September 2009 - Posts
Community Tech-Days is coming to Ahmedabad again. The event is scheduled to be on 3rd October 2009. I look forward to see many of you in the venue on 3rd October.
What is Community Tech-Days?
Community Tech-Days is a technology event organized by Microsoft to help IT Professionals and developers catch up with the latest technologies and development methodologies. This event is pretty much close to the ‘Tech-ED On the Road’ we had recently.
The Community Tech-Days website says “Dive deep into the world of Microsoft technologies at the Community TechDays and get trained on the latest from Microsoft. Build real connections with Microsoft experts and community members, and gain the inspiration and skills needed to maximize your impact on your organization while enhancing your career.”
I agree with the description 100%.
Click here to register for the event.
Who are the speakers and what are the topics?
I am very excited about the Community Tech-days, some of the top speakers in the industry will be speaking on a number of very interesting subjects.
Vinod Kumar, Microsoft India (Tips and Tricks with Office 2010, Windows 7 – A Dream Operating System for IT Profession)
Vinod Kumar works as a Technology Evangelist (Databases and BI) with Microsoft India specializing primarily on SQL Server. With the love and passion for SQL Server he would want to help the community to maximize their investments on SQL Server by utilizing the product in the right way in their design, development, architecture and deployments. He has been working in the industry on various Microsoft technologies for the past 8+ years and been MVP - SQL Server for more than 3+ years before joining Microsoft. He has been a regular speaker at many of the MS Events like TechEd, MSDN, TechNet and many more. Also loves the local Microsoft Communities and has helped them in every single opportunity available. Apart from SQL, his part-time love is around Office suite of products which he plays a lot with.
Pinal Dave, SQL Server MVP (SQL Server 2008 - The other side of Index)
Pinal Kumar Dave is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP and a prominent expert on SQL Server technologies. He has written over 1000 articles on the subject on his blog at http://blog.sqlauthority.com. He is a dynamic and proficient Principal Database Architect, Corporate Trainer and Project Manager, who specializes in SQL Server Programming and has 7 years of hands-on experience. He holds a Masters of Science degree and a number of certifications, including MCDBA and MCAD (.NET). He was awarded Regional Mentor for PASS Asia and is also Mentor for Solid Quality India.
Jacob Sebastian, SQL Server MVP (Best Practices for Exception Handling and Defensive Programming in Microsoft SQL Server)
Who is this guy??? I think I have seen him somewhere ;-)
Prabhjot Singh Bakshi, Professional Trainer (.NET Framework 4.0)
A Microsoft Certified Trainer, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Dubai(UAE) based, E- Consultancy FZC, a Trainers outfit which pioneering to teach over internet across the globe. Also imparting Corporate training to Professionals of leading IT Companies, including IBM, Microsoft India, Accenture, Cap Gemini, Intel, Scope(Standard Chartered), Mcafee , Royal Bank of Scotland, KPIT Cumins, Wipro, HCL, CSC, Computer Society of India, Patni, Ness, Mphasis, Polaris, ICICI, 3iInfotech, L&T Infotech, Kambay, Virtusa, Aces Goa, Logica, Solid Exact Solution(Holland), SMTC(Dubai), Ceridian (Mauritius) and many more. He interacts with the IT professionals and assists them to adapt and horn their skills on what’s new.
Date, time and location
Community Tech-Days Ahmedabad starts on 3rd October 2009 from 9.15 AM onwards. It is a full day event with 5 sessions on core ITPro/Dev topics.
Location: Hotel Anmol, H l College Lane, Opp Bank of Baroda, Navrangpura. Ahmedabad – 380009
My friend and SQL Server MVP, Jonathan Kehayias (@SQLSarg) tagged me and it is now my turn to disclose the path that I travelled to reach the SQL Server World.
After I read Jonathan’s post, I tried to travel backward through my career in the IT industry. It was fun, very interesting and emotional.
I never got a chance to touch a computer in the school. My first exposure to computers took place in 1990 at Rogate Ashram, India, a religious house run by Rogationist Fathers from Italy. Head of the Ashram, Fr. Vito Antonio Lipari gave me the first lessons of computers in 1990 and I picked them up pretty well.
Fr. Vito Antonio Lipari
Fr. Vito had a Toshiba laptop and that was what we used for the initial training. I don’t remember the model or the ram, hard-disk size etc, but it was a cute little laptop that I liked very much. (I am glad that I could find an old photograph of the laptop from my photo album)
The Toshiba Laptop that I first worked with
The computer was equipped with 5 software programs.
- Wordstar - A word processing software like MS Word.
- Lotus 123 - A spread sheet application, like MS Excel,
- Professional File - A software that provides an interface to create data entry screens and view reports.
- Q&A – An italian softare which is used to generate quizzes, where you can enter objective type questions and their answers. The software randomly generates test papers that can be printed and given to the students.
