Speaking on Ethics in Modern Data at Improving Edge 2022

Christine and I are looking forward to speaking at the Improving Edge conference, co-presenting our session on Monday, June 6th. Our presentation on “Ethics in Modern Data” features topics relevant to modern developers and data professionals, using historical and current events to discuss ethics in data collection and analysis. 

This is an important topic that lives at the crossroads of our careers, Christine's career in organizational psychology and human resources, my career in data, our work and volunteerism in civic non-profits, and our joint passion for history and civil rights. It's important to understand that when dealing with bias: outcomes matter, intentions don't. 

Our slide deck, references, and citations are available for download.

Data Community #DataWeekender Europe 2020: Ethics in Modern Data

On Saturday May 2 Christine and I presented at the Data Community #DataWeekender Europe 2020 online conference, an all-online free virtual popup Microsoft Data Conference hosted by various professionals from around Europe. Our joint presentation is one of our favorites to present, Ethics in Modern Data. It was awesome to present to the international audience of hundreds of data professionals, and are grateful for the final time slot that put us in mid-morning Saturday, Central US Time!

This is an important topic that lives at the crossroads of both of our careers, my wife's career in organizational psychology and human resources, my career in data, and our joint passion for history and civil rights. It's important to understand that when dealing with bias, outcomes matter, intentions don't. While many of our examples come from the historical context of the United States, not all, and we have added addition context to an international audience.

Link to our presentation slidedeck with references is here: https://github.com/williamadba/Public-Presentations/blob/master/DataWeekender%20Europe%202020/Ethics%20in%20Modern%20Data.pptx  Thanks to UserGroup.tv, a previous recording of our presentation is available here.

Ethics in Modern Data presentation at SQLSaturday Austin BI Edition 2020

Excited to launch another new presentation, the first co-presented with my wife, on Ethics in Modern Data. We'll explore the ethical considerations around historical bias, ethics in analysis and data collection, and disparate impact, with tons of well-documented case studies and examples.

This is an important topic that lives at the crossroads of both of our careers, my wife's career in organizational psychology and human resources, my career in data, and our joint passion for history and civil rights. The effort of researching, paring down, and rehearsing our presentation together as a couple has been an exciting first for us. It's important to understand that when dealing with bias, outcomes matter, intentions don't.

Thanks to the many of you who chimed in during the presentation, including with further reading and book recommendations for us all!

If you'd review any of the topics or case studies we covered, our slides and citations is available for download here.

Thanks to UserGroup.tv, a recording of our presentation is available here.

My wife also presented at Austin SQLSaturday BI 2020 on "Mastering your Resume & Interview: Tips to Get Hired" Saturday afternoon.

Ethics in Data @HRTact @william_a_dba #sqlsataustinBI pic.twitter.com/pf8r4Hpx3I

— Alicia Moniz (@AliciaMoniz) February 8, 2020

Idera GeekSync: SQL Security Principals and Permissions 101

Thanks to Idera and all 239 of you who joined the Idera GeekSync webinar today for my topic on SQL Security Principals and Permissions 101.

Fun fact: Principals and Principles have totally different meanings, but both apply. Principals - in that each login, role, group, user, etc., in SQL Server is a principal - as in an important person, or, in one of the definitions, "a person for whom another acts as an agent or representative." But also, the presentation is about Principles - as in good guidance, or "a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning."

We discussed both! Not only a 101-level intro to authentication, logins and users, but also guidance on migrating and dealing with logins and users, SQL Injection, vulnerability and threat detection, data provider updates, permissions for non-sysadmins, separate accounts for sysadmins, and the nature of permissions in/around SQL Server stored procs, views, and functions.

Got good feedback from Idera on the comments, hope it was a useful and entertaining (albeit fast-paced because of time) review of SQL Server Security and Permissions for you.

PowerPoint available for download here: https://github.com/williamadba/Public-Presentations/tree/master/Idera%20GeekSync

Lab scripts for the sproc/view/udf permissions demo:
https://github.com/SparkhoundSQL/sql-server-toolbox/blob/master/lab%20-%20security%20p1.sql
https://github.com/SparkhoundSQL/sql-server-toolbox/blob/master/lab%20-%20security%20p2.sql

[UPDATE] Idera has posted the recording here: https://www.idera.com/resourcecentral/webcasts/geeksync/sql-security-principals-and-permissions

Thanks for joining us at SQLSaturday Dallas!

