November 2018 SQL Mastery Sessions

Friday, November 2, 2018

A FULL day of training offered the day before Oregon SQL Saturday
8:00 AM until 5:00 PM

PCC CLIMB Center
1626 SE Water Ave
Portland, OR 97214

Migrating to SQL Server 2017
Glenn Berry

An Absolute Beginners Guide to Power BI
Michael Johnson

Execution Plans in Depth
Hugo Kornelis

T-SQL for Performance and Accuracy
Vern Rabe


Migrating to SQL Server 2017
Glenn Berry

How do you design and implement a safe and successful migration from an older version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2017 with no data loss and virtually no downtime? What if you have a limited hardware budget for the upgrade effort and you are worried about the core-based licensing in SQL Server 2017? How can you choose your hardware wisely in light of the new licensing model? How can you convince your organization that the time is right to upgrade to SQL Server 2017? This session will cover several different methods for migrating your data to SQL Server 2017 while meeting these objectives and minimizing your hardware and licensing costs.

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Biography: Glenn Berry works as a principal consultant at SQLSkills, based out of Elizabeth, CO. He is a former Data Platform MVP and has a collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCAD, and MCTS, which proves that he likes to take tests! His expertise includes DMVs, high availability, hardware selection, and storage subsystems. Glenn is also an adjunct faculty member at University College – University of Denver, where he has taught since 2000.


An Absolute Beginners Guide to Power BI
Michael Johnson

During this full-day training session, you will learn Power BI from the ground up. Starting with a little bit of theory before diving into several practical demonstrations covering the full spectrum of the report creation lifecycle.

Preparing your data:

Import, cleanse and transform your data using Power Query, Microsoft’s Excel-like data import tool. Power Query supports connections to a large number of data sources and a large collection of transformations to clean and shape the data just the way you need it.

Modelling your data:

Create relationships, the ability to create relationships between tables is one the key differences between Excel and Power BI enabling you to interact with data in new and exciting ways.

Introduction to DAX, a powerful calculation language used by Power BI unleashing a wealth of reporting options.

Visualising your data:

Power BI’s rich set of built-in visuals supported by a growing set of custom visuals allowing users to create stunning interactive visuals that help drive deeper insights into their data.

Publishing your report:

Not only does the Power BI service allow you to share your report with your peers but also includes an amazing set of machine learning tools such as Q&A and quick insights that allow you to interact with your data in ways that you could not have imagined.

Using the knowledge you learn in this session, you will return to work with a great understanding of what Power BI is and the type of problems it can help you solve.

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Biography: Michael Johnson is a Microsoft data platform MVP and leader of the Johannesburg SQL User Group and Business Analytics Virtual Group. He works as an Independent Business Intelligence Consultant and regularly presents at local user groups, SQL Saturdays and PASS Virtual Chapters.


Execution Plans in Depth
Hugo Kornelis

For troubleshooting slow queries, looking at the execution plan is a good starting point. But sometimes, just looking at the plan does not help. Sometimes you need to dig deeper.

In this full-day workshop, you will learn everything you need to take your understanding of execution plans to the next level. For most of the operators you’ll find in execution plans, we will look at the inner workings, and at properties that affect their behavior. We will also look at how the operators within a plan interact with each other. This will increase your understanding on why the optimizer picks a plan, and what you can do to make it pick a better plan.

Aside from explaining most operators, we will also look at how these operators interact, which will help you understand which areas in complex execution plans can cause performance issues.

If you have seen some execution plans but feel you need to bring your understanding to the next level, then this workshop is for you!

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Biography: Hugo Kornelis is an established SQL Server community expert who spends a lot of time at various conferences. He is also a blogger, technical editor of a variety of books, and Pluralsight author. He was an SQL Server MVP from January 2006 to December 2016.

When not working for the community, he is busy at his day job: freelance database developer/consultant.

Hugo has almost 20 years of SQL Server experience in various roles. He has a strong database design background, but also loves to write and tune complex queries.


T-SQL for Performance and Accuracy
Vern Rabe

It seems like there’s always a query or a stored procedure that takes way too long to execute. Don’t be quick to blame it on a missing index, out of date statistics, or insufficient memory. Often a slow performing query can be drastically improved with a rewrite. In this full-day session we will learn how to write (or re-write) T-SQL with two goals in mind: Getting the results you expect (accuracy), and quickly (performance).

We will start with some SQL Server internals, where we will look at how the optimizer determines the execution plan, analyzing several execution plans in the process. We’ll then look at various tools to identify poorly performing queries and performance bottlenecks. Then we’ll look at many common T-SQL mistakes that can cause unexpected results (inaccuracy) or poor performance, and of course remedies to these issues. We’ll also see some often used functions or patterns that have serious consequences.
You will definitely gain some new T-SQL skills in this session.

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Biography: Vern Rabe is an independent SQL Server consultant and contract trainer in Portland, OR, and leader of the OregonSQL user group. He has attained MCSE, MCITP (both Administration and Development), and MCT certifications, among others. Vern has been passionate about databases since 1992 and has worked with SQL Server since version 4.21a. He provides broad technical SQL Server knowledge gained from the mixture of academic and practical experiences acquired from his classroom instructing and varied consulting contracts. Vern was honored to have one of the Top 9 PASS Summit session in 2017.