No sooner does the official holiday season end than SQL Saturday season begins. Next week on January 9 is the Atlanta BI edition, but the week of the 16th is the event here in Nashville (well, technically we will be in Murfreesboro, but it is close!). Tamera Clark (@tameraclark) is again heading up the team that is making it happen, and I will be there again this year (sans walker, thankfully), and for the first year, I will be speaking (so I can’t use Nashville to fulfill #3 on my Pass Year’s Resolutions!)

If you are interested in attending on Saturday or even one of the awesome looking Pre-Cons, head over to: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/480/eventhome.aspx and get registered immediately. It is sure to be a great time of nerdy fellowship and learning. Check out the schedule and if you are not new to the SQL Community you will see a lot of names you recognize and trust along with some you will hopefully come to know in the future

My presentation is a new one (that I am finishing up writing in the next few days) on concurrency, and the many different ways you tune and handle concurrent operations that access the same data.  The abstract is:

Let Me Finish… Isolating Write Operations

OLTP databases can be constantly written to and reporting databases are written to at least periodically. In order to ensure consistent results, connections must be isolated from one another while executing, ideally with the lowest possible cost to concurrency. How this isolation is handled is based on the isolation level, whether the classic lock based or the newer optimistic scheme of the in-memory OLTP engine is used, or even if both engines are enlisted in the same transaction. In this session we will look at examples of how SQL Server isolates reading and writing operations from other writing operations to explore how this may affect your application through error messages and performance hits.

I love giving giving presentations at SQL Saturdays, but it is never as much fun (or as scary) when presenting a new topic (if you can call concurrency “new”). Every night until the conference I will be editing, and presenting to myself working to get it just right with just enough material to fill an hour. I hope to see you there, and if I don’t see you, there are 11 other concurrent sessions going on at the same time…thankfully not in the same room