PASS Summit Cometh, and That Right Soon

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Look at the cute bunny. Now go vote for me.

I can see October from here, and it’s coming at about 137mph (that’s 220.47kph for you nonAmericans).

This year’s PASS Summit 2011 starts on October 11, and this year they’re asking you to vote for preferred sessions. I really enjoyed my first time speaking at PASS last year, so I put in three abstracts…including one BRAND NEW SHINY SESSION! If you like em, vote for em!

  • T-SQL Brush-up: The Best Things You Forgot You Knew About SQL Code
  • T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code, and Why
  • Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos – New!

T-SQL Brush-up: The Best Things You Forgot You Knew About SQL Code [200]

You’re a good SQL professional – you attend conferences and webinars, you read articles and books, and you know your way around SQL Server. But sometimes – just SOMEtimes – some piece of T-SQL slips by you unnoticed, or falls out of memory. Most of us are working with at least two or three out of the last five versions of SQL Server, so who can blame us for missing a feature or two? Come and revisit old favorites, and brush up on new T-SQL features and enhancements. In this session you will see SELECT turned inside-out. You’ll get really, really excited about OVER and PARTITION BY. You’ll learn that Common Table Expressions are, in fact, very cool, and that FOR XML isn’t as scary as it looks. And what’s more, we’ll look and BRAND-new features like SQL Server Denali’s new SEQUENCE object! This session is chock full of code examples, including before-and-after demos and how-to illustrations.

T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code, and Why [200]

It’s impossible to follow every best practice all the time. “Code sins” are those things we do to our code that are either so horrendous that they can’t be borne, or that have such tremendous consequences that your stored procedures wish they’d never been created. Attendees will hear about the most common code sins that make code difficult to read, support, run and extend, and practical strategies for reversing the trend.

Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos [200] – New!

Once upon a time, you inherited an application or a database that was filled with chaos and inconsistencies. The T-SQL code is overly complex and impossible to ken. The architecture is painful to behold, and grueling to code for. One might optimistically say that query performance is “spectacularly mediocre”. If you’re without good documentation or system architects to guide you, how do you break the curse of confusion? In this session you’ll learn several methods for conquering chaotic code, and how to seek and destroy some of the nastier coding mistakes and inefficiencies. We will break complicated queries into key pieces, turn them upside-down, and reform them into something sensible. We will vanquish major issues like data abuse and index negligence. We will restructure joins, tame subqueries, and refactor dynamic SQL. We will emerge victorious!

Happy days, and see you at the Summit!
Jen McCown
http://www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen