Branding Yourself for a Dream Job

Everyone wants a great job that they enjoy, but few of us know how to take charge of our career. Learn why it’s important to raise your profile in today’s highly competitive world where there are often more candidates than positions for great jobs. This session will help you build a strong brand that allows you to attract potential employers or clients and start to convince them ahead of time that you are the person they want to hire.

Helping Myself and Others Cope During the Pandemic

Life during the pandemic has been a struggle at times. My company tracks our well being, and mine has definitely declined during the year. However, I've also been publishing a daily coping tip for a year at SQLServerCentral and following my own advice, which has helped. I want to share some of the tips, the techniques, and the view of how I've adjusted my life to work on my mental health and wellness.

How to get started with Git

Version control and Git are not widely used by many database developers. In this short intro, we will get started as two developers in a team and write code to show how to work together.

Blogging for the Tech Professional

When a company posts a job opening, they are often inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants. How do they decide which ones are worth pursuing with an interview? Standing out from other candidates is important to ensure you receive the consideration that you deserve. Building a blog and including those links in your CV can help. Come learn how to build a blog, choose topics, and share your knowledge in a way that boosts your career.

This session will go over how to create a blog, choose topics, and build your brand to enhance your career.

The Future of Database Development

The computing advances adopted by many software developers are starting to filter down to the data platform. DevOps, containers, Kubernetes, and many other buzzwords will fundamentally change the way we work with databases in the coming decade.

The Encryption Primer

SQL Server has a number of encryption features that allow you to better secure your data. This session will examine the basics of encryption and cover the various ways in which you can encode and decode your data to protect it from unauthorized access. Cell level encryption, Transparent Data Encryption, and backup encryption will all be discussed. This session is designed for those who want to learn the basics of how to protect their data.

The Basics of Database Containers

This session will explain the basics of what a container is, how to work with a container and how a database container can be used in your work.

Testing T-SQL Made Easy

Everyone tests that code, but most people run a query, execute a procedure and run another query. This ad hoc, non-repeatable testing isn’t reliable, and encourages regression bugs. In this session you will learn how to begin introducing testing into your development process using the proven tSQLt framework. You’ll run tests with a click of a button, using an ever growing test suite that improves code quality. You will see how to handle test data, exceptions, and edge cases.

Bringing DevOps to the Database

DevOps is a hot topic in today’s software development world. However most of the knowledge and experience with DevOps is based around application software and ignores the database. We will examine how the concepts and principles of DevOps can be applied to database development by looking at both automated comparison analysis as well as migration script management. Automated building, testing, and deployment of database changes will be shown.

Continuous Integration with Local Agents and Azure DevOps

One of the fundamental tools for modern DevOps software development is continuous Integration (CI). This process provides an automated independent validation and verification of your code, with quick feedback for developers that are under pressure to write higher quality software at a rapid pace. This session examines how Azure DevOps or TFS can be used to manage this process and run a database CI process inside of your data center, on your own instances.

Adopting A DevOps Process for Your Database

DevOps is changing today’s software development world by helping us build better software, faster. However most of the knowledge and experience with DevOps is based around application software and ignores the database. We will examine how the concepts and principles of DevOps can be applied to database development by looking at both automated comparison analysis as well as migration script management. Automated building, testing, and deployment of database changes will be shown.

Adopting a Compliant Database DevOps Process

DevOps is transforming software development, with many organizations and individuals adopting lean development practices, implementing Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and performing on-demand deployments to their production environments. However, the database is largely ignored and seen as a bottleneck for a DevOps software development process. We will discuss the challenges of database development and deployment and examine why many developers find the database to be an impediment. We examine the risks of sensitive data in the development process and how you can ensure that data security concerns do not get in the way of the need for speed and agility. We’ll look at how you can adopt a Compliant Database DevOps approach that removes the database bottleneck while ensuring compliance with regulations governing the use of data within your organization such as GDPR, HIPPA or SOX. We’ll discuss the techniques used to include the data

A Tour of Azure DevOps

The popularity and push for adopting DevOps as a way of developing software continues to grow. Do you wonder how to get started and what tools are out there? TFS and Azure DevOps are the way that more and more Microsoft developers look to try and automate parts of their software development process. Join this session for a look at how the capabilities of Azure DevOps/TFS are integrated together to help you track your code and automate the process of getting it to your production environment.