New Year & new things

Well, here we are in 2013, a nice shiny new year. So, what have we got planned for the user group I hear you ask, well there are a number of things. First a foremost is that we have just put a new site together, and as a result this site will no longer be maintained. The new site can be found at http://SQLSoton.SQLPass.org, and we will be posting all of the meeting information and a whole host of other bits and pieces up there.

Other than that we have got ourselves setup as an official PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server) chapter, and hopefully in the next couple of months we will be seeing some rather interesting things happen.

So please head on over to the new site (http://SQLSoton.SQLPass.org), have a look around and sign up for the next meeting.

Thanks

John & Steph

December 2012 - User Group Information

Can you believe it, there is only one user group meeting left in 2012 before we start again. Doesn't time fly! Anyway, the December user group meeting is back to the normal day (first Wednesday of the month) at the normal venue (St Andrews Church).

So what have we got planned for you? Well this month we are very lucky to have one of our favourite speakers back, Jen Stirrup (@Jenstirrup, blog) of Copper Blue Consulting (Website) will be paying us a visit. She will be speaking about how we can use PowerShell to power Business Intelligence development, driven by the fact that we need to work smarter rather than harder to meet the thirst for data in business today. This looks like a great session that all data professionals can learn from, not just those within the BI sphere but anyone who works with data.

Jen is best known for her work in Business Intelligence and Data Visualisation. Jen is a SQL Server MVP who is the current holder of the SQL Passion Award, presented by PASS at Summit 2012, for her work in helping the European SQL Server Community. This year, Jen has presented at TechEd North America, SQLPass and SQLBits, along with SQLSaturday events throughout Europe. Jen runs Copper Blue Consulting with Allan Mitchell, delivering business-critical solutions that add business value in addition to provisioning technical integrity. You can follow them on Twitter on @ThinkCopperBlue.

After this we will be having a little bit of a social evening where you can chat with the other attendees, both Steph and I are very keen to get your feedback on how the user group is going. Also we would like to know if there is anything that you want to see or for us to arrange in the coming year.

If you want to register for this event, then please head on over to our eventbrite event here and register with us for free as normal.

All the best & hope to see you there.

John & Steph

February 2013 User Group

Yup, that's right, we're posting about a user group meeting that is still a few months off. However this one needs a little bit of homework before we can make it happen. We have got the guys from Adatis (Website), one of the premier BI consultancies in the UK, coming to talk to us. Now at the moment there is no subject matter for their talk, and this is where you come in. They have said that they will answer questions on BI that are put forward by the user group attendees, so what we need to do is get a list of BI questions that we can send over to them at the start of January so that they can get it all written up for the February meeting.

So if you have any questions about BI work that you are doing, data warehousing, data visualization, ETL and the like. Then send it over to us at SQLSoton@Gmail.com so that we can gather them up and forward them to Sacha at Adatis. Hopefully they will be able to answer the top four of five questions over the course of the evening, however they might be able to cover more, we don't know until you ask.

So get thinking, and email those questions over to us.

John & Steph

November User Group - Dave's on Tour

After many emails, tweets and some profanity we have now got our lineup for the user group on the 8th of November all sorted. We are very lucky to have Dave Ballantyne ([@DaveBally],[Blog],[Website]) giving us a rundown on why cursors are evil, and Dave Morrison ([@TSQLNinja]) helping us understand query plan operators with a deep dive on the subject.

The meeting will be held at a different venue to normal on Thursday the 8th of November with doors opening at 18:00 and we aim to finish just after 21:00. There will be the normal swag, pizza and banter that we normally have. The meeting will be taking place at Southampton Science Park for this meeting only due to unforseen scheduling issues. So please feel free to sign up here and come on down and get some insights from two great SQL Server professionals, all for Free!

Cheers

John

User Group Meeting, Wednesday October 3rd 2012

It's that time of month again where I realise that I am behind in publishing all of the information about the user group, so here goes.

This month we have our very own Eric Lawson (@EricJLawson, blog) presenting to us about the Kimball star schema and the tabular model within SQL Server. Eric hails from the non-stop tandem database platform and started out as a programmer and DBA, he is now working as a BI consultant for a major cosmetics company in the UK.

We are also very lucky to be in the position to welcome Geoff Clark (LinkedIn) to talk to us about some of the really cool things that he is doing with Change Data Capture within SQL Server. He will be running us through just what CDC is and how it fits into the SQL Server product stack. This session will include a number of demo's showing us how we can get CDC up and running. Geoff started off working with SQL Server back in 1991 and worked at BAA on one of the first deployments on some of the earliest versions of SQL Server. He is currently working on building a data warehouse in a CI environment and making use of CDC within the ETL systems.

In addition to these two great sessions we will be having SpectrumIT pay us a quick visit as one of out main sponsors and the normal array of pizza, and general chat.

If this sounds like your sort of thing, the sign up at out Eventbrite page here.

Hope to see you there

John

September User Group - Registration Open (05/09/2012)

Just a quick post to say that the September meeting will be taking place next week on September the 5th at the usual venue. We have two great speakers this month in Gavin Payne who is presenting "The breadth of the architect" and Mark Pryce-Maher who will be giving us some insight into how to write add-ins for SSMS.

Additionally this month will be Mark's last at Southampton :-( he will be off to pastures new in Norfolk after this meeting so come along and wish him all the best. I know I for one can't thank him enough for all the hard work that he has done helping to get the Southampton user group up and running over the last couple of years.

If you want to register, nip along to SQL Soton September Registration and sign up.

Hope to see you next week.

John
aka SQLServerMonkey

4th July, 2 SQL Masters, 1 Night

The 4th of July is a special night at the Southampton SQL Server User Group, not only do we have Gavin Payne, one of the newest Microsoft Certified Masters in SQL Server 2008 but we have Christian Bolton returning.

To register go to http://sqlsoton.eventbrite.co.uk

Network, learn, ask a question, meet other folk, get fed - these are all things that happen at user group events. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning experience.


Remember to tell your friends and the people you work with; make sure you register as soon as you can.

6.00pm - Networking / Biscuits

6.30pm - Introduction

6.45pm - Gavin Payne (@GavinPayneUK) http://www.coeo.com/ presenting "Seeing double with SQL Server replication"

7:40pm Pizza!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

8.05pm - Christian Bolton ( @christianbolton ) http://www.coeo.com/ presenting ...TBC

9.00pm - End

9.30pm - Over to the Cowherds...


Directions:

Please use the entrance on Alba Road. The signs should point you in the right direction.

Visit http://southamptonsqlserverusergroup.co.uk/ for more details.