Sessions I Present

I teach T-SQL development, SQL Server administration, career development, and more privately and at various conferences (SQL Saturdays, PASS Summit, and more).

My current favorite one-hour sessions: 

  • We Aren’t Broken: How to Get Organized
  • Beginning T-SQL
  • T-SQL’s Hidden Support Feature
  • Beginning Admin: The Care and Feeding of SQL Server
  • Effortless Backups with Minion Backup
  • The SQL Career Roadmap for Women (and Men!)
  • Designing Stored Procedure Solutions

Note that I can turn elements of any of those one-hour sessions into a lightning talk. Just ask!

Current lightning talks: 

  • Complete SQL Server Administration in Ten Minutes

My current favorite all-day sessions: 

  • The Enterprise Maintenance Lifecycle: Problems & Solutions
  • Beginning Programming with Powershell

Lightning talks:

Session details, recordings, and downloads:

One Hour Sessions

We Aren’t Broken: How to Get Organized

Level: 100-200

Abstract: Even when I try my best, I’ve always had trouble concentrating, keeping organized, and showing up on time. Being a great student or an outstanding employee kind of requires those skills, among others. So, I – and a lot of my techie compatriots – spent years of our lives grinding our teeth and searching for ways around those problems.

We’ve read articles and videos about productivity hacks, to-do lists, apps, reminders, calendars, Pomodoro timers, Kanban boards, and on and on. We compare notes online and at conferences: “What are you using to keep track of your schedule? Oh yeah? What’s the URL?”

I’m older and wiser, and now I know that we are not broken. We just need the right tools. I’m so wise, in fact, that I know the right tool: the Bullet Journal method.

In this session, I’ll tell you a little about what a Bullet Journal is, what problems it can solve, and how to set one up yourself. When you’ve got the method in motion, you’ll have your brain on a page: to-do lists, projects, notes, appointments, priorities, ideas, quotes…everything and anything you want.

Bring along a blank notebook, or to open up a document, to start your own “BuJo” if you like!

Downloads and more: 

Beginning T-SQL

Level: 100

Abstract: If you’d like to become a database professional – or if you already work with SQL Server at all – you need to know Transact-SQL, the SQL Server programming language. During this session, we’ll design and create our own table to demonstrate key concepts, query syntax, and more. If you’ve been meaning to learn T-SQL, here’s your chance!

  • Goals: To learn the basics of Transact-SQL, with no prior experience.
  • Video from SQL Saturday #41 Atlanta, 2010:

Testimonial: “The presenter was funny, informative and knowledgeable. Real interactive class which was enjoyable. We could use a little more time. :)” – Attendee response, SQL Saturday Richmond 2019

T-SQL’s Hidden Support Feature

Level: 200

Abstract: The most effective T-SQL support feature comes installed with every edition of SQL Server, is enabled by default, and costs no overhead. Yet, the vast majority of database administrator underutilize or completely neglect it. That feature’s name is “comments”.

In this session, Microsoft Certified Master Jennifer McCown will demonstrate the various commenting methods that make code supportable. Attendees will learn what’s important in a header comment, use code blocking to edit code, build a comprehensive help system, and explore alternative comment methods in stored procedures, SSIS packages, SSRS reports, and beyond.  These methods help prevent errors and reduce troubleshooting.

Beginning Admin: The Care and Feeding of SQL Server

Design and development may be exciting, but database administration is absolutely critical (and, reasonably well-paying!)

The care and feeding of a server tends to get short-changed or neglected.  In this class, we’ll cover the basics of the big five administrator tasks:

  • Backups – You must set up regular backups, to keep copies of your databases…just in case something breaks, or someone makes a bad, bad mistake.
  • Integrity checks – Regularly and automatically check databases for corruption, which is when bits get scrambled, lost, and ruined.
  • Index maintenance – Databases need regular upkeep so they’ll continue to run well.
  • Disk management – It’s actually your job to find out about full disks before they happen. After all, databases grow!
  • Alerting – Alerts tell you what’s wrong, so you don’t have to go looking for problems.

I’ll also provide good references for the other two big basics of admin: security, and performance. Being a database administrator is a big job, but we can cover the extremely important parts in just one session!

  • Downloads: Slide deck (updated April 16, 2018 just after the Utah UG meeting…thanks again folks!)
  • Video: “Beginning Admin” on DBA Fundamentals:

Effortless Backups with Minion Backup

Minion Backup is a stand-alone backup solution that can be deployed on any number of servers, for free. Once installed, Minion Backup (or just, MB) automatically backs up all online databases on the SQL Server instance, and will incorporate databases as they are added or removed.

