SQL Saturday #34 Wrap-up

PASS
Whew! It's over. New England Data Camp v2, aka, SQL Saturday #34, was completed on Saturday. Going in we had maxed out our online registrations at 500, an accomplishment by itself. During registration on the day of the event, we  shut down registration and just started waving people through the door at 300. Our best guess at the total attendance was 340 (not the 375 I tweeted during the delirium of the day). There were a couple of minor glitches and one major one. The major glitch was not enough vegetarian food. We just ran out. Everyone else seemed to get a meal. We had just a few, read that 3 or 4, sandwhiches at the end of the day. I want to personally thank Adam Machanic for all the…
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SQL Saturday #34

PASS
The event is this Saturday. Take a look at our sponsors, speakers and the program. It's going to be a great opportunity to learn about SQL Server and things around SQL Server. If you're in the New England area, please register and take advantage of this excellent event. 450 of your peers are already pledging to show up. This is going to be a good time for networking too.
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A Call to Arms

SQL Server, T-SQL
Phil Factor's most recent guest editorial over at SQL Server Central has, to a degree, pointed out that the emporer's spiffy new outfit... well, it's not exactly there. That's why he looks so nekkid. But seriously, the very idea of naming objects inside of the database with Hungarian-style notation really should end. Phil's right. There's absolutely no reason why you should name a unique index ixuTableName when UniqueTableName or TableNameUnique would do the job just as well and not be nearly as obscure. I confess to using this type of naming convention all the time, but I'm realizing that I don't need it and it's largely just habit. There are possible exceptions, for instance you want to group all lookup tables in your database so you name them lkTableName, but…
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PowerShell Script for Creating Indexes

PowerShell, SQL Server, T-SQL
I needed to create an identical index on a bunch of tables within one of my projects (yes, I know this is problematic on multiple levels and I'm working on that too). Rather than sitting around typing this up, I decided to use PowerShell to do the work for me. I'm still very much learning how to do things in PowerShell so this took me almost as long as it would have to type them up, but now I know more than I did. Having gone through the pain of trying to find a good example on the web that did exactly what I wanted (they're out there, just hard to find), I decided I'd add this one in so the next person had at least one more source of…
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What three events brought you here?

Misc
Another one of the DBA bloggers games of tag is occurring. I've been asked by Tom LaRock to answer Paul Randal's question; What three events brought you here. Well, mom was a cheerleader and dad was a football player, so... Oh, wait. I guess I misunderstood the question. He means what three events lead me to becoming a data geek. Well, that's completely different. Luckily, no (further) cheerleaders will be harmed in making this (part of the) story. Geek When I was 16 years old and Jimmy Carter was President, Radio Shack was still considered to be the place for aspiring geek wannabe's. It just so happened that I hit $500 in my bank account about the same time they started pushing this radical thing called a "personal computer." I…
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Database Design Process

Misc, Tools
Buck Woody recently asked a question; how do you design a database. He outlined the process he followed and asked four questions about how each of us do our work: What process do you follow? How important are the business requirements? What tool do you use to create the design, do you need it to diagram, do you even care about diagrams? What's your biggest pain-point about designing? Funny enough, I haven't done a full on database design in over a year. My company just finished about 6 years of very hard-core engineering work, designing and building or redesigning and building, the majority of our data input and collection systems. Then, I was doing lots of design work. Now, we're either largely in maintenance mode for most of those systems, or the…
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SQL Server Standard Volume 7 Issue 1

Misc
Kathi Kellenberger's fantastic new article is available in the latest issue of SQL Server Standard. There are a lot more articles in the hopper. Keep an eye out for them. We're providing you with the best writers giving us some of their best stuff. Go and check it out. If you're not a member of SQL PASS, it's free to join, and you'll get access to this article, lots more like it, as well as other stuff.
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Connections Sessions Evals

SQL Server, T-SQL
I've kind of been embarassed to post these despite the fact that I received them a couple of weeks ago. Overall, I'd say they're very good, and I'm quite proud of them, but one comment still has me upset. Anyway, here we go: DMV's For Performance Tuning (same session as PASS): 7 responses Q1. Speaker's knowledge of topic Your average score for this session: 4.0 Highest score (all SQL speakers for this question): 4.0 Mean average score (all SQL speakers for this question): 3.74 Lowest score (all SQL speakers for this question): 3.0 Q2. Speaker's presentation skills Your average score for this session: 3.86 Highest score (all SQL speakers for this question): 4.0 Mean average score (all SQL speakers for this question): 3.47 Lowest score (all SQL speakers for this…
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TSQL Tuesday #2

SQL Server, T-SQL
I've wracked my brain for some bit of puzzle that I could present as part of TSQL Tuesday #2 and I finally came up with a bit of something. When you're looking at an execution plan for a query, you know that this represents SQL Servers best attempt at a good execution plan. But, it may not represent the best possible plan. Or, it could be the only possible plan. The puzzle is, how do you know what you're looking at? Is this a trivial plan, meaning it's the only possible execution method for the query? Is this plan fully optimized, or did the optimizer go through it's prescribed cycles and simply take the best plan it had generated up to that point? These questions can be answered directly from information…
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