It’s spring, and that means that speaking season is starting up again! My first presentation of the year will be at SQL Saturday #291 in Chicago on April 26. I’ll be presenting “SQL Server Features That Will Blow Your Mind!”, a new developer-focused session that covers four features added by Microsoft in recent versions that are sure to elicit “WOW! How’d you do that?” from the uninitiated:
- window functions, which add new dimensions to aggregates (and new aggregates!) by dividing your query’s data into partitions (or “windows”) on-the-fly;
- sparse columns, which allow you to store large numbers of nullable columns in very little space – and allow you to interact with them using XML;
- filtered indexes, which enable creation of indexes that ignore unneeded values (such as nulls), thus reducing the size of the index and improving performance; and
- snapshot isolation, which can eliminate blocking by reads without the dangers of dirty reads introduced by NOLOCK.
I plan to have a lot of demos to show you just how easy it can be to use all of these. It’s going to be a fun hour!
In addition, SQL Saturday Chicago has almost 50 other sessions by top-grade speakers – and it’s all free. See you there!