYS is MVP Connected System Developer, MCT, MCSD, MCDBA. Solution Architect and Competence Leader ‘CloudServices’ at ORDINA.

Click here to register.

Next UG-evening on Thu, March 19th: MDX From Zero To Hero

wesback — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:51:00 GMT

The next SQLUG evening will take place in our Microsoft Belux offices. So please feel free to drop by and ask your nasty questions or just have a chat with me ;-)

From their website:

MDX, from zero to hero. This session is brought to you by Franky Leeuwerck.

MDX is the language that allows you to query a SQL Server Analyses Services multi-dimensional data structure or OLAP cube. In this session, after a brief review on the concepts of an OLAP cube, the MDX syntax for querying a cube will be explained and demoed step-by-step.

This event is sponsored by and takes place in the offices of Microsoft Belux in Zaventem. We want to remind that registration is obligatory. You can register here.

Microsoft BI Website

wesback — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:32:00 GMT

We are very proud to announce you the completely redesigned Microsoft BI website.
Check it out @ http://www.microsoft.com/bi/.

The Holy Trinity: Indexes, Execution Plans and the Optimizer

wesback — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:55:00 GMT

The Belgian SQL Server User Group is organizing another interesting evening full of technical content.

From their website:
"This UG-evening will start with an introduction of the basics of index design (the heap,clustered/non clustered indexes and covering of a query by an index). Later we will discuss how the optimizer works, why it can be wrong (statistics, procedure cache) and how to correct this. Another part of the session will be some advanced features of indexing like partitioning, locking and filtered indexes. We will of course not forget indexed views and computed column indexes. If there is some time left we can also look at spatial indexes and xml indexes

Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Registration and welcome with a drink & sandwich
18:30 - 20:00 Part 1 of the session
20:00 - 20:30 pause
20:30 - 22:00 Part 2 of the session
22:00 - ... Networking with your peers"

Hope to see you there! More information on http://www.sqlug.be.

ps. This post was written using the new Windows 7 Beta :-)

SQL Server Day

wesback — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:00:00 GMT

It was a couple of months ago that the people from the Belgian SQL Server User Group came up with the idea to organize a large event focused on SQL Server 2008. Of course we thought this was a great idea but we also understood that this would not be something that you arrange in a couple of minutes.

There is a long list of things to figure out:

What type of content will you bring?
Who will be doing the sessions?
Are the people you think of willing to do the session?
Where do you organize this event?
How will you find sponsors?
What about catering?
Who will be creating and maintaining the website?
And many more :-)

It took quite some evening meetings (and there will be more), a lot of good discussions and for some people a great amount of phone calls. After many questions and obviously many answers we are finally there.

One of the side effects of our involvement is that Gunther and I were chosen to present the closing keynote and this created a new list of questions - but this time for us :-)

It did not take us too long to know what we would talk about, we almost immediately agreed we would do something on the 'Future of SQL Server'. Obviously we already knew back then that there would be some great announcements about SQL Server but it goes without saying this is also kind of a risk. Finding the right content and material for this session would not be easy, we are talking about stuff that was announced a couple of weeks ago. These are really bleeding edge developments and that means everything still has to go through the whole bunch of quality checks before this material becomes available to everyone at Microsoft. We soon realized that our first challenge would be to find enough and relevant content for this session. Gunther and I are spamming everyone who is involved in these future projects to get our hands on great content for you guys to enjoy. The second challenge is probably one that is more for me than for Gunther, it will be the first time I stand in front of 300 people. As you can imagine I will be very nervous when the 4th of December comes closer, this is just a warning message for people attending our session ;-)

The most important challenge of an event is getting attendees to come, so I do urge everyone who is interested in SQL Server to register on http://www.sqlserverday.be. The people of the SQLUG have done an amazing job and put in a tremendous amount of effort in getting this event to work.

Connect

wesback — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:57:00 GMT

I attended a great SQLUG.BE evening last night about SSIS. Thank you for all the effort you put in this guys!

When I come in contact with the people that are using our products everyday I hear that they have a lot of good feedback on how we could improve our products even more.
Of course we try to make the best products so everyone can be as productive as possible, but sometimes people in the field have very valuable feedback on how they could be even more productive.

We have a channel to do this and it is called Connect. If you encounter bugs or you have suggestions for one of our products please feel free to submit them on Connect. They will definitely be looked at and if appropriate included in future releases. I submitted several requests on Connect myself, for example Connect item 136596 and 275212 were both implemented in SQL Server 2008. Obviously we cannot add all suggestions in the same timeframe and sometimes it is just a matter of priorities but we at least consider all of them.

SQLUG.BE Event: An evening on SSIS - 25th of September 2008

wesback — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:32:00 GMT

The SQLUG.BE is proud to present the next event: an evening on SQL Server Integration Services.

Agenda:

Session 1: what's new in SSIS 2008 by Nico Verheire

A word about our speaker:
Nico Verheire is a Business Intelligence Consultant for RealDolmen. For the last 4 years, he has been working almost exclusively on SQL Server (7, 2000, 2005), with a strong focus on SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. Nico currently holds an MCTS certification for SQL Server 2005 BI.

Abstract:

Integrating data with ADO.NET

Scripting with VSTA

Introducing the new lookup transformation (including caching)

Managing change in a data warehouse: how to use Change Data Capture (CDC) and use of the MERGE statement

Dealing with data quality: the Data Profiling Task

Level: 200

Session 2: Deep-dive session about improving SSIS performance given by Geert Vanhove

A word about our speaker:
Geert Vanhove started his career in IT in 1991 as COBOL programmer on a mainframe system. In 1994 he chose to focus on databases, first on Sybase, later (1998) -almost- fulltime on Microsoft SQL Server. In 2005 he started his own company - DCOD - mainly focussing on performance tuning of SQL Server OLTP and BI platforms. He was closely involved with some of the most important SQL Server realizations in Belgium - as well in a development as in an operational context.

Abstract:
This session will address some problems that might occur when a SSIS solution needs to scale because DB and data volumes to load are getting larger. This session is not only a statement of how you can improve your SSIS performance; the impact of each optimization step is shown in action throughout the demo package that will be the red wire of this presentation...

Level: 300

Date: Thu September 25, 2008

Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Welcome with a drink & sandwich
18:30 - 20:00 Part 1
20:00 - 20:30 Pause
20:30 - 22:00 Part 2
22:00 - ... networking

More information at the source.

SQLRSS Community Application

wesback — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:33:00 GMT

This open source project (on CodePlex) shows how to use different technologies to display table changes as an RSS/Atom feed.
It uses the new Change Tracking feature in SQL Server 2008 together with WCF and LINQ to XML.

Check out the homepage and if you want to add some features to it feel free to contact the project owner.