It's been a busy week for Coeo, with the SQLBits conference being the highlight of our European SQL Server conference season.  We've been involved with the conference for sometime, but SQLBits 9 was our first time as Gold sponsors and the event was a great success! 

We were pleased to deliver one pre-conference training day and three conference sessions as follows (in order of appearence):

Christian Bolton (MCA, MCM, MVP) - Upgrading your DBA Skills to SQL Server Denali

Chirag Roy (MCM) - Transaction Log Performance and Troubleshooting - Deep Dive

Chris Testa O'Neill (MVP) - Controlling resources in SQL Server

Gavin Payne - Through the virtual looking glass

Community events continue this week with the UK's first ever SQL Relay - a series of simultaneous events taking place around the UK each night this week, culminating in a finale where T-SQL legend Itzik Ben-Gan will speak at Microsoft in London on Thursday 6th October.  In addition to sponsoring the SQL Relay event, we are excited to be supporting the following user group events:

Monday 3rd October: 

Gavin Payne (Organiser) -  SQL Server in the Evening, Farnham in Surrey

Christian Bolton (MCA, MCM, MVP, Speaking on SQL Server Denali) - at SQL Server in the Evening

Chris Testa-O'Neill (MVP, Organiser and Speaker) - Manchester User Group event

Tuesday 4th October:

Justin Langford (MVP, Speaking on SQL Server Denali) - at the first ever Maidenhead User Group, organised by Richard Douglas

Chirag Roy (MCM, Speaking on Troubleshooting Transactional Replication) - at the first ever Maidenhead User Group, organised by Richard Douglas

Chris Testa-O'Neill (MVP, Speaker) - London User Group event organised by Neil Hambly

Wednesday 5th October:

Just a short note to mention, Gavin Payne (blog and twitter) is organising an event shortly in Frimley, Surrey - SQL Server in the Evening. 

The Agenda focuses on Infrastructure DBAs, with the following sessions planned:

I was very happy to receive an email last week to confirm I would receive the MVP Award for SQL Server for 2010 - very exciting news !

I missed the first FedEx delivery, however this weekend they were able to successfully deliver the package from Microsoft and it began to feel very real as I opened the box to find the MVP glass-ware!

Since leaving Microsoft, the past couple of years have been incredibly challenging, exciting and satisfying.  The MVP Award is really special, the SQL community has a fantastic, international base with many successful events, leaders and contributors providing an impressive network both online and in-person.

I'm really excited about the year ahead - starting this week with SQL Bits in London, followed by PASS EMEA in Germany next week and at the London PASS user group meeting on Monday 26th April.

Regards,

Justin Langford - Coeo Ltd

Hi,

Just a short post to mention the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference at Microsoft's London office (Cardinal Place) at the end of March.

This is the fifth annual Architect's conference and is packed with presentations from Microsoft Program Managers, Architects and MVPs.

I'm presenting a session on the first day on SQL Server Consolidation.  If this is something that interests you - drop me an email or sign-up for the conference.

Regards,

Justin Langford - Coeo Ltd

SQL Server Consultants | SQL Server Remote DBA

I had a great time presenting at SQL Bits Goes West this weekend.  The conference goes from strength to strength as the attendance grows and the speakers and sessions get better and better - the content just gets better with each conference.

The session I presented on Saturday 21st November covered running a SQL Server consolidation project.  The presentation looks at how to approach a consolidation project - including designing the consolidated environment, managing risk and effective workload isolation.

I've posted a PDF of the SQL Server Consolidation presentation and there's a selection of recent presentations on the Coeo SQL Server Conferences page.

Regards,

Justin Langford - Coeo Ltd

SQL Server Consultants | SQL Server Remote DBA

I recently presented on SQL Server virtualisation at the user group meeting at Microsoft TVP on Wednesday 11th November and again at the SQL Bits conference on Friday 20th November.

The presentation focussed on running a SQL Server virtualisation project, identifying servers as good candidates for virtualisation and others that are less suitable.  The presentation also looks at using virtualisation to provide high availability and troubleshooting SQL Server when running in a virtualised environment.

Here's a link to the PDF of the SQL Server Virtualisation presentation. Links to other Coeo presentation can be found here: http://www.coeo.com/sql-server-events/sql-server-conferences.html.  Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Regards,

Justin Langford

SQL Server Consultants | SQL Server Remote DBA

If you're involved in design, implementation or operations for solutions involving BizTalk Server 2009 - Ewan Fairweather from the Biztalk Rangers/ Customer Advisory Team is hosting a live meeting session tomorrow, details below:

.

As with any performance optimisation, getting the architecture right is critical and testing early in the project lifecyle will identify problems before they impact the business.

Justin Langford

SQL Server Consultants | SQL Server Remote DBA