Pre-Conference Seminars

This session will be a two part session in which we will be focusing on two of the biggest topics in the DBA field. How to properly design your SAN storage solution and how to properly design your virtualization solution.

The storage portion of this session will focus on SAN storage, but most of the material will apply to direct attached storage as well.

In the first half of the session we’ll be focusing on the storage array. Storage can be one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to database performance. It’s also one of the hardest places to troubleshoot performance issues because storage engineers and database administrators often do not speak the same language. In this session, we’ll be looking at storage from both the database and storage perspectives. We’ll be digging into LUNs, HBAs, the fabric, as well as the storage configuration.

After going over the components we’ll dig into some advanced storage configurations. This includes RAID groups, multi-pathing software, and proper redundant storage network design. We will also be digging into some advanced storage array backup techniques including taking storage level clones and snapshots. After going over these advanced techniques we will dig into how these can best be used to backup the SQL Server environment to provide maximum redundancy with no recurring tape costs.

In addition to theory, we’ll be looking at an actual SAN so that we can translate what we see in the Storage Array with what we see on the actual server.

In the second half of the day we’ll be looking into the pros and cons of moving SQL Servers into a virtual server environment. Specifically we’ll be looking into when it’s a good idea and when it’s probably not a good idea. Like everything in the database world there are no hard set answers as to if virtualization is a good idea or not, but there are some times when virtualizing a SQL Server is a good idea, and can save you some money. There are some other times when you will be shooting yourself in the foot and virtualization isn’t a good idea. We’ll be focusing on when how to make this decision, and how to gather the metrics that you need in order to come to this decision.

We’ll look into how tie the virtual platforms to the storage array so that you can maximize the storage performance for your SQL Servers and the virtual environment.

Learn to talk to the storage admin. Learn best practices for server and storage configuration. Learn how to troubleshoot storage issues. Why Thin provisioning can be bad for SQL Server. Network Design.

• True level 300-400, exclusive content from Denny Cherry
• Gain real-world knowledge, get real-world exposure packed with real-world demos and examples
• Get your own copy of course material developed by Denny Cherry
• 8 hours of interaction with the Master
• Lunch, Snacks, Tea/Coffee & loads of fun!
• And may be some surprise goodies 🙂

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud service that provide a complete self-service analytics solution, including tools for data extraction, transformation, modeling and visualization. Data modeling is possible by using both Excel or Power BI Designer. The Power BI Service enables you to create reports and dashboards, sharing them with other users. Mobile apps for several platforms also improve access on any device.

In this full-day seminar, you are guided in creating a complete solution step-by-step, using all the features of Power BI. Starting from scratch, you see how to create query in a visual way to import and integrate data from many different sources, with a particular attention on leveraging existing data in the company, transforming data in order to improve the resulting model and sharing the results of the queries created, so that they will be easy to reuse. Then you see how to create a data model following the best practices and using the resources available on the web in order to accelerate the creation of tables and formulas that can be shared in many models. The reference data model will improve over the day, adding metadata to improve the usability of other Power BI features. You will also learn how to connect to existing on-premises data models in Analysis Services, without copying and storing data in the cloud.

Once the data model is ready, you see how to create reports and dashboards in Power BI, leveraging the many data visualizations available. After publishing the result on Power BI site, you see how to refresh the data on the cloud, including all the details about correct configuration and best practices for moving on premise data to the cloud in a secure way.
You will see how to use Q&A, learning how to optimize the data model for a better user experience during data exploration with this tool. Q&A enables queries written in natural language, and it might require some information in the data model in order to disambiguate similar names or similar relationships.

At the end of the day, you will be ready to start using the entire Power BI stack in your company, choosing the right feature for each requirement and applying the best practices in each step.

• True level 300-400, exclusive content from Alberto Ferrari
• Gain real-world knowledge, get real-world exposure packed with real-world demos and examples
• Get your own copy of course material developed by Alberto Ferrari
• 8 hours of interaction with the Master
• Lunch, Snacks, Tea/Coffee & loads of fun!
• And may be some surprise goodies 🙂

09:00 – 11:00 : Understanding Data storage.
In this session, we look at the various ways that we can store data including relational, columnstore, noSQL and Big Data storage. We understand conceptually how each of these different engines work and which scenario do each of these technologies address.

11:00 – 13:00 : Working with non-relational data stores.
As we move away from relational stores, we take an in-depth look at storing data in non-relational data stores and understand how to translate all our query tuning knowledge to a noSQL environment. We compare a large 100TB solution on a relation store vs a noSQL data store.

14:00 – 15:30 : Storing data in HDInsights
With Hadoop on the cloud, in this session we look at scaling our data stores to multi-petabytes leveraging HDInsights. We also look at connecting an on-premise Hadoop Clusters with HDInsights in the cloud. We explore a high data streaming scenario and see how we can leverage HDInsights to store and process these very large semi-structured data.

15:30 – 17:00 : Analytics with Big Data
The benefits of Big Data is when we can run analytics on very large datasets to glean better data patterns. In this session, we look at how we can run queries and analyse the data that we gathered and stored into our Big Data store.

• True level 300-400, exclusive content from Praveen Srivatsa
• Gain real-world knowledge, get real-world exposure packed with real-world demos and examples
• Get your own copy of course material developed by Praveen Srivatsa
• 8 hours of interaction with the Master
• Lunch, Snacks, Tea/Coffee & loads of fun!
• And may be some surprise goodies 🙂

This full-day seminar will show you how to optimize SQL Server queries and create high-performance applications. You will learn about the inner workings of the query processor so you can write better queries and provide the query processor with the quality information it needs to produce efficient execution plans. You’ll also get tips for troubleshooting underperforming queries. In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), a key new feature of SQL Server 2014, will be covered as well.

Topics include:

• Understand how the query optimizer works
• Troubleshoot queries using extended events, SQL trace, dynamic management views (DMVs), the data collector, and other tools
• Work with query operators for data access, joins, aggregations, parallelism, and updates
• Speed up queries and dramatically improve application performance by creating the right indexes
• Understand statistics and how to detect and fix cardinality estimation errors
• Maximize OLTP query performance using In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton) features, including memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures
• Monitor and promote plan caching and reuse to improve application performance
• Improve the performance of data warehouse queries using columnstore indexes
• Handle query processor limitations with hints and other methods

• True level 300-400, exclusive content from Benjamin Nevarez
• Gain real-world knowledge, get real-world exposure packed with real-world demos and examples
• Get your own copy of course material developed by Benjamin Nevarez<
• 8 hours of interaction with the Master
• Lunch, Snacks, Tea/Coffee & loads of fun!
• And may be some surprise goodies 🙂