The SQL UPDATE Statement

SQLSaturday #21 is gonna be HUUUUUUGE!

I’m excited about next weekend’s SQLSaturday as its going to be one HUGE event. If you live anywhere in the Southeastern United States you should be excited as well! Why? Well for starters next is, for all intents and purposes this is going to be like PASS Summit: East Coast Edition.

For starters, the week leading up to SQL Saturday will feature some top-notch seminars. Each seminar is $149 and includes full-day training as well as lunch. Here’s the seminar schedule for the week:

Monday: Essentials of Managing SQL Server by Andy Warren (Blog | LinkedIn)

Tuesday: Learn BI in a Day by Brian Knight (Blog | Twitter)

Wednesday: Real World Performance Tuning by Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter)

Thursday: From Zero to SSIS by Andy Leonard (Blog | Twitter)

Friday: Performance Tuning Methodology by Buck Woody (Blog | Twitter)

In addition use code “KKLINE” to get a 20% discount if you register for two or more seminars! Even better if you sign up for the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday sessions together you can knock $200 off the price by using the discount code ”Bundle” at checkout. Also worth noting is that Kevin Kline will be visiting various user groups around the state next week. Here’s the schedule:

And that’s just the week leading up to the main event!!!EXCLAMATIONPOINT

On Saturday we have a plethora of great speakers and sessions. In addition to all the guys I’ve previously mentioned in this post we also have guys like Chad Miller (Blog | Twitter), Joe Celko (Blog), Joe Webb (Blog | Twitter), Kendal Van Dyke (Blog | Twitter), Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter), Ken Simmons (Blog | Twitter) and more presenting! This SQLSaturday is also seeing the introduction of the mini-sessions. Mini-sessions are 15-minute presentations aimed at first-time speakers to encourage them to present at a big event without the pressure of having to fill that hour time slot.

So what are you waiting for? Oh what you want one more thing to entice you? Ok, how about free T-shirts for the first 150 to arrive to the event? Swag? We got it in spades. We only have a few seats left so hurry up and register!

For those who don’t know, PASS has several Virtual Chapters. Each VC has its own distinct topic they focus on. The most recent VC established is the Virtualization Virtual Chapter (say that 3 times fast). Our group is dedicated to helping spread the education of virtualization to folks who are thinking of jumping into the virtualization realm with their SQL Servers. We’re pretty excited as we have some top notch virtualization experts such as Duncan Epping (Blog | Twitter), Scott Lowe (Blog | Twitter) and Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) who will be syndication their blogs on the Virtualization VC’s blog feed.

Tomorrow afternoon Wednesday, September 30th at 12pm EST | 4pm GMT, the PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter is proud to host our first webcast featuring Denny Cherry (Blog | Twitter) discussing the pros and cons of moving SQL Servers into a virtual environment. We’ll be talking about when it’s a good idea, when it’s a bad idea, and why there’s no hard-set answers. We’ll be focusing on how to make this decision and how to gather the metrics you need to make a good decision. Audio will be provided through the speakers. This presentation will be presented via Windows LiveMeeting so make sure you arrive early and make sure everything is ready to go on your end. See you tomorrow at the presentation!

Meeting Invite Link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=BP7D93&role=attend&pw=x_](2cfJ4

For those who weren’t able to make the event, some of the recordings from the 24 Hours of SQL PASS event are now available on-demand from the PASS Summit website. You can register for the webcasts at the link below:

Registration for 24 Hours of PASS Selected Sessions

You may be asking “well what about the other sessions?”. The rest of the sessions should be available online after the Summit in November. But that shouldn’t matter much because you’re going to PASS…right? RIGHT?!?!

Ok everyone, please take your seats. Thank you. Welcome to SQL University, my name is Jorge Segarra and I’ll be helping you start on your journey to SQL Server. You’re here because you either are curious about SQL Server and wish to start down that path or you’ve become an accidental DBA in your organization and require knowledge to get your new job done. I’ll be one of your online professors along this journey. Since this is the orientation we’ll start with some basics you’ll need for this semester.

