SQLBITS: THE SQL Server Community Event

Back in September there was a SQL Server Community event held at Hatfield in the UK, called SQLBits this was a free full day event run by the UK SQL Server Community.

The whole event sounded like a good way to spend a Saturday, so I off I went. In fact it was such a good way to spend a Saturday I dragged my film crew with me.

The results of these efforts are the 19 sessions you see below.

• A Testing Time
• A Walk Down Memory Lane
• How To Approach Zero Downtime Database Upgrades
• Indexes Basically
• Where's My Data? An Introduction to Spatial Queries in SQL
• Choices, Choices, Loading and Modelling Slowly Changing Dimensions in SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft's Integrated End to End BI Offering
• Performance Monitoring using SQL Server Management Studio
• Simple Problem, Simple Solution- Lookup Tables
• SQL Server Under New Management
• Data Visualization
• Does your cube support your users?
• Don't try this at work.
• Head in the Cloud
• End to End Report Creation
• Advance T-SQL for SQL Server 2005 and 2008
• Understanding Query Cache and Query Plans
• Useful SQL Stuff that I've Picked up over the years.
• Getting more value from your data through data mining.

Each of these sessions were written and presented by people who use SQL Server everyday, basically the UK SQL Server Community, so their content is not influenced by Microsoft , except for the session “SQL Server Under New Management” which is presented by Andrew Fryer an Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist. I meet a whole variety of people there, include Microsoft people attending just to attend the sessions as well as people who came over the channel just to attend. It was a very good day all around.

So if what you see here interests you, SQLBits IV is being planned now for early 2009, the word on the street is March, but that is just the my sources telling me. To get the latest information you can register on the SQLBits Web Site, and just to provide I did attend, they posted my video recap of the day on the home page – I have to talk to my agent about how that happen.