Most Active Speaker

Erin Dempster

Erin Dempster

IT Data Operations Team Lead - Trean Corporation

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Actions

Erin is currently the Data Operations Team Lead at Trean Corporation in Wayzata, MN, USA. In 2023, Erin was honored as a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform community activity. She has been working with SQL Server for nearly 20 years, both as a developer and a database administrator. Over the past several years, PowerShell and Azure have become areas of interest.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Azure SQL

Introduction to Automated Deployments with GitHub

Developing database changes is just the beginning. Once the code has been committed to source control, moving code between environments can be cumbersome in a manual environment. When multiple changes over time are involved in a release, tracking the proper set of changes is critical. Otherwise, the quality assurance team may test incompatible builds, leading to wasted time and potentially allowing unsupported changes to be deployed together.

This session will introduce database developers and administrators to GitHub code repositories and GitHub Actions to define a build and deployment workflow for an Azure SQL database. Several workflow portions will be explained more in-depth, highlighting different tasks written in YAML.

Deploy Azure Data Factory Changes with Azure DevOps

The most important component in the integration solution may be getting the least amount of attention - Azure Data Factory. Manual deployments work just fine, but there is a greater chance of issues being introduced during the deployment. Azure Data Factory objects can be version-controlled in Azure DevOps and deployed with Azure Pipelines. This session will explore multiple methods to add deployment to a CI/CD pipeline.

Azure Data Factory Deployment Highlights

Azure Data Factory (and Synapse Pipelines) are growing in popularity for ELT/ETL processes. Deploying changes between environments can be cumbersome unless Git repos are introduced to the solution. Then, changes can be pushed either as pull requests between branches or through CI/CD pipelines.

This Flash Focus Session will demonstrate the deployments and their end result.

10 Visual Studio Hidden Gems for Database Development

Visual Studio is well-known as a C# and C++ developer tool, but its depth of capabilities around SQL Server features is rarely discussed. These components benefit developers by providing tools to implement SQL Server databases or maintain analytics solutions with SQL Server Integration Services and Reporting Services. The SQL database functionality in Visual Studio can make ongoing development easier and enable better integration of your database components with existing CI/CD pipelines. This session will highlight 10 features that can improve your database development experience in Visual Studio.

Migrating DBA Network Skills to the Cloud

As a DBA, connecting to a database server on-premises is generally straightforward, especially in a company with a network infrastructure team. Over time, they have fine-tuned network configurations, so adding a new server works. Moving to a cloud environment, the network has to be rebuilt from the ground up, as the first servers are being stood up. Unexpected connection problems are bound to occur until the network configuration has been smoothed out.

Automating Azure Data Factory Deployments

This session will introduce the audience to patterns to deploy code between Azure Data Factory (ADF) environments. Using either Azure DevOps or GitHub to keep code safe is great, but it is limited to a single environment. Branching could be used to push code, but there can be problems with this pattern. Automating the process with either Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps or Actions in GitHub will help ensure a more consistent approach is taken through environments beyond development. ADF pipelines may have scheduled triggers to start them, which creates special needs. This session will also show how to overcome triggers to successful deployments.

Data Protection Hors d'Oeuvres

SQL Server 2022 offers a number of ways to secure data within the database engine. Knowing which one(s) to use can be a challenge. This session will take a quick look multiple topics, including Always Encrypted, Ledger and Row Level Security, among others.

Introduction to Automated Deployments with Azure DevOps

Moving code from development to QA to UAT and eventually production can be a project in of itself. This is especially true when multiple projects might be across multiple repositories. Keeping track of the correct set of builds for a release can be challenging. With Azure DevOps, this challenge can be eliminated with pipelines. This session will step through the process to build and release multiple projects in the same pipeline. Opportunities for adding approvals will also be covered.

Automate Database Deployments with Azure DevOps

Deploying changes for a single database is easy on a team of 2 or 3. What happens when there are several databases being updated by a larger team, say five or more developers? Knowing which changes go together and which need to wait for a different release can be challenging.

With Visual Studio 2022, Azure Repos, and Azure Pipelines, code changes can be managed more easily, and deployments can be packaged and executed consistently. In this half-day talk, we'll use Visual Studio to make database changes and commit them to Azure Repos. Deployment to a test environment will be completed with Azure Pipelines. Besides deployments, there are other connections between Azure Repos and Pipelines that will be covered.

While there will NOT be hands-on lab opportunities, a PDF version of a reference guide will be provided to aid in understanding and setting up your environment after SQL Saturday.

Reduce Data Processing with PowerShell

This session is designed to help data analysts and developers manage the problem of one-off data formats that occur on a regular frequency. PowerShell is a very flexible scripting language, allowing developers and analysts (yes, developers and analysts - not just admins) to build powerful solutions with less effort than some other languages/processes. Pairing PowerShell with SQL Server provides another level of flexibility to develop repeatable, lightweight transformations. Through the use of multiple demos, common built-in cmdlets useful for analysts and developers will be shown. We'll also explore the PowerShell Gallery a couple useful modules, before expanding into ADO.Net classes to select, insert and update data in a SQL Server database.

Live! 360 Tech Con Orlando 2024 Sessionize Event Upcoming

November 2024 Orlando, Florida, United States

SQL Saturday Boston 2024 Sessionize Event

October 2024 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

SQLSaturday - Minnesota 2024 Sessionize Event

September 2024 Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States

SQL Saturday South FL 2024 Sessionize Event

June 2024 Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States

2024 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA (SQLSatLA) Sessionize Event

June 2024 Los Angeles, California, United States

SQL Saturday Jacksonville #1068 Sessionize Event

May 2024 Jacksonville, Florida, United States

SQL Saturday Atlanta 2024 Sessionize Event

April 2024 Alpharetta, Georgia, United States

Intersection of Technology Fall 2023 Sessionize Event

December 2023 Orlando, Florida, United States

SQL Saturday Oregon/SW Washington 2023 Sessionize Event

November 2023 Vancouver, Washington, United States

SQL Saturday Boston 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

SQLSaturday MN 2023 Sessionize Event

September 2023

SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2023 Sessionize Event

July 2023 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States

SQL Saturday Columbus 2023 Sessionize Event

July 2023 Columbus, Ohio, United States

Triangle Area SQL Server User Group (TriPASS) User group Sessionize Event

May 2023

SQL Saturday New York City 2023 Sessionize Event

May 2023 New York City, New York, United States

PASSMN Monthly Meeting 2022/2023 User group Sessionize Event

March 2023

SQLBits 2023 - General Sessions Sessionize Event

March 2023 Newport, United Kingdom

SQLBits 2023 - Full day training sessions Sessionize Event

March 2023 Newport, United Kingdom

Virtual Boston Azure User group Sessionize Event

March 2023

SQL Saturday Austin 2023 Sessionize Event

February 2023 Austin, Texas, United States

SQLSaturday MN 2022 Sessionize Event

December 2022

SQL Saturday Oregon/SW Washington Sessionize Event

November 2022 Vancouver, Washington, United States

SQL Saturday Boston 2022 Sessionize Event

October 2022 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

Data Saturday Atlanta Sessionize Event

October 2022 Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Erin Dempster

IT Data Operations Team Lead - Trean Corporation

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Actions

Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.

Jump to top