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The January meeting of the SA SQL user group will be on Tuesday 20^th of Jan 2009 at 18h30 at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston.

We’re still trying to finalise a speaker, there’ll be an update on that in a day or two. We definitely will have someone, that’s not in doubt.

Please let me know if you’ll be attending. You can RSVP by mail, by replying to this post, or by sending me a PM either from SADeveloper.net or SQLServerCentral.com (Username – GilaMonster)

Update:

The speaker we were hoping to line up isn’t available, so I’ll be presenting again.

I’ll be doing the session that I presented at the PASS conference in Seattle last year – The dirty dozen… 12 Ways to write badly performing T-SQL.

The November meeting of the SQL Usergroup (JHB) will be held on the 28th November (friday).Steve Simon, of State Street Corporation, New York, will be presenting a session titled “DTS 2000 migration to SSIS…makes financial sense !!”

While the migration of DTS 2000 packages to SSIS is relatively efficient utilizing the Package Migration Wizard, mutual fund and other financial packages are often more involved and thus require a bit more hands on effort. This “best practices”, hands-on presentation will show the attendee the practices that we have implemented to convert our existing “far east” packages to run efficiently and effectively within the SQL Server 2005 environment. The discussion will also include ways and means that we have undertaken to reduce as many back end scripts as possible by replacing them with more Control and Data Flow objects.

I don’t have a confirmed venue yet, but it should be the Microsoft office, Bryanston, 18h30. If those details change, I will update this post.

Please leave a comment if you intend attending.

I got roped into speaking at the Microsoft SA Virtualization launch earlier this week (Thursday 23rd October). It went fairly well, though I do need to work on pacing for these kind of things. That said, I only had three days to prepare everything, so it didn’t go too badly. 😉

I did two hour long sessions on new features for developers in SQL 2008. Amoung the things covered were:

• Data Compression
• Datetime data types
• Table types
• Table parameters
• Grouping sets
• Merge
• Sparse column
• Filtered indexes
• Geospacial data types and indexes
• Filestream
• HierarchyID

The slides are available if anyone wants them – What’s New For Developers. (2.5MB)

The meeting last night went very well, at least I think it did. 🙂 It was better attended than I thought it would be.Thanks to everyone that gave up their Tuesday night.

I’ve uploaded the presentation (Powerpoint 2007 format) for anyone interested – Effective Indexing presentation (1.3 MB)

The first meeting of the revived South African SQL Server usergroup will be at 18:30 on Tuesday the 21st of October. The meeting will be held at the auditoriums at the Microsoft office, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston, Johannesburg. (directions)

I will be presenting a talk titled Effective Indexing. I’ll looking at the considerations for selecting clustered and non-clustered indexes, what should and should not be indexed and how queries affect the decision on indexing. If there’s time, I’ll also talk briefly on index maintenance. The talk is a slight modification of the one that I presented at TechEd South Africa this year.

The event is open to anyone interested in SQL Server. Please post a comment if you’re interested in attending.