DATA:Scotland 2019. Unleashing the Guillotine!!!

Friday 13th of September will be my first ever appearance at a conference as a speaker at DATA:Scotland. Needless to say I cannot wait and I'd like to thank the organisers, selectors or whoever it was that drew out the short straw that is me.

I'll be presenting my intriguingly titled 'Guillotines, Sat-Nav and the Query Optimiser' session which I presented at the Manchester and Leeds User Groups earlier this year. The user groups have proved to be a really useful experience as some of the questions that were raised from the audience I've taken onboard and added in, basically I've been stealing their ideas.

My session starts at 12 which unfortunately for me is when my daily caffeine intake usually starts to wear off right at the same time I start to get hungry so I might take up a flask of espresso and a couple of wagon wheels to keep me going. I'll be in conference room 7 which also happens to my lucky number, so that's good news.

Something very new to me is that there will be presenters presenting their sessions at the same time as me and as such I need view these SQL superstars as, well, the competition I guess. I'm not entirely sure what tactics to deploy to get people to come and see me instead; media smear campaigns, good old fashioned kidnapping or perhaps just go really heavy on the propaganda...a bit like this blog post.

The truth is I'm very much overwhelmed at seeing my name up there on that schedule surrounded by people who in all honesty I hold in the absolute highest regard, and I also promise not to kidnap anyone (is their an emoji for fingers crossed behind your back?).

So what can people expect? Well at the moment we're in the midst of an amazing shift in the technical landscape. We've got all this funky cool new stuff like AI, the cloud, containers, Kubernetes etc etc etc and obviously I thought not to cover any of that. No, apparently vintage is all the rage these days so I'm jumping right on that bandwagon!

It may be old school but the query optimiser to me is like the magic box of SQL Server. We all throw queries at it and it goes off and does what it does, that's the beauty of it but at the same time we don't often get chance to open the box and have a good root around - and that's where this session comes in. So I'll be covering how the optimiser works, some of the magic tricks that it performs, how we can use SQL to keep a very close eye on what the optimiser is doing and of course how to break it!

It's worth adding that I will also be trying my best to seamlessly link the query optimiser to guillotines and satellite navigation - that'll teach me to come up with a great title before the actual presentation. I say that but I am currently working on a new session called "fixing your availability groups with sticky back plastic", take note Blue Peter (is that even still on?).

As well as the actual learning stuff (which I promise, there's plenty) there's a few ice breakers in there which I'll not give away right now and there's a good sense of humour throughout, which is mostly directed at the expense of myself.

So if you are attending DATA:Scotland all that's left is for me to beg, plead, perhaps even bribe you to come along to my session; if you choose otherwise I'll not hold it against you...and if you're not attending but stumbled on to this post by accident then thanks for reading if you got this far!