While the solution is designed to be as simple as possible to get up and running, MB is deeply configurable for every backup scenario. In this session, attendees will learn about:

  • Live Insight, which displays the status and progress of backups as they’re running
  • Backing up to Azure
  • Striping, mirroring, copying, and/or moving backups to various destinations
  • Flexible backup delete and archiving options
  • Dynamic Backup Tuning, which changes tuning settings based on your custom thresholds
  • Backing up certificates and passwords
  • High Availability and Disaster Recovery features, including compatibility with Availability Groups
  • Shrink log file on log backup, and some of the associated considerations

Downloads: Demo Code, Minion Backup

Video: Women in Technology VC, April 2017.

Designing Stored Procedure Solutions

Level: 200

Abstract: In this session, you’ll learn about SQL Server stored procedures (SPs): what they are, when and why you’d use them, and how you’d go about developing a solution with one. We will address common SP myths and learn about planning for performance. Most of all, we’ll walk through examples to explore the process of solution building in SQL Server.

The SQL Career Roadmap for Women (and Men!)

Summary:

Here you’ll learn to navigate resumes, job hunting, interviews, and negotiating. We’ll also talk about paths around other career obstacles.

We will also talk about how to get around a big obstacle for both women and men: how to get back to work after a long period of not working.

Abstract:

The ideal way to become a SQL Server professional is to get a degree, get a junior position, and then work your way up. But, the vast majority of data professionals don’t follow this path! Instead, most of us start out as “accidental DBAs” and fumble our way into a full time data career.

This is not ideal, and we could all use some help navigating through resumes, job hunting, interviews, and negotiating.

You’ll learn about all that in this session. We will also talk about how to get around a big obstacle for both women and men: how to get back to work after a long period of not working.

How can I get a database job with no experience? What’s the best way to learn the newest technology? What resources are out there? Bring your questions, and we’ll explore the answers.

Lightning Talks

Current lightning talks: 

  • Complete SQL Server Administration in Ten Minutes

Future: I can also turn elements of any of these one-hour sessions into a lightning talk – probably on the spur of the moment, if I had to!

  • Beginning T-SQL
  • T-SQL’s Hidden Support Feature
  • Beginning Admin: The Care and Feeding of SQL Server
  • Effortless Backups with Minion Backup
  • The SQL Career Roadmap for Women (and Men!)
  • Designing Stored Procedure Solutions

All-day Sessions

The Enterprise Maintenance Lifecycle: Problems & Solutions

Database maintenance isn’t a single event; it’s a lifecycle. Aside from the maintenance event itself, there’s also reporting, error management, specialized configs, HA/DR and more. In this full day session, we’ll explore the many issues surrounding maintenance and how to solve them in a way that is cohesive and comprehensive. If you’re managing more than one server, come to this session.

Learn how to:

  • Deploy maintenance routines to hundreds of servers, effortlessly
  • Standardize configuration throughout the enterprise
  • Set up custom alerts and reports.
  • Manage HA/DR failover scenarios and keep your maintenance intact.
  • Minimize the number of jobs
  • Tune backups and database integrity checks

For maintenance, you’ll learn how to:

  • Order index operations to maintain the most important tables first
  • Maximize your maintenance window by fine-tuning your routine.
  • Easily deal with special circumstances like indexes with settings that conflict with maintenance.
  • Make reindex operations fully dynamic to meet your changing environment.
  • Handle the most difficult CheckDB scenarios with dynamic custom snapshots, multi-threading and CheckDB offloading using auto-restore and remote CheckDB operations.

And for backups specifically, you’ll learn to:

  • Automate management of failed backups
  • Ensure that certificates and encrypted passwords are securely backed up
  • Automate configuration changes between HA/DR sites, in case of failover.
  • Turn trace flags on or off automatically.
  • Dynamically archive end of month or end of year backups.
  • Tune the backups for your entire enterprise and keep them tuned as the environment changes.

This will be the most complete class on enterprise maintenance you’ll ever have.

For a more detailed explanation, and to meet your presenters, here is a YouTube video.

Beginning Programming with Powershell

Have you ever wanted to learn how to code, but you don’t think you have enough knowledge to jump into a class? In this 1-day class we’re going to start from scratch and teach you everything you need to know to begin your coding career. We won’t be able to teach you everything, but by the time we’re finished, you’ll be able to understand the basic concepts, and do a lot more in code than you would expect.

This course is for those who are completely new to coding and want to get started. It is not necessarily for those with coding experience, and just want to learn PowerShell. If you have experience, you’re welcome to come because you will learn the basics of PowerShell, but some of the beginning concepts may leave you answering work email.  So whether you’re strictly an admin, or a business person, manager, or any other field, if you’ve got no experience coding, then this course is for you.  Your coding career starts today.

My Bio

Jen McCown is CEO of MinionWare, LLC; a Microsoft Certified Master for SQL Server; and an independent consultant. She is Senior Editor at MidnightDBA.com, where she creates training videos, the DBAs at Midnight webshow, blogs, reviews, and podcasts. Jen is a member, volunteer, and speaker in PASS, the North Texas SQL Server User Group, and the PASS Women in Technology virtual chapter.

Visit my “Sessions I Present” page on my blog at http://www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen/ .