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Early Bird Discount and Full-Day Workshops for 2015 IT/Dev Connections

Super Early-Bird Discount Ends Soon

The IT/Dev Connections super early-bird discount ends on Tuesday, March 31st and it is the lowest price of the year.

Best SQL Server Content Yet

The 2015 IT/Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas at the Aria Resort and Hotel promises to have the best (and most-diverse) SQL-centric content to date for this event.  Of course sessions will cover the basics of SQL Server administration and development topics but we also have experts in their fields covering Hadoop, Hive, Power BI, SSIS, DevOps, VMware, PowerShell, BIML and so much more!

Great Options for Full Day Workshops

In addition to the other tracks' full-day workshop offerings the Data Platform and BI track will offer four options for full-day workshops from Stacia Misner, Denny Cherry, Itzik Ben-Gan and Grant Fritchey:

Building Blocks of BIML - Stacia Misner

It’s generally accepted that creating and maintaining ETL packages is one of the more time-consuming steps in the data warehouse development process. Which would you rather do with your time? Spend seemingly endless hours working through repetitive SSIS package development tasks and more hours tweaking those packages as schemas evolve? Or invest in a framework that gracefully adapts to changes and updates your package designs in minutes so you can spend your time solving bigger problems or expanding the scope of your data warehouse? In this full-day workshop, you learn about Business Intelligence Modeling Language (BIML), your secret weapon to saving time on SSIS package development. We start by learning about the history of BIML, the tools you can use to work with BIML, what it looks like, and the problems it is designed to solve. Then we dive into the syntax of BIML by building out a simple SSIS package step by step. You learn the structure of a BIML file and how to generate a package that you can view in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or SQL Server Development Tools for BI (SSDT). Next, we explore how to use BIMLScript to automate package development. You learn how to use control blocks to conditionally generate sections of BIML or even complete BIML files. For example, you can programmatically read a collection of tables from your source and generate a set of extraction packages to extract data from those tables into a corresponding staging table, among other capabilities that you learn about in this portion of the workshop. You also learn how to break up BIML instructions into multiple files and how to use directives to manage the way in which BIML is interpreted across multiple files. With these building blocks in place, we examine a simple framework for using BIML to create package to support the full extract-transform-load process from metadata. You learn how easily BIML can update packages to reflect changes in your source or target schemas. In addition, you will have a set of example BIML files that you can adapt to fit your environment and start saving time on your package development efforts!

 

SQL Server for the Non-Database Administrator - Denny Cherry

In this all day session on Microsoft SQL Server we will be learning about how Microsoft SQL Server works and what needs to be done to keep it up and running smoothly when you don't have a full time database administrator on staff to help you keep it running. In this session we will cover a variety of topics including backups, upgrade paths, indexing, database maintenance, database corruption, patching, virtualization, disk configurations, high availability, database security, database mail, anti-viruses, scheduled jobs, and much, much more. After taking this full day session on SQL Server you'll be prepaired to take the information that we go over and get back to the office, get the SQL Server's patched and properly configured so that they run without giving you problems for years to come.

 

Mastering T-SQL Querying Fundamentals - Itzik Ben-Gan

If you work with SQL Server in any capacity, as a developer, DBA, BI specialist, analyst, power user, you need to know your T-SQL. The thing is, this language is deceptive. When you start learning it you quickly get to write queries with filters, sorting, grouping, joining, and so on. You might get a false sense of confidence and the wrong impression that the language is easy to master. In reality, most get to learn T-SQL without understanding the fundamentals correctly, and this incorrect understanding can lead to using the language incorrectly. Often people assume things about the language that are not guaranteed, and end up with bugs in their code. This seminar is dedicated to correct understanding of T-SQL querying fundamentals. You will learn about the principal elements in the foundations of the language. You will learn about logical query processing—what I find to be the most critical aspect of T-SQL that any T-SQL practitioner should master. Then the seminar covers fundamentals of query constructs like joins, subqueries, table expressions (derived tables, CTEs, views, table valued functions), the APPLY operator, and set operators. If time will permit, the seminar will also cover the fundamentals of more specialized query constructs like PIVOT, UNPIVOT, grouping sets and window functions. Know your T-SQL querying fundamentals well, and then tackling advanced problems will be so much easier.

 

Query Performance Tuning Using Execution Plans in SQL Server - Grant Fritchey

80% or more of all performance problems in your databases can be related directly to your T-SQL code and your data structures. This all day session gets right to the heart of that issue and shows you how to identify common performance problems using the tools available to you within SQL Server. With the problems identified, we then proceed to figure out how to address those problems using execution plans to understand the choices made by the query optimizer. You'll learn multiple ways to capture execution plans, how to interpret them, and how to query them directly. All the examples and scripts will be immediately applicable to your systems. You can address your performance problems in order to make your SQL Server T-SQL code run faster.

Session Content to be Announced Soon

Stay tuned for the release of information on the over 40 sessions for the Data Platform and BI track as well as the 100+ sessions from all other tracks that are IT/Dev Connections.  We expect to announce this information in the coming weeks.  For additional information on 2015 IT/Dev Connections please visit devconnections.com.

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