Shawn McGehee, local Pensacola DBA, author and .Net developer has agreed, at mine and Karla’s request, to introduce a recent SSIS project that has saved us many man hours and loss of sleep and how a 3 hour process went to under 1 minute.  SSIS is a technology that both DBAs and developers have embraced for it’s flexibility and speed at manipulating data. However, data, as we know, comes in all forms.  There is certainly a learning curve with SSIS and every bit helps. 

Our first meeting is 2 days away, Thursday at 6:30, and we have had some good responses so far. Our goal is to host our own SQL Saturday.  We hope this meeting will be our first step toward meeting that goal in the fall.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Date: June 19th, 2008

Time: 6:30 PM

Location:  Pensacola Regional Airport, 2nd Floor

SQL Saturday #4 at the Orange County Convention Center here in Orlando, Florida turned out to be quite a worthwhile trip. As we like to do,  Karla (SQL Babe) and I took a trip down to mix business and pleasure, the pleasure being the “In Between” event aka, SQL Saturday. Well, ok, we did EPCOT too which is of course an acronym (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) but the point being, I had a great time meeting colleagues and learning more about the next release of SQL Server…2008. As luck would have it, RC0 posted over the weekend and I got my copy today in preparation for TechEd, which I will be attending tomorrow.  I will post the first glance impressions here, but from Brian Knight’s very informative presentation, the features go WAY beyond my expectations. As Brian explained, this is a 14 point font release, meaning one PowerPoint slide can display all of the new features in 14 point font. SQL 2000 to 2005, by comparison was a 10 point font release. 

Here is a picture of Brian and I ( I am the heavier and taller good looking guy…kidding Brian). Much to do to prepare for tomorrow. I have about 20 people to track down. I will post the adventure “Live From TechEd”. If you are there and see a big guy wearing a BSOD T-Shirt stop and say Hi.

When Joe Healy, Microsoft’s Florida technical eveangelist extrordinaire, mentioned there was an upcoming tweener that he was getting excited about, I was a bit dismayed. What the heck is a tweener? As it happens, TechEd in Orlando this year consists of two seperate tracks, one for devlopers and one for administrators like me.  Joe, seeing a billion square foot facility in the Orange County Convention Center going to waste on the weekend in be”tweener” the two tracks, he jumped on it.

After minimal pleading, he was finally convinced to let me speak on Saturday, the 7th at 11:00 AM.  I will be speaking on the SQL DBA repository using SSIS and SSRS together to build a full blown solution on the cheap.  I have written and spoken about this solution quite bit in the past year and have expanded it recently. This discussion will focus on gathering and analyzing sql connections across hundreds of servers in under 2 minutes every hour using SSIS. 

I definitely hope to see everyone there.

Rodney Landrum