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We entered slightly late and unfortunately they changed around the timing of Rob Farley’s presentation and the CSU Masters program, probably under the correct assumption that everyone would want to skip the CSU masters and see Rob’s.

REALLY ANNOYING.

Mostly because it’s true and that we missed half of Rob’s presentation – which was as awesome and energetic and helpful as always. He also seemed to be doing most of his presentation from the SQL Management Studio – which if you can see Rob working within the studio environment – he flies and is really great at giving examples.

And then we had to sit through the sell.

I got us onto the network – but of course then my pc failed and I got kicked off the network and can’t rejoin – so the CSU wireless network hasn’t changed over the last two or three years – as useless as always.

And then we have Julia Heather with Database Mirroring which we have zero interest in and won’t be employing in work – she seems enthusiastic and people seem to be enjoying it, asking questions so I guess it’s valuable to someone in the room

She also didn’t do much that wasn’t in powerpoint and the slides are pretty packed – so it’s tough for me to care – plus the slides had a company branding on the bottom which is kind of… yeah.

Right now – still a bit annoyed I can’t get online as I could be liveblogging this or doing twitter and enjoying the backchannel – which has become the best part of the codecamp experience.

Really.  CSU Networking team FAIL. (And EPIC FAIL because this isn’t the first year this problem that has occurred).

Managed to get on back on the network by putting this URL into a browser (even when I couldn’t get the CSU homepage: https://networks.csu.edu.au/cgi-bin/netdirect_conf.pl

And we’re back on the backchannel – twitter hashtag #sducc09

Now listening to Greg Low who is going over indexing and going a little bit more into the depths of the technology than I need, would prefer to just see the stuff working, best practice etc.

Also, I feel like I saw this exact talk at SQL Code Camp last year – so many of the talks seem to be repeated every year or that might just be my perspective.

I just have this feeling that someone didn’t show and Greg had to do a filler or something and this happened.  Or I am just confused.

Anyway, it’s an alright talk – something everyone needs to know – how to index properly.  Not much to say – it seemed to go on a bit, lot of anecdotes going into it.

THIS POST WILL UPDATE AS THE DAY CONTINUES

This past week we had Rob Farley of Lobsterpot Solutions out to give our company’s development team Analysis Services training and it was pretty brilliant.

Rob is a SQL MVP and an expert on Analysis Services and came to us in rural NSW, for a few days to go over what we would need to do to make a data warehouse, use analysis services cubes, and perform things like Data Mining.

He based the training off the Microsoft course on Analysis Services, but went ten steps further in providing real world knowledge and examples, and taking our scenarios of working within a farming system and really trying to understand and use our domain to further our education.

All three days he was great in the training, happy to go further into other topics like profiling, t-sql and performance tuning, indexing, backups and other topics where we needed further help or education – and was great at answering every question.

And he was able to give a view on any question or scenario we gave him.

He also went one step further in explaining not only how we’d achieve something, but to make sure we kept out internal customers needs in mind – and explaining how they’d achieve what they need, and how they can access data better.

He was also more than willing to come to our local Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group and give a talk while he was in the area – and he gave a brilliant talk on T-SQL tips that really blew everyone away.  Tips and information that we’d never heard of, that was incredibly well presented and received.

I’d have no problems recommending Rob’s training or help to anyone – it really was some of the best training I have ever received and we’re now in a position where we’ve got tonnes of ideas on how we’re going to use the training to improve so much of how our company works.