Thanks for joining hundreds of SQL pros from around the country today at UTDallas!

Here's my session downloads from my presentation today at 1:15 in room 1.102, there's a handy .zip file in there with all the contents for easy reference. They have also been uploaded to the SQLSaturday Dallas website and downloadable from the schedule page.

Why a 101-level presentation? One of the pieces of feedback we consistently have received over the past 10 years of SQLSaturday Baton Rouge is there's not enough entry-level content. This is why I try to deliver low-level entry ramp style presentations for jobseekers, job switchers, and students at SQLSaturdays. And it's not something "beneath" me, because these foundational, fundamental principles are important for new careers and, at the edges, I still learn things that round out my knowledge and further my own career.

Is @william_a_dba giving a presentation on security permissions or singing opera? Or both? #SQLSatDallas pic.twitter.com/bYFwbsmFn2

— Christine Assaf (@HRTact) June 1, 2019

Near capacity here for @HRTact at #SQLSatDallas. I'm not saying she drew three times the number of people that I did, but all her people are awake too. :/ #NotBitter #NotJealous :) pic.twitter.com/F4hQAUaV5i

— William Assaf (@william_a_dba) June 1, 2019

Activate Conference 2019: Databases 101 for the Aspiring App Dev Session Info and Resources

A special hello if you're visiting this blog post during or after my workshop on Thursday afternoon, April 4 at the Louisiana Tech Park as park of the Activate Conference 2019!

Here are all the links, downloads, and more you need:

Databases 101 for the Aspiring App Dev
Workshop Student Track
1:00 PM

Presentation Downloads:

Slide deck: Download link  (.pptx files) 

Sample TSQL 101 script: Download link (.sql file)

Links to get setup with MS SQL Server:

This is the link to download SQL for FREE:

• SQL Server 2017 Downloads, click Developer

The tools to dev in the Microsoft ecosystem are all free:

• SSMS (for the SQL Server) 
• SSDT (for SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, also for Database Projects) (installs a shell of Visual Studio)
• Visual Studio Community Edition or Visual Studio Code

Download the WideWorldImporters sample database:

• WideWorldImporters-Full.bak (restore to any Edition aside from LocalDB)

Toolbox: Github (.sql files)

• Look for toolbox.zip for an easy download, or 
• Click on each file then download, or 
• Click on each file, click “raw” on each file to copy/paste

SQLSaturday Houston!

Thanks for joining me for a full room and a boatload of quick-delivered SQL 2017 information in the second timeslot today at SQLSaturday Houston 2018! Lots of great questions, especially about adoption of SQL Server 2017.

Quick recap of this answer question: outside of a third-party vendor's support, there is no good reason to upgrade to SQL 2014 or SQL 2016 instead of SQL Server 2017. As of this week, 2017 has been patched eight times. In fact, because of the new options available to deal with rare issues with the Cardinality Estimator changes in SQL Server 2014, it's easier to upgrade to SQL Server 2017.  Unfortunately, software vendors don't always respond to new SQL Servers to "certify" and "support" their software on new versions of SQL Server, or, they use support for new versions of SQL Server hostage along with new versions of their own software. This isn't cool, and to be clear, there isn't any technical reason to go with SQL 2014 or SQL 2016 as opposed to SQL 2017.

It's awesome to see so many great (and new!) sponsors at these events, helping keep alive the spirit of free community tech training. Be sure to thank sponsors and volunteers for making a day like this happen, trust me, it's appreciated!

Download of my slidedeck is available here and has been uploaded to the SQLSaturday Houston 2018 schedule site.

Thanks to light-up lanyards, the attendees could track me in the dark

What's New In SQL Server 2017? at the March '18 Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group

Thanks to everyone to attended the BRSSUG meeting tonight at our sponsor's location at the Baton Rouge Alliance Safety Council location and their awesome classroom training facility.

See you next month at the BRSSUG/BRDNUG meeting back at our usual location at the Technology Park.

