SQL Server Saturday at Microsoft Iselin

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.

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