I attended my second meeting on 03/25/08 and the guest speaker was Chris Barth. Chris gave a great presentation on tuning and troubleshooting queries in SQL Server 2005.

Topics

• Steps in determining when a stored procedure should be tuned.
• Seek or Scan? How to read query plans.
• System tables that will help you determine what transact-sql is performing poorly.
• Overviews of SET statements that will assist in troubleshooting transact-sql.
• The negative performance effects resulting from poor performing update or delete queries and stored procedures.
• Steps for writing better performing queries

This was a really good meeting in regards to what we’re doing with our database. I was able to learn a lot about when and when not to tune queries. The biggest lessons I can take from the meeting is to really know your system tables and think pages.

I attend my first SQL users group meeting on 02/26/08. This is a new users group in the Cincinnati area. I really enjoyed this meeting. So far most of my IT experience has been creating web sites but I've always considered becoming a DBA. I think I'd enjoy maintaining a database but haven't had the chance yet.

The guest speaker, Maria Stone, was also nice enough to zip up her PowerPoint presentation along with several example queries for the AdventureWorks database.

Topics covered during this meeting:

• Try – Catch
• Recursive Queries
• Temporal Data
• Ranking
• Pivot

Right now I'm just attending the meeting to get a better understanding of what SQL Server 2005 can really do. I know SQL Server 2008 has been released recently but for the company I work would not need the upgrade at this time.

There were many new things I was able to learn during the hour meeting but it also opened my mind to start to think in the direction of how to use the data versus just maintaining it.

If your using SQL and in the Cincinnati area feel free to attend these meeting on the fourth Tuesday of each month in Mason, Ohio. You can go to CincySQL for more information.