Talking Data: Six Word Stories

In six words, can you give a compelling description of your data?

I’m taking the Microsoft DAT248x course as part of the Data Science curriculum. This is one of the new courses added, and it’s about telling a story with the data. The point being made is we often only have a short window, a small opportunity to catch the attention of our target audience so they’ll investigate more. This is true whether we’re talking about another peer or up the chain of management to a C-level.

The question that was asked: can we distill the story we see in the data into a short, six-word sentence? If we can, we’ve gotten to the heart of the story and we have a chance to create a compelling message. After all, we can have mounds of convincing data. It does no good if the decision makers don’t look at it.

 

Upcoming Performance Tuning Webcast

On September 13, 2018, at 3 PM Eastern (USA), I’ll be giving a webcast for MSSQLTips.com on finding and correcting poorly performing queries.

Sign up link: SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting and Query Tuning

This is a 100-level webcast, but we’ll be looking at what we have within SQL Server to try and spot the issues and bring about solutions.

Here’s the abstract:

How do go about finding poorly performing SQL Server queries in your environment? And once you find them, what can you do about them?

In this webinar, Brian Kelley will show you the built-in functionality within SQL Server that will help you identify these problem queries on your system. We’ll also look at some cases where SQL Server is collecting data which may reveal an issue even if you don’t happen to catch the query in flight. Finally, we’ll look at the steps to tuning those queries so your overall system will perform better.

Midlands PASS Restart – October 2, 2018

The Midlands PASS Chapter, a local group of PASS, will restart on October 2nd, 2018. We will be meeting at our former meeting place, WeKnowIT, in West Columbia/Cayce, South Carolina. From here on we’ll be meeting on the first Tuesday of each month where possible.

Look for more information coming in the next couple of weeks including:

• Time of the meetings
• Scheduled speakers
• Sign up/RSVP links

If you’re interested in being part of the leadership team, please contact me via private message on LinkedIn or DM on Twitter. I definitely can use the help with scheduling, administering the meetings, ensuring we have food/drink, and the like. PASS has set up a mail forwarder, but I would like to have it email the entire leadership team.

Also, if you’re interested in presenting and haven’t already contacted me, please contact me via the same. There is the possibility of remote presentation, however, as with most user groups, we’d prefer speakers on site locally.

ISACA Class: Auditing SQL Server in Every Way Possible

At this year’s TechnoSecurity and Digital Forensics Conference I gave a 1 hour presentation on auditing SQL Server. There were a lot of things I covered only in the conceptual, such as building a framework using Extended Events. The SC Midlands Chapter of ISACA is giving me the opportunity to present a half-day class so we can go into more detail with practical examples of the more extended features available, such as the Audit object and Extended Events. It will be held August 27th, 2018 in Columbia, SC. If you’re interested in attending, here’s the sign up link:

Auditing SQL Server in Every Way Possible class (4 CPEs)