SQL Saturday #446 & RedGate SQL in the City

So I’m missing out on the Summit 15 keynote this morning as I was sadly paged last night. Between that and the first timers meetup and welcome reception I was completely unable to get up at an appropriate time today. While my work colleague gets ready I wanted to jot down a few impressions from the last few days.

SQL Saturday #446: Portland, OR

This was my third SQL Saturday in Portland and the event continues to be fantastic for a number of reasons. It’s right before Summit so a number of speakers at summer present in Portland that Saturday before so you can open up your Summit schedule if you get in on the sessions early. It’s a great networking event (I think there was around 400 SQL Family that showed up?).  I attended a great session on auditing in SQL Server from Colleen Morrow (b|t) The really short and skinny: in SQL 2008 Standard you can only audit at the instance level but in 2008 Enterprise and SQL 2012 and above you can drill down into specific databases with your auditing. It all makes use of extended events so it’s light weight. It’s configurable in filtering, retention and handling auditing errors (lose the audit info, cancel the transaction that triggered it etc). She also shared a plan for centralizing the collection and ingestion of the audit logs that were created in a central location for reporting purposes. Scripts and slide deck here.

SQL in the City

This was my second SQL in the City and it was even better than my previous experience as well: new products like ReadyRoll and InstantClone really speak to some pain points at our organization and I’m looking forward to see we can fully implement them to make it all better. Or at least mostly better. Or at least version or databases: I hear that’s a good start!

I’m super excited and it’s time to hop on a train to start hitting Summit sessions. If you found this post and found it useful let me know!