Austin 2012

Database Maintenance Essentials

Many DBAs take routine database maintenance for granted. What they don’t understand is that the cumulative effect of poor database maintenance can significantly hurt performance and reduce uptime. In this session, you will learn the key things all DBAs need to know in order to help them maintain their databases at peak performance. In this session you will learn about: Physical File Fragmentation; Database and Log File Management; tempdb Maintenance, msdb Maintenance; Index Maintenance; Statistics Maintenance; Data Corruption Detection; Database and Log File Protection; and Database Maintenance Monitoring.

Tools used: SQL Monitor

Future Plans For Red Gate Development

At Red Gate, it's everybody's job to make sure our tools delight our customers. In this session, we'll tell you about new, free tools from Red Gate labs, and our other latest product developments. We'll introduce you to tools you could start using in the office first thing on Monday, and ask for your feedback on what you'd like us to give you next.

Prepare for When Disaster Strikes

Accidents happen, and when they happen to our computer systems, they are disasters. Steve Jones will talk about the disasters that are likely to occur in your computer systems and the steps you can take to minimize the impact to your environment.

Tools used: SQL Backup Pro, SQL Virtual Restore, SQL Monitor

Red Gate tools – The Complete Lifecycle

Developing and deploying databases within SQL Server requires you to perform massive amounts of work to get things done. Don't you wish there was a way to make your job even a little bit easier? Red Gate software supplies tools that work to simplify your work and your processes all the way through the development process. And make no mistake, these are useful tools, not another piece of software that you have to maintain. This session walks you through a complete development and deployment life-cycle with all the Red Gate software that will assist you through this process. We'll go from initial development to that first deployment to production and then back through the whole lifecycle again with subsequent releases of your code.

The Whys and Hows of Database Continuous Integration

Development teams looking to shorten the feedback loop in the development cycle are turning to database continuous integration to achieve their goals. In this session, the two Davids discuss the benefits of database continuous integration and how the SQL Developer Bundle fits into the process. They’ll demonstrate using SQL Source Control to put a database under source control, the SQL Compare command line, and SQL Test for unit testing.

Tools used: SQL Source Control, All tools in the SQL Developer Bundle

A Sandbox Development Process

This session explores the use of two Red Gate products, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Source Control, in establishing a well-defined development process that allows for the use of known datasets and source code management of your database code. Working with a development process is the best way to ensure a safe deployment process to protect your production systems.

Social Media, Business Intelligence, and Bridging the SSMS-VS Divide

In this session, Noemi and Tom explain how they developed a system to import information from Twitter into a SQL Server data warehouse, and then export their analysis into Google Docs. They also discuss how Red Gate’s database development tools helped them collaborate on the project without having to pick between their favourite IDEs.

Proactive Data Growth Management: Reducing your Storage Footprint

Organizations are storing more and more data at an unprecedented rate, forcing them to purchase more hard disk space. Are there any ways that DBAs can deal with data growth, and at the same time minimize their storage costs? Of course there is. In this session you will learn about several different options how you can use different forms of compression to reduce your organization’s footprint. These will include using Red Gate Software’s SQL Storage Compress to compress databases used for testing, development, and reporting; and how to use SQL Backup Pro to minimize your backup storage footprint.

Tools used: SQL Storage Compress and SQL Backup Pro

Forgotten Rings and Other Monitoring Stories

Most common monitoring metrics are important and useful, especially over time, but they can fall short. How do you gather information to determine, for example, if you have buffer cache pressure?

This session will drill down into a few of the more obscure monitoring metrics that can give you very precise information about exactly what's happening within your server.

Automated Deployment: Application And Database Releases Without The Headache

Ever since applications were first created, the deployment of updates and changes has been a headache. There’s potential for disrupting the application at best, and data corruption at worst.

Getting the steps of any deployment right are critical to its success, and if there's a problem it's even harder. Data structures depend on code, and code depends on data structures.

In this session we'll look at how deployment has been done in the past and the problems encountered, then we'll cover some ways to mitigate the risk inherent in application deployment, including Red Gate's new Deployment Manager tool, which helps you streamline the whole process.