Lobsterpot Solutions
SQL Social No. 21 – The MVP Edition
The next SQL Social event is this week, Wednesday 11th December in fact. As usual we will be at the Governor’s Lounge at the Royal Melbourne Hotel, 629 Bourke Street, Melbourne.
This month we are spoiled by having 2 SQL Server MVP’s (one from our generous sponsors) giving us a few words of wisdom from their experiences.
This Month’s Speakers
Peter Myers
Peter Myers has worked with Microsoft database and development products since 1997. Today, he specializes in all Microsoft BI products and provides mentoring, technical training, and training course content authoring for SQL Server, Office, and SharePoint.
Peter has a broad business background supported by a bachelor’s degree in applied economics and accounting, and he extends this with solid experience backed by current MCSE and MCT certifications. He has been an MVP since 2007.
Peter will be presenting on Power BI, and specifically Excel’s Power Query. This talk will include some demos.
Rob Farley
Rob Farley is the Owner and Principal Consultant of LobsterPot Solutions Pty Ltd. He has been consulting in database technologies since completing a Computer Science degree with first class honours in 1997. He is a regular conference presenter both around Australia and overseas, heads up the Adelaide SQL Server User Group and holds several Microsoft certifications including Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, a recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award for SQL Server every year since 2006, and a past Branch Executive Committee member of the Australian Computer Society. Rob is director of the PASS organisation, and is a published author, his books including Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting, SQL Server MVP Deep Dives and SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2.
Rob will provide some tips on query parameters – passing parameters into queries, functions and stored procedures is a thing we all do, but if you’re not careful about the data types, you could find performance becoming a problem, even if you’re just getting the length of a string wrong. This quick tip will give you ammo to take back to your developers to make sure they code it right the first time.
As usual, food and drinks are provided courtesy of our sponsors.
Registrations are open, so please use the link below to let us know that you will be attending
http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/sql-social-no-21-tickets-9519528165?aff=eorg
We’ll also have some giveaways of one month Pluralsight subscriptions …. so something maybe for best networker of the evening, best questions or even just if you wear something Christmassy.
SQL Server Social – Christmas Edition Wrap-up
SQL Server Social Number 3 is in the bag and another great evening was had by all who attended. Well, that’s the feedback I received anyway 🙂
We had over 40 registrations, but apparently a number of you got lost on your way to the Sherlock Holmes Inn. We had just over 20 attendees for the evening, which I suppose isn’t too bad considering the proximity to Christmas and the Melbourne SQL Server User Group the evening before.
The theme for the evening was ‘Festive’ and only Martin Cairney and I participated. We were lucky enough to have a self-appointed photographer to hand, and Mai Bing took some great shots, all of which appear in the album below (and on our Facebook page, and our Google+ page). Please feel free to tag yourselves in the photos on Facebook and Google+.
The evening was thoroughly enjoyed all thanks to our sponsors who paid for the drinks and eats at the Sherlock Holmes Inn. A big thank you goes out to BizData and LobsterPot Solutions for their ongoing support.
It was great to meet a number of new people and to catch up with old friends. Personally, I had a number of great conversations including:
- Discussing the Oracle BI offering and how SQL Server 2012 stacks up
- Power View and setting up a sandbox environment – I’ll be blogging a series on this.
- The outlook for Mobile BI in 2012 and who will be adopting it.
- Vacancies and potential hires.
- Learning about the different companies/industries that attendees work for/in.
- Planning the next event.
Martin and I were the last to leave, at around 11pm. I feel hugely satisfied by this month’s event, as even though there were fewer people than expected, the conversations that I had were informative and I made a number of new acquaintances.
Next month we are planning a games night. A night of pool (snooker/billiards/etc), darts, Wii & Xbox, among other things. We should also have a room all to ourselves! So stay tuned for the announcements and be sure to check your spam filter for emails from Eventbrite. 🙂
Thank you to everyone who attended. SQL Server Social wishes you a very Happy New Year and great start to 2012!
See you in January.
– luke
SQL Social 