Jacob's Blog

I am wrapping up my work in NY and getting ready to go to Seattle for PASS Summit. I will be in Seattle from Sunday afternoon (1 Nov 2009) to Saturday morning (7 Nov 2009). I look forward to see many of you during PASS Summit.

Contacting Me

Email is the best way to setup a meeting time if you would like to meet me. However, it is not mandatory; If you see me around, just feel free to jump in and ‘interrupt’.

My talk on Creating XML Schema Collections

I will be speaking on Creating XML Schema Collections and the session is on Tuesday (3 Nov 2009) 4.30 PM to 5.45 PM in Room Number 612. We will go over the basics of XML Schema collections and see a number of demos that perform a variety of validations on XML Documents. A few of you will be able to grab copies of my book The Art Of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections during my session.

Join me at Birds of a feather (XML) Lunch on Tuesday

Before you read further, I would suggest you read Mike Walsh’s post on what is Birds of a feather lunch.  I will be hosting the XML table and nine of you can join me for lunch on Tuesday. We will discuss SQL Server and XML. I will not be the only one talking at the table, in fact, all of us will be discussing, asking and answering questions, praising and cursing XML. I look forward to meet many of you at the Lunch Table on Tuesday.

Join Pinal Dave at Birds of a feather (CDC) Lunch on Tuesday

Pinal Dave will be hosting the CDC lunch table. Those of you wants to take part in the Change Data Capture (CDC) discussion, please be at his table (which will be close to my table) ‘on time’ (honestly, he is a SQL Server Star and if you are late by a minute, you might miss the opportunity to lunch with him).

See you at PASS Summit.

I am just back from the the SQL Server Saturday event (Microsoft Iselin) and had the honor of presenting with Michael Coles and Robert Pearl, two great SQL Server Experts of New York. It was a fantastic event with close to 100 SQL Server developers and DBAs, which triggered a lot of interesting discussions around various aspects of SQL Server.

Getting to the Venue

Robert was kind enough to pick me up in the morning from Brooklyn, along with my colleague Joe. None of us were familiar with the location and neither Google Map nor Map Quest helped us to to get to the venue on time. After driving around New Jersey for close to an hour, we finally located the Microsoft Building.

Michael Coles and SQL Server Spatial Support

I missed the first part of Michael’s interesting presentation. Michael explained SQL Server 2008’s spatial data support in great detail along with a number of very interesting demos. Instead of explaining the spatial features by showing a world map and places that does not make sense to most of us (that is what I always saw elsewhere), he really demonstrated the spatial features on New York’s own Road Maps and Subway Maps which made the presentation very interesting and valuable.

I had been exploring the spatial support recently to add some of the spatial features to our home health care solution HhaeXchange (http://www.hhaexchange.com). Many of the examples that Michael demonstrated were very close to what I was looking for, and it reduced my work tremendously.

Thank you Michael for putting up a great presentation, giving me a copy of all your demos and the spatial database you created with a lot of hard work. Most importantly, thank you for driving me back to New York (Michael lives in New Jersey), I know it should have taken you several hours to get back to home after dropping me.

Michael authored close to a dozen great books on SQL Server. I would recommend reading them, especially the following books.

1. Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer’s Guide
2. Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008
3. Accelerated SQL Server 2008
4. Pro SQL Server 2008 XML
5. Pro T-SQL 2005 Programmer's Guide (Expert's Voice)
6. Expert SQL Server 2008 Encryption

Robert Pearl and SQL Server Auditing

Robert Pearl presented a very interesting session on SQL Server Auditing. He explained how to configure auditing in SQL Server, how to configure Change Data Capture and walked through tracing and management of transaction logs.

Robert had been doing a lot of work in SQL Server internals. He has a web based SQL Server Monitoring Product, SQL Centric, which is capable of monitoring one or more SQL Server databases and can send you notification/alert emails in case something goes wrong.

Thank you Robert for the insights you provided into SQL Server storage engine and Transaction Log Processing.

Jacob Sebastian and “Best Practices for Error Handling and Defensive Programming in SQL Server”.

I am very glad to know that every one found the session very interesting and helpful. Thank you Melissa for your complement “SQL Server Fire Cracker”.

Jacob and Melissa

Thank you Michael for walking around and clicking all the photographs.