All of our speakers recently at the user groups are local speakers, some speaking for the first time. It's great to see new local speakers growing into the role! Looking forward to hearing more from these and more home-grown tech speakers in the future!

Here's the slidedeck to download for my presentation of What's New in SQL Server 2017, let me know if you have any questions or followup.

Activate Conference 2018: Presentation info

A special hello if you're visiting this blog post during or after my workshops on Thursday afternoon, February 22 at the Louisiana Tech Park as park of the Activate Conference 2018!

Here are all the links, downloads, and more you need for these two workshops on Thursday, Feb 22:

Databases 101 for the Aspiring App Dev
Student Track
2:45 PM - 4:15 PM

Your Applications and modern SQL Server 2017
Professional Track
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Links to get setup with SQL Server:

This is the link to download SQL for FREE:

• SQL Server 2017 Downloads, click Developer

The tools to dev in the Microsoft ecosystem are all free:

• SSMS (for the SQL Server) 
• SSDT (for SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, also for Database Projects) (installs a shell of Visual Studio)
• Visual Studio Community Edition or Visual Studio Code

Download the WideWorldImporters sample database:

• WideWorldImporters-Full.bak (restore to any Edition aside from LocalDB)

Presentation Downloads:

Slide decks: Download link  (.pptx files) 

Toolbox: Github (.sql files)

• Look for toolbox.zip for an easy download, or 
• Click on each file then download, or 
• Click on each file, click “raw” on each file to copy/paste

"What's New in SQL 2017?" at the Baton Rouge SQL Server UG meeting

We had a great joint meeting tonight of the Baton Rouge SQL and .NET User Groups at the Louisiana Tech Park, and I gave the first version of a growing presentation on new features of SQL Server 2017 (with quite a few new SQL 2016 features in there for good measure).

Thanks to everyone who attended from both user groups!

Link to the presentation slidedeck here (including all the hidden slides I couldn't get to tonight).

I included a question from our SQL Sever 2017 Administration Inside Out author "fun" survey, you can read the whole survey on my blog.

Thanks to Thomas Leblanc for photo

Twilight Timezone: Date and Time Architecture in your Applications aka Use DateTimeOffset, Your Future Self Thanks You

Thanks to everyone at a joint meeting of the Baton Rouge .NET and SQL Server User Groups who joined my colleague Steve Schaneville and me for a presentation on date/time data architecture in modern applications last night.

We reviewed the SQL and .NET architecture for date/time storage an informative and thought-provoking talk about handling timezones in your application architecture. Dealing with Time Zones is disconcerting, rarely straightforward, and often complicated! In the end, our architecture recommendations lead to two likely best paths - either using datetimeoffset (and optionally also storing the Time Zone Name information in a separate field) or storing the date and time in separate fields. (But preferably datetimeoffset.) There are few advantages and major disadvantages to storing only UTC data or all-in-one time zone data.

Steve and I are the principal consultants for appdev and SQL Server respectively at Sparkhound, and have worked hard to put together a joint presentation on this topic that is valuable to both audiences. We got a lot of great questions and positive feedback, as well as more notes to add to our presentation the next time, which will likely be at Houston Tech Fest 2017 in October. Got questions/feedback for us, actual use cases or lessons learned? Please reach out to us, our emails are at the end of the slide deck below.

You can download the slidedeck and sample code here.
 

Great to see you at SQLSaturday Houston 2017

Great to see all of you at #SQLSatHouston today, an awesome event put on by a great crew of volunteers. I presented in the first timeslot of a stacked schedule, and met and made a lot of friends.

My talk on SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals had a great crowd in the morning, about half of whom had never attended a SQLSaturday event before. I was thrilled to be their (hopefully good) energetic first impression!

You can download my slide deck and sample scripts here at the SQLSaturday Houston schedule page.

Please reach out if you have any questions, contact info in the slidedeck. Thanks to UserGroups.tv, you can click here for the video of the presentation.

See you all at SQLSaturday Baton Rouge on July 29!

