So now we’re at day three of PASS Summit 2012, or at least, my third day.  You can follow these links to see my day one and day two recaps.  The third day, Friday, followed a wonderful Thursday evening at the EMP, and it did not have a key note in the morning.  Still, I made it to the conference for the second session of the day…

Lightning Talks : Friday November 09 : 09:45 AM – 11:00 AM

• Christian Wade – Is It an Alligator? Is It a Crocodile? No, It’s a Gecko!
• Edwin Sarmiento (Blog / @EdwinMSarmiento) - Presentation WOW
• Julie Koesmarno (Blog / @MsSQLGirl)- TRY CATCH in a Nutshell
• Laerte Junior (Blog / @LaerteSQLDBA) - T-SQL Health Check to Excel in Email in 10 Minutes with PowerShell
• Neil Hambly (Blog / @Neil_Hambly) – Effective Error Log Parsing

Now this was a treat.  Several presenters doing 10 minute sessions, focusing on the highlights or the important aspects of their topics.  I will admit, I wanted to catch Julie for the most part, as I tried to attend her SQLLunch.com presentation, “Ready Steady Catch”, a couple weeks back.  I was able to attend initially, but given I was in the office at the time, work duty called, so I could not sit for the entire presentation.  So I made sure to get to her lightning talk.  And really, I’m just a fan.  However, the other speakers were great in their own right.  Christian offered his reptilian take on BI.  Edwin, fellow Filipino extraordinaire, had a very engaging and energetic session on how presenters, no matter the topic, should wow their audiences; you can really tell Edwin rehearsed his presentation many, many times, and it truly showed.  Laerte is a diehard Star Wars fan, adding fandom-inspired humor to his PowerShell demo.  And Neil gave us an abbreviated yet in depth look as parsing the error log.  There was one no-show to the lightning talk session, so Edwin dug up another 10 minute presentation and proceeded to provide another inspired and enlightening talk.

The Key2 Consulting crew took time at lunch to hit the Pike Place Market and had a great lunch at Lowell’s Restaurant.  After a little sightseeing of the Seattle waterfront, it was back for one final session…

Extending SSIS 2012 Reports with Analytics - Friday November 09 : 02:45 PM – 04:00 PM
Patrick LeBlanc (Blog / @PatrickDBA )

Patrick ended up co-presenting with Julie Koesmarno for his session on SSIS 2012.  Really, though, he made Julie do all the work.  The bum!  All kidding aside, Patrick is a great fellow who I follow on Twitter and is the man behind SQLLunch.com.  No fluff, just stuff. Now, he’s a Microsoft guy, having been a part of Thursday’s BI Power Hour.  But watching Patrick in person is a must see for those who have only listened to him from SQLLunch.com or other online sessions.  If you’re late to his session, he’ll pick on you, for sure.  But aside from levity, Patrick and Julie both offer thier seasoned views on taking data from the Cloud via SSIS 2012 and consolidating the analytic data now available via SSIS 2012.

After the session, the Key2 crew headed off from Summit 2012 to take in the latest James Bond flick, capping off a great PASS Summit 2012 experience.  The rest of the crew has either a redeye or early Saturday AM flight back to Atlanta, while my flight was not until 11 AM on Saturday morning.  Next year, PASS Summit 2013 will be closer to home in Charlotte, NC.  Hope to be there again to learn, to network, and have some fun.  Thanks for reading!

Just my two and a half cents…

The other day, I recapped my first day at SQL PASS Summit 2012. By the second day, Thursday November 08, the time difference from the East Coast to the West Coast was getting to me, so I did not make it to the second keynote; I’ll have to follow up on the recording another time. However, I made it to four sessions during the day, while making sure to be able make it to the Microsoft sponsored event at Seattle’s EMP later that evening.

At the EMP, later in the evening...

Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism : Thursday November 08, 2012 : 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM
Adam Machanic (Blog / @AdamMachanic)
This session interested me the most even to this day, as I review the recording that was added to the end of the Day 2 Keynote that captured this session. I follow Adam via Twitter so it was great to see the man in person during his presentation, though he was in the big auditorium room where the overflow for the Keynote was held. I would have loved to apply his tuning principles right away, but I’m off to another client that has more ETL needs that SQL tuning, but this would have helped tremendously with a prior client. Who knows? I may find myself there again… Anyway, big tip Adam shared while tuning SQL within SSMS was to do the following:

• Actual Execution Plan enabled
• Client statistics enabled
• Discard results after execution

While it’s best to review the recording as a whole, in short from Adam’s sample files, the APPLY pattern he uses is as such:
–The Parallel APPLY Pattern
SELECT
x.[columns]
FROM [driver set] –< This is where you define your chunks
[CROSS/OUTER] APPLY
(
[correlated payload] –< This is where all of the work is done
) AS x

What to Look for in Execution Plans : Thursday November 08, 2012 : 01:30 PM – 02:45 PM
Grant Fritchey (Blog / @GFritchey)
Grant is another gentleman I follow on Twitter, so again, it was a joy to see the individual in person for his presentation. And after Adam’s session prior to lunch, Grant’s session would reinforce what to look for while examining execution plans. However, I will admit, the past two lunches provided by PASS (Wednesday and Thursday) were very good, and thus it was a challenge to stay totally alert throughout the session. Thankfully, there’s Seattle’s Best coffee waiting outside.

Database Design Throwdown : Thursday November 08, 2012 : 01:30 PM – 02:45 PM
Thomas LaRock (Blog / @SQLRockstar) , Karen Lopez (Blog / @DataChick)
Ahh, the Rockstar versus the DataChick. This was a great session to attend, seeing another pair of Twitter peeps that I follow. It turned out to be SRO (standing room only), so I was glad to have gotten a seat in the room. Tom and Karen via a throwdown session offered two opposing sides of database design issues. Normalization versus not; Nullable versus non-Nullable fields; DBAs versus Developers versus PMs. It was great! The energy was high and helped to keep the audience engaged, educated, and entertained. Plus the coffee beforehand was kicking in, too!

BI Power Hour : Thursday November 08, 2012 : 05:00 PM – 06:15 PM
Matt Masson, Chuck Heinzelman, Matthew Roche, Patrick LeBlanc, Peter Myers, Sean Boon
This was another highlight from Summit 2012. There was lots to learn, especially about hugs and tapping everything. Suffice to say, you had to be there.

After the sessions, the Key2 crew headed out to dinner at Dragonfish Asian Café a block or so from the conference. What can I say? There was Tempura Bacon to be had, and Sake to boot!

And finally, the day ended at EMP http://empmuseum.org/. While there was SQL Karaoke to be had, one of the highlights was the Icons of Science Fiction exhibit, where this bad boy below can be found.

But the other highlight was the debut of the awesome rock band, the Krooked Keys 2 [Squared]! Follow the link below to watch our one-night only performance. Only true rock fans can appreciate the awesomeness!

So last week, I along with almost 4,000 attendees participated in PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle, Washington, between Wednesday November 14 through Friday November 16.  This didn’t include the many who attended PreCons on Monday and Tuesday, totaling over 5.5K of registrations.  The underlying theme I found while attending PASS Summit 2012 was SQL Family.  Now, I know I’m not that well connected to the SQL Family as many are, but I do like to watch from afar, keeping tabs on the notable SQL peeps via the internets and all.  So for me, finally being able to meet a few in person or via participating in their sessions was a real joy during PASS. 

My blog entry today is part one of several entries made to recap the sessions I attended, what tidbits I was able to learn, and to highlight the people and events around PASS Summit 2012.  This first entry recaps day one of PASS, Wednesday November 07.

