SQL Server User Group - Thursday

Adrian just emailed me to let me know that Australian Peter Ward is presenting in Wellington on Thursday night:

Peter Ward is visiting us from Australia and will make 2 presentations, with refreshments in between.

Peter Ward is WARDY IT Solutions Chief Technical Architect. Peter is an active member in the Australian SQL Server community and President of the Queensland SQL Server User Group. Peter is a highly regarded speaker at SQL Server events throughout Australia and is a sought after SQL Server consultant and trainer, providing solutions for some of the largest SQL Server sites in Australia. Peter is a regular author for several SQL Server websites and has published numerous articles in the monthly SQL Server newsletter that he produces along with the highly acclaimed WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server Blog. In 2007 Peter was selected as a speaker for Tech-Ed Australia, SQL Server Open World in Denmark and as a Spotlight speaker for the 2007 SQL Pass Community Summit, the largest SQL Server event in the world. Peter has also recently been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his technical excellence and commitment to the SQL Server Community.

The topics of the presentations are:-

"SQL Server 2008 - What's new, and the business value it brings"

If only they taught SQL Server in Kindergarten…
Bon Jovi had a hit song in the 90's with a chorus that I believe went something along the lines of 'The server is running slow, and your to blame, You give SQL Server a bad name'.  If you look at most Information Technology courses today this parody often rings true.  There are all sorts of exciting (and 'sexier') subjects such as Object Oriented Programming and Programming Abstraction but somehow the subject 'SQL Server 101' has been overlooked.  As a result there are set of common mistakes that are made time and time again by developers that cause an application to negatively affect the performance of SQL Server.  Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will walk through some of the common Gotcha's when developing an application that accesses SQL Server and how to identify possible performance issues prior to deployment.

"Index, What Index? SQL Server Index Tuning"

Unfortunately SQL Server does not ship with the 'Make SQL Server Go Faster' configuration option. Despite what appears to be an obvious lack of functionality, SQL Server does ship with a feature that is often misunderstood called an index. When an index is used correctly it can be the answer to the missing 'Go Faster' configuration option. New hardware and configuration changes can improve the performance of SQL Server by small percentages; however a simple CREATE INDEX statement can improve performance by large orders of magnitude. In this session, Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will explain the basics of indexing in SQL Server and the strategies that you can employ to improve query tuning by understating how to identify and create effective indexes.

Pizza and drinks are being provided with the kind courtesy of Microsoft.

If you want to come along, the details are:

13 March 2008 6pm
Intergen
L7 Plunket House
126 Lambton Quay

(Lifts lock at 17:30. If you're late and there's nobody around to swipe you up, contact Adrian on 027 435 4050)