SQLGrillen 2018: “Fun for the whole SQL family”

On June 22 a delegation of fourteen Koherians went to Lingen in Germany to attend the event SQLGrillen 2018. Colleague Randi Vertongen joined the club. Read his report of a day full of databases, bratwurst and beer.

Many colleagues and I went to SQL Grillen last week. It was in my opinion the perfect balance between learning and fun. 6 sessions back to back is not to be underestimated, it’s not only about the BBQ and booze ;).

The sessions

First session I attended was statistics behind the curtain by Uwe Ricken, He was handed a beer by the organizators and off he went. It was a nice refreshing session on statistics, with some good examples on some common statistic pitfalls when designing queries. And what to look out for in your production environment.

The next session was a newcomer session on Recursive Cte’s: “Recursive CTEs – cursing again and again?” We actually went to that session since a colleague had issues with designing a recursive CTE to get information from top to bottom, but also include the parents of all the childs referenced.We came to the conclusion that that recursive cte design was probably not going to end wel… .

The last session before lunch was “Self Healing” Query execution in SQL 2017 by Christina Leo. The start was good and clear cut. Unfortunately one demo on the “adaptive query processing” did not work, which made the session a bit more “all over the place”. I still liked the presenter’s presentation style and the new upcoming features look very cool.

After the lunch, I attended DevOps for the DBA by Grant Fritchey. Grant is an experienced presenter, and it showed. A very dynamic and open session on DevOps.

The next session was SQL Containers in the cloud, an intro to running docker in Azure, I was lost trying to follow the code, but it really showed how easy it is to deploy images to azure, and spin up one or more nodes that are running in SQL Server, and a very interesting example why you should enable two factor authentication when using Azure.

The last session I followed was SQL Server Problem Tombola by Stijn Wynants, one of my colleagues.

What else can I say than that it was a very fun, entertaining session, and that I learned a very interesting fact about SQL Server. If you want to find out which fact(s), you will have to attend his session :-)

Fun for the whole (SQL) family

It was all in all a great event, I even entered in a raffle to win a drone (sadly, i did not win)!

I am really hoping to go next year as well!