Early birds catch the worms. Learning in the 8:30am session. #SQLSatHouston pic.twitter.com/IwKb7Jsi57

— Robert Anderson (@RAndersonTexas) June 17, 2017

SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMV's at SQLSaturday Pensacola 2016

Great attendance and awesome questions from my 1130AM session on "SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMV's". As promised, all the script files, including the demos we skipped for sake of time, and the entire info-packed slidedeck are available for download here on the official SQLSaturday Pensacola 2016 website.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch, please let me know, contact info inside. Happy to meet, and thanks again for participating in the session and asking so many great questions. Thanks also to the brave contingent of developers from Alabama who survived the experience with a room full of anti-GUID DBA's. :)

It was an awesome event and I have very thankful to Karla Landrum for resurrecting the event,  the first SQLSaturday in Pensacola since 2012. Back home in Baton Rouge now I had a great weekend and was very glad that the wife and I were both able to be a part of a tremendous speaker lineup.

Thanks also to photographer/SQL extraordinaire Jamey Johnston for taking photos at the event and also for agreeing to photograph SQLSaturday Baton Rouge in August!

SQL Server Security Principals Lightning Round Presentation

Thanks for attending tonight's joint meeting of the Baton Rouge .NET/SQL/PowerBI User Groups, which was sponsored by Idera!

I presented a lightning round to the combined user groups on SQL Server Security Principals, which was a shortened version of a presentation I've given several times in the past. For this one though, I added some extra content about SQL Server Agent security and job permissions, which is a troublesome topic for some developers.

Hope you enjoyed my presentation!

Here's the slidedeck, with complete info and more links inside:
http://1drv.ms/1O4U51O

More information about these great Baton Rouge user groups: .NET | SQL | Power BI

Houston TechFest 2014: SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV's

Awesome crowd this morning for my SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV's presentation at Houston TechFest 2014, thanks very much for attending! There were some exceptionally useful questions raised today, great job to my audience.

Here is the .zip file as promised for my presentation slide deck and .sql files, including the new content for SQL 2014. Download here

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMVs

Thanks for attending my session today SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMVs at 8AM!

Here's the link to a .zip file to download the slide deck and all sample files: http://1drv.ms/VH3mda

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals

Thanks for attending my session today, SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals at 9:15AM!

Here's the link to a .zip file to download the slide deck and all sample files: http://1drv.ms/VH3lpx

Performance Tuning Presentation from October 2012 BRSSUG Meeting

Thanks to the 15+ folks who attended the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group meeting last night!  I hope everyone enjoyed "everyone gets a book" night!

I presented on SQL Server Performance tuning, which began with Michelle Ufford's article from GoDaddy on how she saw massive performance gains just by correcting columns to more appropriate data types.  Here's a link to that article: https://web.archive.org/web/20130629210916/http://inside.godaddy.com/scaling-database-data-types/

Then we went through database compression, indexing and execution plans, index INCLUDE structure, the missing indexes feature, how foreign keys can affect performance, isolation modes and MAXDOP.

I've uploaded all my sample scripts in a .zip file to the brssug.org website here for you to download.

Thanks for attending, see you November 14!

UPDATE 20141104: Link to a cached copy of Ufford's article.

SQL Server Best Practices for DMV's - Houston Tech Fest 2012

It is a pleasure meeting everyone today at Houston Tech Fest!  The new facility is miles away - literally and figuratively - from the previous Houston Tech Fest facility.

Here's a link below for downloading the presentation files and sample scripts from my presentation on "SQL Server Best Practices for DMV's" at Houston Tech Fest 2012 at the Reliant Center.

Download the .zip file here.

SQL Saturday Pensacola presentation file downloads

I had a great weekend at my fourth annual visit to Pensacola for SQL Saturday, which had many great sponsors, the biggest of which was water.

I presented in the lunch-hour Lightning Talk competition and won Best Content with my five minute presentation, "Finding Missing Indexes In Your Ill-Begotten Databases", a title that the presentation picked up when I was presenting mainly to Developers at the Baton Rouge .net User Group.  You can download the presentation slidedeck and sample files here.

At 3:15pm I presented to a full room on SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals.  I was happy with the positive feedback I received, as this was the first time I'd presented this topic at a SQL Saturday.  You can download my slidedeck and samples files here, including the two-part demo demonstrating how stored procedures and views allow you to minimally-provision users with direct table permissions.