SQLSaturday #258 – What a long Journey

After the SQLSaturday #258, I couldn’t find any time to write about my opinions for this fantastic event. So, it was a long journey which succeeded for us and for all attendees. This journey was started at the beginning of June to October. During this time, I and my chapter team worked very hard so to say inch-by-inch and day-by-day. First of all, I would like to thank to the team. But the big thanks absolutely must go to Turgay Sahtiyan who was the former president of PASS Turkey. He made an excessive effort. It was the 3rd time we held this event in Istanbul. But for this year, SQLSaturday came with big differences. We welcomed non-local speakers and organized a day-long preconference (precon) training with Andreas Wolter held on Friday, October 4, 2013. 22 Speakers including 4 MCMs, 8 MVPs and 6 Microsoft Engineers presented 23 sessions on 5 parallel tracks (DBA, DEV, BI, SQL Server 2014 and Azure). We got more than 700 registrations for SQLSaturday and could only confirm 160 of them due to venue area policies.

Precon training which was held by Andreas Wolter started at 9am on Friday with 46 attendees. This session was focused on tools and techniques of SQL Server performance and how to resolve common performance problems. Andreas started on Operating System level using Perfmon and dive into SQL Server Wait Stats analysis for identifying bottlenecks.

Also he mentioned different tools like SQL Trace & Profiler and the successor (Extended Events for detailed analysis and see what other tools are available from codeplex). Attendees had the chance to examine the Plan cache and Indexing using DMVs and finally got into locking & concurrency problems.

Andreas Wolter, with over a decade of experience with SQL Server, is a Microsoft Certified Master SQL Server 2008 as well as MCT, MCITP:DD/DA/BID, MCDBA, and MCSA. Being an active member of the PASS he is also a speaker at various international conferences. With his Germany-based company, Sarpedon Quality Lab, he specializes in development and optimization of database and data warehouse systems, with a focus on scalable, performing and secure deployments.

Here are the course objectives of Preconference;

• Performance Monitor for Server-Level Performance Analysis
• Wait-Stats Methology
• SQL Trace & Profiler to Extended Events for Workload & Query-Analysis
• Tempdb Performance Optimization
• Plan-Cache Analysis
• Index & Statistics, Analysis & Tuning
• Locking & Blocking Analysis / Concurrency problems

On the event day (Saturday, October 5, 2013), we arrived to Microsoft Istanbul headquarters at 7am to organize sponsor tables and swag bags. Event started with the keynote where I was one of the speakers.

After the keynote, parallel tracks started. On each track there were 5 sessions. I was one of the presenters for SQL Server 2014 track and presented on one of the most interesting and the newest topic of SQL Server 2014 called “In-Memory OLTP Project (Hekaton): A new Adventure“. In-Memory OLTP is a memory-optimized OLTP database engine for SQL Server. Depending on the reason for poor performance with your disk-based tables, In-Memory OLTP can help you achieve significant performance and scalability gains. Don’t worry, I am not going into details right now but planning to write In-Memory OLTP series soon. I hope that I can make it true as soon as possible . Anyway, here is our agenda.

Organizing multiple tracks and having international speakers were appreciated according to the feedbacks which we received from attendees. Attendees were also very pleased to be able to extend their professional network. This was very rewarding to get these feedbacks which we initially aimed for our attendees and sponsors.

We all worked very hard for this event by evaluating each and every idea coming from the head team members. One of the ideas was to have speaker t-shirts. Every speaker wore their SQLSaturday t-shirt for the first time. Another great idea was to make an online streaming for the people who cannot attend physically to the sessions. We couldn’t manage it this year but it is in our to do list for the coming years

In the picture you can see me presenting In-Memory OLTP technology in SQL Server 2014 CTP1 . I aimed to set my session level as upper intermediate. But during the session, I felt that this is more advanced based on the attendees’ questions. I am sorry if the level couldn’t match your expectations. Attendee feedbacks are really important for the next year’s SQLSaturday event. So, please don’t hesitate to tell us your opinions.

In our previous events, we recorded every single session to publish. If you want to review our previous sessions, you should login to our chapter website of SQL Server Onculeri (PASS Turkey). However, the website and session languages are Turkish, sorry again for those who cannot understand it . This year, we have changed this structure to short interviews and spoiler videos. We aimed to show a summary of the event. Next year, we can combine these two by recording all sessions and having interviews. We also aim to stream all sessions online to be able to reach much more people which we couldn’t due to attendance limitations. You can watch 3 minutes spoiler of this year’s event below and I will be sharing all recordings very soon.

SQLSaturday was ended with great prizes such as XBOX Kinect which was the biggest prize of the day. We also gave away SQL Server books, RedGate’s licenses, ApexSQL licenses, Aspose license, pluralsight subscriptions and various other prizes.

 

As PASS Turkey Chapter, we are very pleased with this year’s event. We have received great feedbacks during and after the event. Our next big mission is SQLRally!

I would like to thank to Gokben Utkun who is the Product Manager of Data Platform at Microsoft for her support, absolutely to the core team, our all speakers and all sponsors (TCM, BilgeAdam, Mechsoft, Confio, Idera, RedGate, ApexSQL, Pluralsight, Aspose, Agtek, Cozumpark).

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