Seattle 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.

Top Tips for Writing Better T-SQL Stored Procedures

T-SQL provides many different ways to accomplish the same task, and as you might expect, some ways are better than others. In this session, you will learn specific techniques, that if followed, will make you a better T-SQL developer. The session is jam-packed with practical examples and is designed for developers and administrators who want to take their T-SQL skills to the next level.

Tools used: SQL Prompt, All tools in the SQL Developer Bundle

What, Where, Why and How of Indexes

Ever wondered what makes an index useful? Curious about why the optimizer picks the indexes that it does? Wondered what black magic goes into designing good indexes? In this session, we'll look at design considerations for clustered and non-clustered indexes. We'll investigate what makes an index useful to SQL Server and what common mistakes make indexes useless. We'll go into the details of how various query predicates interact with indexes and what the primary driver is when designing indexes for any database application and finally we’ll look at index maintenance

The Ten Commandments of SQL Server Monitoring

You wake up, the pager's bleeping stabbing at your mind. A glance confirms your guess: the same alert that always fires at 2:00 a.m. It can wait till morning. You toss the pager on the floor and go back to sleep. If this sounds familiar, it's because most monitoring systems are improperly configured and haphazardly implemented. This leads to solutions that trick you, fail you, and never catch you when it's time for a trust fall. Monitoring doesn't need to be that way! In this session, you’ll learn 10 rules that’ll help you sleep a lot easier. We'll also look at how SQL Monitor implements these rules to help you create simple and effective SQL Server monitoring solutions.

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, with the potential of disruption of the application at best and data corruption at worst. Getting the steps of any deployment right are critical to the 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, the problems encountered, and we'll look at 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.