- Banner – A software that allows to format/shape text and print in a variety of attractive fonts and layouts.
- DBase – A relational database management software
That was a very humble beginning and then I got a number of opportunities to work with DBase and that is when I developed an interest in database management systems. The journey continued to FoxBase and FoxPro in the next few years.
FoxPro was my favorite database management system those days. I wanted to explore the capabilities of FoxPro to the maximum. However, very few learning resources were available (and accessible to me) at that time. I could find no good FoxPro book in the local book store. Internet access was not easy.
Finally I came up with my own learning resource. I created a Foxpro report from the internal help file of foxpro (foxhelp.dbf) and then generated a text file output from the report. It generated a large text file and I managed to print them all. There were close to 700 pages and I took them to a local book binding store and created a reference book out of it.
Honestly, that was the first and last book I studied from the first page to the last page. I was not been that sincere even when I was in the school. None of the books I purchased after that were read/studied completely.
I moved to a new company in those days and soon had to switch to Clipper. It was not hard to pick up because a major portion of FoxPro commands were supported in clipper too. After working with Clipper for close to two years, I switched to Visual Foxpro for a short while.
From Visual Foxpro, I moved to SQL Server 6.5 in 1997. That was my first meeting with SQL Server. We then moved to SQL Server 7.0 and then to 2000. I got the opportunity to work on a number of large SQL Server 2000 projects having large databases and complex business requirements.
The experience I gained from designing and building applications in Foxpro/Clipper for verticals such as manufacturing, banking, insurance etc, has helped me tremendously in the later part of my career. I am deeply indebted to those colleagues and seniors who have contributed directly or indirectly towards making me a better Relational Database Citizen.
Let the game continue and let me Tag:
- Pinal Dave (@pinaldave)
- Steve Jones (@WAY0utwest)
- Michael Coles
I am just back from Chennai, after doing a Hands-On-Lab on Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.
It was a great experience spending two days with a wonderful set of SQL Server developers and administrators from Chennai, sharing my experience in building BI solutions using Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and helping them do the Labs.
Here is a summary of what we did.
This is part of a series Hands-On-Lab that my friend Pinal Dave (SolidQ) is doing in several Indian Cities. You can see the list of other cities where similar training sessions are organized here. Pinal has so far done this training in 9 other cities (as you can see in his posts) and as per his request I helped him with session in Chennai.
I would like to thank everyone for attending the session and making this a great learning experience for all of us.
It was a pleasure presenting at ‘24 Hours PASS’ event this morning and I would like to thank all of you who attended the session. For those who missed the session, the recorded version will be available at PASS website soon.
What is “24 Hour PASS” event?
“24 Hour PASS” event (24HOP) is a 24 hour FREE SQL Server Training Webcast organized by the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), an independent, not-for-profit association dedicated to supporting, educating, and promoting the Microsoft SQL Server Community.
Twenty Four speakers from all over the world presented 24 sessions – one session every hour – starting from 00:00 hours GMT on 2nd September 2009. Eminent speakers like Allen White, Gail Shaw, Greg Low, Kalen Delaney, Kevin Kline, Louis Davidson, Paul Nielsen, Steve Jones etc made the 24HOP a must-attend session for every SQL Server professional.
Community Rocks!
What is so lovely about this event was the amount of effort volunteers from PASS HQ, PASS Chapter and SQL Server community have put into making it a big success. Each session was hosted and moderated by a PASS chapter. People at like Rick, Blythe, Chuck at PASS HQ have worked round the clock to make sure that everything is well organized. A large number of volunteers from PASS Chapters across the world showed their commitment to the SQL Server community by being the host and moderators of each session. These moderators assisted the attendees and presenter by managing the live meeting, helping people having trouble with using the live meeting interface, assisting them with Q&A etc.
You may be surprised when I say that each session was supported by a ‘backup-moderator’ and a number of ‘backup-bakup-moderators’. That shows the spirit :-)
My Session: Tips and Tricks for writing SET based queries
My session - “Tips and Tricks for writing SET based queries” - focused on exposing some of the tips and tricks for writing efficient TSQL queries that solves common business problems using a SET based approach. In most cases, a SET based query may be found to be a better choice over a piece of PROCEDURAL code.
My session included dozens of TSQL demos that presented a number of ways of writing TSQL queries to solve common business problems. We examined the different versions of the queries, starting with a simple version and incrementally presented better options resulting in the best practice solution to the problems
Download the demo scripts
I have uploaded all the demo scripts we examined during the presentation and you can download it from here.
Feedback and rating
I will be very happy to hear your feedback and please do send me emails with your comments. If you have attended the session, please rate my talk at http://speakerrate.com/talks/1434-tips-and-tricks-for-writing-set-based-queries