Group Blog

Nashville User Group Presentation by John Rives

joew@webbtechsolutions.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:49:02 GMT

On Tuesday August 19, 2008, we met at NovaCopy in downtown nashville. Our speaker was John Rives of Amniox with a topic of "Clustered Virtualization of SQL Server".

John did a great job keeping the topics agnostic to the technology, and gave a solid rundown on many of the issues and concerns with running SQL Server (and any database system in a virtualized environment. He covered everything from current technology and some foresight into the future.

We had a good crowd again, with over 45 people in attendance:

Outside of the building, many folks took advantage of the Microsoft Across America Truck:

Next month, Louis Davidson (who is also writing this post) will be speaking on September 26, 2008 at 11:30 at the Microsoft office in Franklin, TN. This will be an interactive session Database Design (and giving away swag for his new book release.) Come prepared to speak up as the session will be very interactive.

Additional pictures:

June 6, 2008 Meeting with John Kellar

joew@webbtechsolutions.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:41:36 GMT

The Nashville SQL Server Users Group had another successful meeting at the Microsoft Office in Cool Springs Friday 6/6. Thank you to our sponsor’s, Jerry Heath from Rezult IT and Cannon Loughry from Microsoft. John Kellar was a fantastic informative speaker. He was highly rated by the attendees and managed to fit in several laughs for a fun interactive presentation.

April 4 Meeting, Joe Webb presents "Tips and Tricks for Writing Better Queries" and more

joew@webbtechsolutions.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:22:21 GMT

The last SQL Server Users Group meeting was great! We had 55+ attend and Joe Webb’s presentation was highly rated by everyone.

Joe’s presentation, “Tips and Tricks for Writing Better Queries” has also been uploaded to http://nashville.sqlpass.org . Thanks again to Quest Software and Robert Half Technology for sponsoring this meeting.

In our meeting we also discussed a 2000 vs. 2005 problem involving NO LOCK.The question was:

The company was using the NO LOCK hint in SQL Server 2000 to increase performance since they tightly controlled the data changes on the database. Under SQL Server 2000 there were no reported issues with using the NO LOCK hint. However, when they upgraded to SQL Server 2005 they started getting failures in the application layer occasionally (once per month). They have traced this issue back to the fact that the query using the NO LOCK hint is returning two rows for a single query containing the row prior to change and the same row after the change. Again, this only happens infrequently (once per month) but causes the application to fail when it occurs. The question was asked if NO LOCK should be used, and if there was a difference between NO LOCK and READ UNCOMMITTED.

Cannon Loughry (Database Platform Specialist, Microsoft) researched the problem and sent us this response:

I have discussed the NO LOCK hint question raised at our last SQL Server User Group with several individuals internally. There is agreement, backed up in the article below, that the NO LOCK and READ UNCOMMITTED hints are synonymous. However, while these are generally used to improve performance when possible given the state of data and reporting purposes, the article referenced below shows our best practice for accomplishing this same goal without the risk of having issues arise without the potential for the problem described during our meeting.

SQL Server 2005 Row Versioning-Based Transaction Isolation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345124.aspx I have not been able to find any reference to the NO LOCK hints working differently in SQL Server 2005 from the way they behaved in 2000 as was indicated during the call.

Our next meeting will be the middle of May or early June and we will be sending out an update when we get the topic and speaker confirmed with a location.

First User Group Meeting with Kevin Kline, Speaker

joew@webbtechsolutions.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:59:33 GMT

On Friday, February 15, the Nashville SQL Server Users Group had its first meeting. It was actually the very first meeting of the rejuvenated SQL Server group that had more or less dissolved over the past few years. But a few of us got together and realized that we wanted to have a user's group that we could attend here locally, and so the group was reborn.

Turnout was spectacular for a first meeting of any kind really, with the meeting being held at the offices of Robert Half International in downtown Nashville. Approximately 100 people were in attendance, which for one thing meant that the pizza was pretty much all eaten by the end of the meeting, but also meant that this was a tremendously well received first meeting for any type of group, much less a SQL Server user's group that had floundered away a few years back. Hungry for pizza, hungry for knowledge.

Luckily for our first meeting, we brought out a very popular speaker, and a coauthor of mine, SQL Server MVP Kevin Kline, who gave an excellent rundown of the Top 10 Features that are coming in SQL Server 2008.

As you can see from the pictures, almost every seat was filled, which is quite a big deal, since in most conferences/user groups, there is a strict, unenforced "chair-between" policy.

Kevin's talk covered:

SQL Improvements
Developer Improvements
Reporting Services Improvements
Compression
Datatypes (like the new Date and Time types)
Security Improvements
Resource Governor
Auditing
Analysis Services Performance Improvements
Multi-Server management

You can download the slides from here, along with a white paper that Kevin had written up on this for his employer, Quest.

Our next meeting will be on April 4th, 2008, a Friday at 11:30 (location to be announce) where Joe Webb, another SQL Server MVP from here in Nashville will give a presentation on Tips & Tricks for Writing Better Queries. Joe is a great speaker so please come on down (or up, depending on where you live and where the meeting ends up,) and here him speak. We will also have another member of the group present another tip or trick that they have up their sleeve.

If you are interested in attending, watch http://nashville.sqlpass.org for updates on the exact location, and register if you want to get updates sent to you. If you are interested in speaking, send an email to shelton.dickson@decisionsource.com. He will get you hooked up.

Of course, I am presenting a very pretty mighty perfect picture of the day, and for the most part, it is true. The only real snafu of the day was that the first (and only) projector that was used wouldn't work. In the picture, notice that the only thing out of focus (more or less) is the picture on the screen. Despite having the collective audio visual clubs of half of the schools in Nashville from the past 20 years in one room, not a one of us had the ability to get the projector going (even though some tried, and others shouted out helpful tips like "see if the lens cap is off"). But thanks to some Southern hospitality, another projector was acquired from a company in the same building and we were off and running.

See you on April 4!

Note: I apologize for the quality of the pictures. For future meetings I will be toting along a far better camera than my Motorola Q phone camera so I can provide blogs and pictures for the website.