Wow, where does the time go? Hope I see every reader there in Louisville this weekend for a lovely time. Say you live in Alaska and it would be too far to go in one day? Hey, we all have our problems (and don’t tell anyone, but I am going to try to finish up video versions of these sessions by the end of the year.. shh.)

I will be doing my session on Database Design Fundamentals and How to Write a DML Trigger, both sessions I have done quite often of late, and I really like how they work now. I have a bit of a reputation as a slide/code tinkerer and this time is no different, but the biggest thing I have settled on is how I deal with presentation like these, where honestly the subject is more than a 1 hour session can handle. Homework.

I will cover the fundamentals of whatever topic in slides, and then demo as much code as I have time, but the rest is homework. I got the idea when I was prepping to speak to the Richmond User Group, as I was flip flopping between showing some slides and showing code. I realized that the slides would explain the fundamentals better than slogging through the internals of the code directly, and that when I attend sessions with a lot of code, all I am sitting there thinking is “man, I want that code”.  So I try to comment the code to make it self explanatory, run the code before each presentation, enhance it as I have time to, show you enough of the code to get you started, and then give it to you to play with (and if you want to pick it apart, email me at drsql@hotmail.com, I LOVE constructive criticism.  

I post all of my slides and code on my website (http://drsql.org) not just because it is part of a presentation, or to make myself feel cool, but mostly so I can reference it as I need it. I use my code snippets all of the time when coding, and I try to keep them up to the version I am using (or writing about as it were.) So hopefully, I see you and get to explain the fundamentals, then the (rather wordy at times) slides are there for reference, and the code is there to get you started practicing on your own. Homework.

The abstracts for this weekend’s presentations: 

Database Design Fundamentals

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). 

How to Write a DML Trigger

Triggers are extremely powerful and useful (if somewhat rarely needed) objects that are coded very similar to a common stored procedure. Yet for their similarity, there are some very important differences that need to be understood. In this session, I will walk through what goes into writing a robust DML trigger, starting with a simple version of a trigger, and working through some very useful applications of DML Triggers..