School Supplies (aka stuff you’ll need for SQL University):

• SQL Server 2008 Express (Runtime with Management Tools) – Download link
  • NOTE: If you already have a SQL 2008 instance to play with don’t worry about step 1. This is meant for those who are starting from scratch. For stuff like SQL Server Agent we’ll discuss it but assignments won’t depend on you having it.
• SQL Server Books Online – Online Version | Download
• Basic understanding of SQL Syntax – W3 Schools (SQL Tutorial)
• Basic understanding of Relational Database Theory – Designing Relational Databases (video) | Relational Database Concepts (PDF)

What I’ll ask of students is that you go over this list and get yourself prepared. First day of class will start on Monday, September 28th and we’ll be covering how to use the basic management tool for SQL Server: The SQL Server Management Studio. In the meantime here’s your homework assignment:

1. Install SQL Server 2008 Express (Runtime with Management Tools)

2. Install AdventureWorks Databases – Download here

NOTE: AdventureWorks is a ficticious bicycle company. The databases are example databases that are commonly used for practice with SQL Server so that students can learn basics from. Please Use the Recommended Download (All Databases.x86.msi)

3. Go through the whole SQL Tutorial on W3 Schools (If you don’t know SQL syntax consider this MANDATORY. If you already know the language and you’d like a refresher go ahead and do the tutorial anyways)

4. Either watch the video (about 34 minutes) or download and read through the Relational Database Theory paper to familiarize with key concepts and theories.

So now that you have your homework let’s cover how SQL University is going to work. I have amassed a few fellow faculty members that will help me out with classes this semester. Each staff member will be blogging on a different beginner topic and tagging their post with SQL University. I will be linking their classes here so you can have a central place to come back to and see all of the great SQL University content at a glance. With each topic/class I ask that students try to be active and ask questions in the comments section of each post. The more questions posted the more answers can get posted and the more we ALL learn!

Well last night I presented my Policy Based Management presentation for the Orlando SQL PASS User Group aka OPASS. The meeting was held at the End-to-End Training (now called SQLShare.com) offices which is a nice facility ran by Andy Warren (Blog | LinkedIn). The meeting started off with a short bit of networking where Andy has everyone introduce themselves to their neighbors and get some discussion going. I thought this was a nice little touch and lets people work on their networking skills.

First up for the night was a mini presentation on Backup Basics with Todd Holmes (LinkedIn), a DBA for Channel Intelligence in Celebration. The mini presentation is a 15-minute presentation slot that Andy came up with to encourage new speakers to cut their teeth on public speaking and technical presentations. Todd did a great job with such a broad topic and even went the extra mile in showing examples via T-SQL code. Todd will also be doing this mini presentation at the upcoming SQL Saturday #21 in Orlando.

After Todd’s presentation there was a short dinner break and I got setup for my PBM presentation. Andy said he was curious to see an hour-long presentation went on Policy Based Management since he thought it was a topic that could be covered rather quickly. Funnily enough my presentation ran just a tad over an hour and I could have kept going! There were some hiccups here and there with my VM taking a little longer than I would have liked to open certain things but demos didn’t blow up like they did at the last SQL Saturday. I also got a chance to show the audience EPMF in action (sort of). I showed the script run that used PowerShell to apply existing policies and dump results into a database repository. The example failed because I tried to open Reporting Services page on VM which had the hardened IE settings enabled that didn’t allow scripts to run so I wound up just showing a screenshot of the dashboard view. Hopefully this demo helps people take SQL 2008 and PBM back to their jobs and look like rock stars for virtually no money (except for cost of SQL 2008 Standard license after they see how awesome this is).

After the meeting I stuck around and talked shop with Andy, Jack Corbett (Blog | Twitter) and Kendal Van Dyke (Blog | Twitter) which was pretty awesome as we talked about all things SQL. Always a good time when you get quality geek time in. Overall it was a great time and a big thank you to the group for having me out there. If you’re in the Orlando area make sure to check out the group!