July OPASS Meeting Wrap up

Last Tuesday, July 13th, we had our monthly OPASS meeting.  The meeting was sponsored by RedGate who were kind enough to also provide licenses for SQL Prompt Pro and SQL Compare Pro as raffle prizes.

We had about 20 people in attendance which is about average.  Andy Warren (@sqlandy) has posted his thoughts about how OPASS is not growing and, honestly, we aren’t sure what we can do create interest and increase attendance.  We are open to ideas.

I opened the meeting with the PASS Chapter Deck and enjoyed announcing the PASS Spring Event, now officially named SQLRally, discussing the PASS elections, and the progress we have made with SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando.

I also did a demo of SQL Source Control 1.0 for RedGate.  I think it’s a nice product and it definitely generated some interest among the attendees who already have their databases in some version of source control, but none of the solutions they are using integrates with Management Studio like SQL Source Control does.  As usual Andy asked the most difficult questions, and, not being an expert in the product, ones I couldn’t answer adequately, but overall the demo went well.

Our featured presentation was Performance Tuning Part 2 by David Pless, Senior PFE with Microsoft.  He covered statistics, performance counters, PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs), and how to use many of the DMV’s available in SQL Server.  The live meeting recording can be found on the resources page of the OPASS site.

Afterwards I spent some time with one of our attendees discussing the current job market and how to try to get back into the field after taking a few years off.  Hopefully I was helpful.

As usual I had a good time hanging with the OPASS group, and hope to see you out next month, when one of own, Tim McAliley, will be talking about VS2010 Team Foundation Server for the DBA.  See the OPASS site for details.