The First Keynote : Wednesday November 07, 2012 : 08:15 AM – 10:00 AM

An introduction was made by Bill Graziano (Blog: SQLTeam.com | @BillGraziano), where among speaking about SQL Family, Bill announced the upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference (@BA_Conf), to be held in Chicago, Illinois in April 2013.  But the keynote itself would be handled by Microsoft’s very own, Ted Kummert, where he along with other Microsoft employees talked on how to “Accelerate Insight on any Data”.  The highlights of note were, as summarized by Steve Hughes ( Blog: Data on Wheels)

• Hekaton: the project code name for a new in-memory OLTP engine
• The Columnstore Index will be updateable
• Next version of PDW will be out in H1 2013
• Polybase: allows you to query across multiple types of data sources such as SQL Server and Hadoop with T-SQL
• DAX Queries will be able to query SSAS Cubes
• Microsoft HDInsight Server CTP: Hadoop for Windows Server
• Windows Azure HDInsight Service Preview: Hadoop for Azure
• Power View and PowerPivot fully implemented in Excel 2013

10 Extraordinary Things to Achieve with Integration Services 2012 : Wednesday November 07, 2012 : 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM

Peter Myers (PASS Bio), Matthew Roche (PASS Bio)

For the first session after the exciting keynote, the balance of calm and cool Peter to the hyper and electric Matthew made for an insightful recap of why we use SSIS in implementing ETL solutions.  Newcomers to SSIS can take away the many things that SSIS can do for them, while experienced users (I’d like to think I’m experienced, more so than where I was a year ago) can recap everything else SSIS can do.  Here’s the recap of the outline and the delivery points, from their posted slide deck:

Session Outline

1. Exporting/Importing Binary Data
2. De-Duplicating Data
3. Implementing Custom Logic with Scripts
4. Leveraging CDC
5. Cleansing Data with Data Quality Services
6. Integrating Data Mining Predictions
7. Working with Environments
8. Working with the SSIS Catalog API
9. Implementing a Data Tap
10. Monitoring and Analyzing SSIS Catalog Data 

SQL Server Integration Services delivers

• A rich set of features and capabilities
• A robust, flexible, fast, scalable and extensible architecture
• While it was primarily designed to implement ETL processes, it is also useful in many other scenarios:
• Assessing data quality
• Cleansing and standardizing data
• Merging data from heterogeneous data stores
• Implementing ad hoc data transfers
• Implementing ad hoc data manipulation
• Automating administrative tasks

Adapting Your ETL Solutions to Use SSIS 2012 : Wednesday November 07, 2012 : 01:30 PM – 02:45 PM

Devin Knight (Blog | @Knight_Devin)

After lunch, I made a point to go see the session from an old friend from Jacksonville, Devin Knight.  And the topic was in line with an upcoming project I hope to be a part of and start in 2013 as the project will look to move existing ETL packages towards SSIS 2012.  A demo heavy session, I took away the following bullet points:

• Use the SSIS 2012 Wizard to convert older packages to SSIS 2012 with SSDT, which is SQL Server Data Tools; it is no longer called BIDS
• Packages can still use Legacy Mode to access file-based packages
• However, use of Legacy Mode will not leverage SSISDB
• SSISDB is where the advantages of SSIS 2012 happen

The afternoon ended some visits to the sponsor booths and some feet resting, as the jet lag from flying from Atlanta to Seattle the day before caught up with me.  I was able to later join my Key2 Consulting colleagues and participate in Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour of Seattle http://www.undergroundtour.com/.  It was a very educational and enlightening tour and history lesson of Seattle.  If you have about a couple of hours to spare to learn about crappers and seamstresses, and can handle some light walking up and down stairs, it’s a must see in Seattle. 

After dinner and a few cocktails with Key2 crew, I was able to make a very late albeit brief visit to Pragmatic Works’ SQL Karaoke event at the Hard Rock Café.  Yeah, we arrived late, but arrived in time to see several SQL ladies entertain the crowd to their rousing rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”.  Yeah, you had to be there to see/hear it.

And after a brisk walk in the Seattle Fall night back to the Crowne Plaza hotel, it was off to bed, and one day down for PASS Summit 2012.  Next up, Thursday…

As always, just my two and a half cents…