Gifts and Prizes

A lot of gifts and prizes were distributed among the attendees which included several autographed copies of my book The Art of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections, Michael’s book Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer’s Guide, several copies of Windows 7, including a Signature Edition copy, T-shirts from Red-Gate and many more.

Thank you and don’t forget to rate my talk

I would like thank everyone for attending the session. I look forward to hear your feedback (though many of you talked to me after the session), please go to http://speakerrate.com/talks/1556-best-practices-for-exception-handling-and-defensive-programming-in-microsoft-sql-server4 and rate my talk there.

I have not been able to write on my blog for quite some time. I am currently in NY for an onsite assignment and have been quite busy lately. I hope my life will get back to normal soon :-)

I will be presenting at the New Jersey SQL Server User Group on 24th October 2009 on “Best practices for exception handling and defensive programming in SQL Server”. I am glad to have the honor of presenting with two great SQL guys, Michael Coles and Robert Perl.

Event Details

• Date: Saturday, October 24^th
• Time: 9:00am - 3:00pm (Sign-in begins at 8:15am)
• Location: Microsoft Office (Iselin, NJ)
• Registration Link: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=141878

Speakers and Sessions

Michael Coles ["Where in the World?" -- Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008 ]

SQL Server 2008 introduces two new core data types for storage and manipulation of geospatial data. You can use SQL Server's built-in library of spatial operations to perform complex geographic calculations quickly and easily, and interface the spatial data types with front end mapping tools. The R2 release of SQL Server 2008 adds even more spatial data functionality to the Microsoft BI stack via Reporting Services improvements. In this session attendees will learn how to store, manipulate, and perform calculations with geospatial data in SQL Server to enrich their applications.

Robert Pearl [Who Did it and Ran?']

Robert Pearl brings us a SQL caper that takes us on a journey through the depths of the sql server internals world, putting us on the trail of who did what and when to your database. This presentation will be an exercise in database forensics that will apply computer investigation and analysis techniques to set up auditing and evidence collection, by leveraging the native SQL Server features out-of-the-box. We'll explore the Transaction Log, SQL 2008's Change Data Capture (CDC), and other methods to secure your database (to put us in compliance (ie: SOX, HIPAA, etc.)

Jacob Sebastian [Best practices for exception handling and defensive programming in SQL Server ]

This session focuses on understanding errors and error handling in SQL Server. We will see a number of demos that show how to detect errors, control errors and handle errors. It also focuses on exposing some of the common programming mistakes and pitfalls.

I hope to see many of you at the event.

Though I wanted to write a blog post with a quick summary of Community Tech-days Ahmedabad event, I could not really do that for the last several days because I was travelling. I had to leave right after the event for New York for a 4 week on-site assignment.

A few of my friends have already written great blog posts covering the event in great details.

1. Vinod Kumar’s Blog - A’bad UG CTD and Gandhi Ashram
2. Pinal Dave’s Blog - SQLAuthority News – Community TechDays in Ahmedabad – A Successful Event
3. Ritesh Shah’s Blog - Microsoft Community Tech Day in Ahmedabad on 3rd OCT 2009
4. Tejas Shah’s Blog - Community TechDays at Ahmedabad - Great Event
5. Imran’s Blog - Overview of new features in windows 7 - MTD Session

I had a great time meeting and having a quick chat with many of you. It was a pleasure meeting some of you after so many years. Thank you for attending Community Tech-days.

Thank you Vinod Kumar, Pinal Dave and Prabhjoth Bakshi for making it a great event. Special thanks goes to the guys at Microsoft who agreed to bring the event to ahmedabad and to my friend Ashwin Kini who coordinated the event.

Vinod Kumar Presenting on Windows7 and Office 2010

Pinal Dave presenting on the ‘Other side of Indexes’

Jacob Sebastian presenting on ‘Best practices for exception handling in SQL Server’

Prabhjotsingh Bakshi presenting on .NET 4.0

I got several emails asking for the the PPTS and the sample scripts that I used in the presentation. I will make them available for download soon. I request those of you who attended my session, to go to http://speakerrate.com/talks/1473-best-practices-for-exception-handling-and-defensive-programming-in-microsoft-sql-server and rate the talk there.