I am currently in-transit (or was when I wrote this) to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for SQLSaturday #17. As described so many other places, SQLSaturday events are free, one-day mini-conferences that provide SQL Server training to the local development and IT community.
After having learned about the SQLSaturday concept a year or two ago, I’ve wanted to attend one. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any in Texas*, despite our thriving SQL Server community.
This probably seems obvious, but it never occurred to me to travel to one. It wasn’t until I heard that Tim Mitchell (blog, Twitter), a friend from our user group, was doing just that, presenting to (at least) two SQLSaturday events in Florida recently. What a great idea&em;SQLSaturday is certainly worth some traveling! My wife agreed, and we began budgeting for such a trip.
Tim let me know that he was presenting at SQLSaturday #17 and invited me along. I decided to join him, based largely on the following reasons: my long-standing desire to attend a SQLSaturday, my goal to practice delivering technical presentations as much as possible before my PASS Summit session, and the change to observe the organizing/running of a SQLSaturday (to serve as a model for our own*). I submitted an abstract to the call for speakers and delighted that it was accepted. I will be delivering my Deadlocks: Detection, Troubleshooting, and Prevention presentation that I’ve already given to both local user groups. The presentation details were truncated by the SQLSaturday web site, so I’ll post the complete details here:
| Session Name: | Deadlocks: Detection, Troubleshooting, and Prevention |
| Track: | Infrastructure |
| Description: | As an enterprise application grows and load increases, some concurrency issues are bound to surface. Deadlocks are one of the more aggravating of this class of problems. Fortunately, each release of SQL Server includes better tools for troubleshooting deadlocks. Trevor will demonstrate approaches for handling deadlocks in SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008. |
I’m really looking forward to it! I’m sharing a rental car and hotel with Time, so I’m glad that I’ll get the chance to know him better too.
If all goes well, I’ll try to attend SQLSaturday #21 or #25 in October, presenting my Leveraging PSSDiag/SQLDiag for Efficient Troubleshooting topic. Stuart Ainsworth (blog, Twitter) is courting me for SQLSaturday #25, so that one is in the lead right now. Another friend from NTSSUG, Tim Costello (blog, Twitter) is also planning to attend SQLSaturday #25, so that is an additional reason to go.
* I’m part of a team (the NTSSUG board plus Tim Mitchell) working on bringing the SQLSaturday experience to North Texas. We had a great conference call with Andy Warren (blog, Twitter), a founder of SQLSaturday, and plans are starting to come together. More details will follow in the coming weeks.
Trevor that’s great that you’re attending some out of town events and on top of the fun of participating you’ll get to bring some good experience back to Dallas for a local SQLSaturday!
Also, not sure how we goofed on the truncation, send me the full text and we’ll get it fixed.
Trevor, please contact me privately at email I provided. hope the conference is great.