The October SQL Server Sri Lanka User Group meet up consisted of 3 main sessions this time. Deviating from the conventional SS SLUG meetups, this time the team incorporated a new twist to the agenda to make the evening more interesting. Their first sign of victory was the numbers they brought in for the day. It was the first time in the history of the SS SLUG a large number of audience gathered.
The agenda for the day was,
- Session 1 – There’s More to T-SQL than Stored Procedures – Dinesh Asanka (MVP)
- Session 2 – BI Goodies up Microsoft’s Sleeve – Dinesh Priyankara (MVP)
- Session 3 – Looking after VLDBs – Preethiviraj Kulasingham (MVP)
The performance graph of the day was similar to a cosine curve.
The first session managed to hit the mark. Dinesh A. spoke of UDFs (User Defined Functions) and also he touched on certain limitations of stored procedures that could be overcome with UDFs as well as instead of writing long lines of queries with stored procedures, how the same thing can be done using few lines of UDFs.
Progressing to the second session, Dinesh P. spoke of the upcoming enhancements made to the BI suite planned by Microsoft and if you’re doing any development for BI, how it would help you to know where you stand compared to the current progress of Microsoft. This session did not raise itself up to as the first session because there was a very small percentage of the crowd who really knew what BI was. Though Dinesh P. managed to give a bird’s eye view into BI before he began his session, as he continued the interest level on the topic dropped a bit low. He spoke of Traditional BI and the emerging trend of Self Service BI. I personally clueless about BI was looking forward for this session, because the topic on the agenda sounded pretty interesting and I assumed that it would give an overview to BI and cover some interesting areas. It was a bit of a disappointment.
Trying to gain momentum, Preethiviraj got into the field with his topic. Another session I was looking forward to. Preethiviraj spoke about what Very Large Databases were, maintaining them and some of the dos and don’ts. Since the first session started behind schedule, Preethiviraj was being hurried to finish his session sooner than the time slot allotted to him. It was a drawback that he had to cut down on his session, because all those who wanted to learn could see that he planned to deliver so much more but couldn’t because they were already behind schedule.
So hoping that next time’s SS SLUG meet up will try to improve on the shortcomings of October’s meetup and try to keep up the enthusiasm and the drive to learn in all the sessions they plan for the day.
M. Antoinette Jerom 