There are several SQL Saturday events I have attended every event that has existed. Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga (didn’t speak one of the years), and (I am pretty sure) Birmingham. On October 6, I will add one more to this list. The inaugural SQL Saturday Memphis! Having lived in Nashville for 20 or so years before moving to Cleveland (TN), I know many of the people who run or have run the Memphis SQL Server user group, and have been out to speak at their group a few times in the past (at least once on the same topic I will be speaking about early Saturday morning.

I will be speaking on my favorite topic: relational database design. Here is the (well used, but still very relevant,) abstract.

Database Design Fundamentals

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, but are often thought of as old-fashioned. Many common T-SQL programming “difficulties” are the result of struggling against these standards and can be avoided by understanding the requirements, applying normalization, as well as a healthy dose of simple common sense. In this session I will give an overview of how to design a relational database, allowing you to work with the data structures instead of against them. This will let you use SQL naturally, enabling the query engine internals to optimize your output needs without you needing to spend a lot of time thinking about it. This will mean less time trying to figure out why SUBSTRING(column,3,1) = ‘A’ is killing your performance, and more time for solving the next customer problem.

I look forward to hanging out in Memphis, hopefully getting some of that great Memphis BBQ, and perhaps a stop at Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, though worst case scenario, I can get that in Knoxville on my way to work in Virginia Beach the next week. 

(If you are not anywhere near Memphis, but are in the south, my friends in Orlando, FL are also having a SQL Saturday on the 6^th as well! Not in the south? Minnesota is having theirs. Not in the continental US? Puerto Rico is having an event too! Denmark and Bucuresti as well. If none of those fit the bill, there are tons of other free events coming up, as well as the not free, but well worth it, PASS Summit early in January!)