On Friday, May 10 I will be speaking for the Knoxville SQL Server User Group, and on May 18, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday in Atlanta. Both days, my session is my old chestnut “Database Design Fundamentals”. It is my favorite session to do because of two things. 1. I love to talk about database design 2. No demos :).  The abstract is:

In this session I will give an overview of how to design a database, including the common normal forms and why they should matter to you if you are creating or modifying SQL Server databases. Data should be easy to work with in SQL Server if the database has been organized as close as possible to the standards of normalization that have been proven for many years. Many common T-SQL programming "difficulties" are the result of struggling against the way data should be structured and can be avoided by applying the basic normalization techniques and are obvious things that you find yourself struggling with time and again (i.e. using the SUBSTRING function in a WHERE clause meaning you can’t use an index efficiently).

It is a session that I haven’t done in short form since PASS 2011, and submitting this as a session was one of my resolutions this year, because it is truly my favorite regular session (my second favorite session is the precon version, because we get to spend a good amount of time on the subject.)

Additionally, at SQL Saturday Atlanta, I will be doing a lunch session for Red-Gate called: What Counts For a DBA: Observant. It is a session that is 33% professional development, 33% about where to find info about your server, 33% about monitoring your server and 11% demo of the SQL Monitor (and a lack of math skills is part of the show.) This is not the normal advertisement session, I wrote it myself, but is intended to be useful to anyone immediately without buying their tools, and to show you how Red-Gate’s tools can assist in observing your server’s behavior