It’s Been a Crazy Year So Far!

Posted on 2015/06/28 by Kathi Kellenberger

UPDATE: My Pluralsight course is now live!

It’s hard to believe that 2015 is halfway over. This is the first year that I have been an independent consultant, theoretically working part time, but I have been busier than ever. In addition to the consulting work, I wrote a book, Expert T-SQL Window Functions, during the early months of the year. It was my main activity in January, actually.

Once the book was completed, I dove headfirst into recording my first Pluralsight course. I just completed recording this course yesterday. I am waiting to hear from my editor if there is anything else needed from me, but I think I am done. This is a big deal for me. I am hoping that recording courses and teaching in-person classes will be my main work-related activities in a few years.

Writing books and recording courses is a ton of work, but work that I find very rewarding. I don’t know if it takes a special talent, but I find that I keep getting better at it the more that I do. I guess it is “practice makes perfect.”

If you are interested in learning more about becoming an author and will be attending the 2015 PASS Summit, be sure to check out my session on writing technical books. Yes, that is correct. I am speaking at PASS Summit again this year!! I didn’t actually expect to speak this year. Shhhh, don’t tell the Program Committee, but this makes three years in a row for me.

A couple of years ago, I realized the reason that I was put on this earth and why I was given the talents that I have. I am here to help other people, many who have not had the opportunities that I have had, to have a chance at a technical career. I am especially interested in helping women, people of color, or anyone else who could use a break. I am really happy that I am a mentor with the Coder Girls program. Most of the women in the program are learning to code with the CS50X course from EdX. I am helping those women who are interested to learn T-SQL. I will probably also teach SSRS as well.

I was recently asked to participate in a “Speed Mentoring” event with the Women’s Economic Stability Initiative through the St. Louis YWCA. This program helps single mothers with job training in traditionally male careers. I got to talk with women working on degrees for architecture, automotive repair, diesel mechanics, and computing. It was such a fun evening, and I loved watching these women “geek out” while talking about their fields.

I decided that, after spending six months working on SQL Server content, that I need a break. I am going to try, I said try, to not agree to any book projects or new courses until at least November. I have lots of things to catch up on, and my office is a mess. I will continue to volunteer, speak at events, and write blogs. In fact, I have a great idea for a blog series. Details to come…

Posted in Life in IT | 1 Comment

Linchpin People Office Hours

Posted on 2015/06/15 by Kathi Kellenberger

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UPDATE: View the recording.

Linchpin People has recently started a webinar series called “Office Hours with SQL Experts.” This is your chance to ask one of our technology gurus your questions. The first webinar was held a couple of weeks ago by Tim Mitchell and Andy Leonard and featured SSIS and Biml. Mike Walsh and I will be presenting the next one on June 24th at noon Eastern. Our webinar is titled “Is Your Data Safe and Healthy?” We will be talking about managing your SQL Server. You must register for the event. I can’t wait to talk to you during the session!

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A First Look at SQL Server 2016

Posted on 2015/06/01 by Kathi Kellenberger

I received the email from Microsoft a few days ago letting me know that SQL Server CTP 2 was available for download. You can get it here if you are interested. This is the first time we can actually get our hands on SQL Server 2016, and probably a bit earlier than we expected.

If you have access to Azure, you can also find a VM template with SQL Server 2016 CTP 2 installed. That is the route I took, which saved quite a bit of time. You can start reading about the new features if you aren’t ready to install it at this point.

I am always interested in new T-SQL features, but I was pretty disappointed to see that either there is not much new T-SQL planned or maybe some features are not implemented yet. I remember that early CTPs of SQL Server 2012 didn’t have all of the new functions that were eventually released, so I hope this is the case with 2016. There is, however, a lot to be excited about.

One interesting feature that is related to T-SQL is the ability to return results in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. This is really easy. All you have to do is add the phrase “FOR JSON AUTO” to your SELECT query.

Have you ever wished that a table automatically kept a record of changes? It can with the new temporal table feature. With temporal tables, you can automatically send old values to a history table without changing your code. You can also query the main table for versions of the data for any point in time in the past.

I’ve presented on the new Project Deployment model that came out with SSIS 2012 several times over the past couple of years. I am always asked if one SSIS package can be deployed instead of the entire project. The answer was no, if you wish to deploy to the SSIS Catalog. Guess what, starting with 2016, you will be able to deploy a single package. I guess this was holding some shops back from adopting the catalog.

Probably the most exciting feature for query tuning geeks like me is the new Query Store. This will allow us to see plans that are already gone from the cache and to force queries to use a particular plan. There is also a query tuning feature called Live Query Statistics. It’s similar to the Actual Execution Plan, but you can see what is going on while the query runs. These really look interesting, and it will be fun trying them out.

One thing I was really wondering about is Profiler. Will it finally be gone? Nope, at least at CTP2, it is still there. I’ve made a commitment to myself not to use Profiler or Trace going forward regardless.

I will be exploring these and the many other new features over the next few months.

Posted in SQL Server 2016 | 2 Comments