SQL Saturday "Action Items"

Kendra Little's "Cerealizable" Isolation Level

SQL Saturday #60 was a huge success!  As a volunteer, I'm proud to be part of a team that put on a great event.  As an attendee, I'm kind of blown away at the quality of the event, especially knowing that it was all donated time and money.  (None of the speakers were paid, and many actually flew to Cleveland in February on their own dimes!  You guys rock!)

The best thing about going to events like SQL Saturday and the PASS Summit is that you get to meet and hear all these fantastic speakers.  (The worst thing is, there's never time to meet and listen to all of them!)  This week's  new "discoveries" for me: Jeremiah Peschka, Aaron Bertrand (although I'm a huge fan of Aaron's "Bad Habits" series already), Kendra Little, and Tom LaRock.  All of these folks are wicked smaht and fun to listen to, and Kendra even draws groovy little cartoon drawrings like the one I shared here.

As usual, I went home with visions of new SQL tools and techniques dancing in my head.  Here's some things on my "to investigate" list:

• Erin Stellato introduced me to ClearTrace!!! Die, die, read80trace!!!  Okay, that's not fair-- read80trace has helped me through many performance audits, but it's kind of unruly to use.  ClearTrace looks like the answer to a SQL Profiler-analyzer's dreams.  Must learn it.
• About everyone made it clear that Twitter is not just for posting your breakfast intentions anymore.  Brent Ozar wrote a little book to help old folks like me catch up.  I actually joined twitter last night, and I feel more connected already, at least to the SQL community.
• Tom LaRock finally explained waitstats in a way that made sense.  I'm vowing to finally start looking at waitstats to diagnose performance issues.
• Kendra Little got me excited about snapshot isolation level again.  I thought it was about the coolest thing ever when it came out, but then never had the time or load test facilities to try it out.  I'm still convinced this will provide huge performance boosts to clients of my former employer, where blocking and deadlocking reign.
• Lastly, I'm going to get on the schedule of my local SQL user group to present on some SQL topic.  Giving SQL presentations was my favorite part of my last job, and seeing all these great presenters has me itching to get back on the other side of the lectern again.

That should be enough to keep me busy for a while.