SQL Saturday, Seacoast SQL and January

Where does the time go?! January was an incredibly busy month with the day job, home, a battle with the flu and the wrap up of the holidays. It went felt like it took a week to go by but some good news came in January as well. This first week in February, I hope to catch up with a post about the goals for the year, perhaps respond to a meme I was tagged on and get some technical posts queued up for the coming weeks. Until then, a bit of an update:

SQL Saturday

I presented at my first even user community event! I am still here typing after doing so, so the fear, nervousness and anxiety didn’t kill me. I was given some good feedback by people I trust after each talk on some areas to improve but it didn’t seem like I bombed in either talk. Some people sought me out after each thanking me and even had some compliments. I can definitely be more interactive, project my voice better and try and keep the presentations a little bit more dynamic (I had positive feedback with a silly phonebook game I did in one of the talks when talking about SARGability and Indexes). I also have some thoughts on tweaking the DBA talk a bit to help drive the main point home. The slide decks and some other info on the talks are in the presentations area of this site:

• You Can Tune Your Own SQL Code – The beginner level talk aimed to help show that doing some level of tuning isn’t as scary as some make it out to be.
• As a DBA, Where Do I Start? – We setup a scenario at the beginning that puts you into the position of being the only SQL Server DBA at a company. Through that we talk about prioritizing our jobs as DBA as we go through the “itties” of database administration.

Seacoast SQL Server Users Group!

I got a great e-mail from Blythe Morrow at PASS HQ (BlytheMorrow on twitter) welcoming the Seacoast SQL Server Users group to PASS. I still have some finalization with a location and primary sponsor but it looks like our first meeting will be the first or second Tuesday of April on Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth, NH. More coming on this in the coming week or two as more details are finalized. Subscribe to the blog feed to keep up with updates.

An Ultrasound and A Name!

My family and I (Today that set includes a wife, a 4 year old daughter and an almost 2 year old son) got to watch an Ultrasound (I love watching the pictures, especially the 3D… Amazing) on my wife. The Insert statement (Lord Willing) is looking like this INSERT INTO WalshFamily (Name, GoesBy,Gender, DOB, LikesToSleepFlag, CuteFlag) VALUES (‘Samuel’,’Sam’,’M’,’0528ish’,1,1)… Happy news indeed 🙂 There is talk about another INSERT statement but we have plenty of time to pray and discuss that one. It will be what it will be, though.

SAPpy Love Songs

Well.. Not a lot of love, but it looks like I am now getting my hands very dirty in the area of being a DBA for an SAP implementation. Getting to know the tables (and the big tables), the processes and maintenance on our new GL. We’ll be adding more functionality but for now, I am getting to know the environment closely. Also getting to know a lot of new ETL processes and a team of dedicated ETL developers. It was a busy month but things are stabilizing and we’ll see how it looks when we go through the future phases. I’ve worked with many ERP systems, just never SAP. Great that we are doing SAP on SQL, too bad they planned it before talking to me and missed the opportunity to go 2008 at go live but we can work on that later.

But No Blogging, Tweeting, Etc.

Didn’t really touch the blog this month. I exhausted a couple saved posts early on but didn’t do any updates. I was a bit of a recluse this month. In the coming days, I’ll get a goals post (late but better than never) online. I am expecting to be perhaps speaking at another SQL Saturday or two this year and I will be doing tweaked and (hopefully anyway) improved versions of the two talks I gave in Waltham. 2010 is shaping up to be a fun, busy year.