First of all, Rodney and I want to thank all of you for coming to last
night’s meeting. What a great turnout for only our second meeting! AND,
now because of that, we received confirmation this morning from Joe Healy
that he will indeed be our guest speaker at the August meeting!!!

I know most of you last night recognized Joe’s name when we mentioned him,
but for those who haven’t maybe heard of him, Joe Healy (www.devfish.net)
is the Developer Evangelist for Florida. Joe’s geographical responsibility
is to provide ‘developer care’ for the Gulf States District for the East
Region Developer team. As such, he has responsibilities to bring .NET
development to the masses in his area.

Joe serves a multitude of clients, from corporate accounts to broad reach
events and User Groups. He lectures on various development and
architectural topics focused around the .Net Frameworks, Visual
Studio.NET, and associated servers.

Joe worked previously for Microsoft Consulting Services in the custom
Application Development arena, focusing on Internet, Web Services, Rich
Client, B2B, and browser delivered systems for Microsoft Consulting
Services.

Joe’s presentation at the August 28th meeting will be “Visual Studio 2008
Service Pack 1″. - Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Overview – “more than
a service pack” – Currently in beta testing, VS2008 SP1 is planned for
release in late summer. It will deliver significant new components for
web developers, including ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Entity Framework,
and ADO.NET Data Services. Also including are a myriad of other features.
We’ll take an overview snapshot of SP1 during this session.

Having Joe come is a huge honor for our new users group, so please do
spread the word for this next meeting. We will be sending out the new
location info by the end of next week.

Thank you again for all your support, and your feedback is always welcomed!

Cheers,
Karla
 

We will have out next Pensacola SQL Server Users Group Meeting on July 23rd at 6:30 PM.  This meeting’s sessions will be:

DBA Day 1 presented by Shawn McGehee

Designing Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services presented by Rodney Landrum, author of “Pro SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services” (Apress)

Both of these sessions will be beginner to intermediate level.

We will also have more giveaways from our growing list of sponsors and a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate up for grabs.

The location for this meeting will be at the Pensacola Regional Airport, second floor, room 224.  Parking is $2.00 per hour, but if you bring in your green parking ticket, we have reimbursement vouchers for the parking fees.

We look forward to seeing everyone there.

I intentially put the ellipses on the title to represent three kicks of my own butt in not having updated our site with information about our first group meeting until now.  No excuses like overworked and chapters due on the new book and holiday. It is funny when someone says, I won’t give you excuses, like…and then they spell out the excuses.

However, our first meeting was a success.  We met a lot of great local talent who were all engaging and patient as I explained SSIS package varaibales and expressions.  We learned several important lessons for our first meeting.  First, of course, for any good user group meeting is food. Well…ok content should be the main focus, but having good food helps. Second, Thursdays seem to be the worst time for most of the attendees.  So…our next elliptical meeting will include great food again, good content, free parking and will be held on a Wednesday. 

Many people asked for presentation decks to be posted. We will be posting them soon.

And here are some pictures of the first group that braved the drive to the airport. Luckily the jet engine noise was not too bad.

Thanks everyone who attended and we promise the next meeting, on July 23rd (details shortly) will have more swag, more free software from sponsors, and content that crosses the SQL spectrum with introductory sessions as well as intermediate level.  We will be sending out a meeting schedule very soon.

Rodney

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

This meeting will be the kickoff meeting for the Pensacola SQL Server Users Group. 

Revitalizing the SQL Server community of the Panhandle, Rodney Landrum, author of Pro SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, will be presenting the “SQL DBA Repository”, made popular by several feature articles in SQL Server Magazine. 

Date: June 19th, 2008

Time: 6:30 PM

Location:  Pensacola Regional Airport, 2nd Floor

Contact: Karla Remail

e-mail: karla@pensacolasql.com or rodney@pensacolasql.com