Garden of the Gods in Colorado

This will serve as my review of the SQL Saturday Denver 2024 Event.  

Overall Event 

1. Well put on,  Great communication from the organizers.  I knew where to be as a speaker and as an attendee. 
2. Good networking and conversations with attendees.  I should have followed up a little better and given out more cards(yes I’m old school and still use business cards). 
3. Not sure about attendance numbers but it felt like a good number starting the day.  We lost some people after lunch simply because lunch wasn’t available on-site.  
4. Huge thanks to the Organizers of the event. They did a great job! 

Sessions 

Mastering Postgresql Advanced Techniques 

Speaker: Ramesh Kumar Venkatraman 

This presentation made some good comparisons between Postgresql and SQL Server.  

Key takeaways 

1. Datatype comparisons were good,  Be weary of Money data type when you move from SQL To PG.  This one will get you. 
2. Comparison of Transaction Isolation levels was good I enjoyed that.  
3. Case Sensitivity is a key thing for PG and not in SQL Server.  I liked that this was mentioned. I’ve been forgetting to put it on my slides about conversion and it’s an important key point to remember.  

Things to Improve. 

1. Focused on Inheritance at the start,  For me, that hasn’t come up a ton so I was thrown off that it was the first point to bring up. 
2. The first few slides focused on everything that PG could do that SQL Server could not.   Since this was much more a crowd moving from SQL to PG it might be better to focus on a feature in SQL Server and show how to do it in PG.  This was done with datatypes and other items but a few slides were all about things that PG did that SQL Server did not.  

Maximizing Organizational Potential: The Essential Role of Data Strategy 

Speaker: Cher Fox 

Great overview and discussion of the concept of a Data Strategy.  A lot of points in this presentation were for a much larger company/group but the points were solid and could still be used in the smaller companies as long as you understood the concepts.  I enjoyed the discussion in this session.  

Key takeaways: 

1. Presentation Stated with Why!  I love it when presentations tell you why this is important.  
2. Loved the mention that Data Strategy is the Backbone of ML, AI, and all the other aspects of Data path.  If you can implement and solidify a strategy then doing any other data aspect makes things easier. 
3. Setting goals is important and it’s important to get your stakeholders to help decide those goals.  Executive level is important to help set the goals and metrics that are needed for the data strategy 
4. Data Strategies drive growth and revenue.  The better the strategy and more understood the better chance you are going to grow and receive more revenue. 
5. Data culture is important. Making everyone a Data Steward helps to have quality data in the backend.  Quality data makes everything cost less and move faster. 
6. If you are in a startup, don’t be afraid to change your Strategy often and fail fast to find what works for you.  

Things to Improve: 

1. Wordy slides,  Lots and lots of information on the slides.  Cher did a great job speaking to them but I felt like it was really busy in a lot of slides. 
2. Boil down to more stories and key points. I feel like this tried to tell you everything you needed for the Strategy and with only 60 minute session that wasn’t going to happen.  I think telling more stories about how and why you need these strategies/goals and how they changed the company would be best. I know this was a session geared for the summit so it makes sense it would have a lot of content. 

Importance of Postgresql Vacuum, Tuning to Optimize Database Performance

Speaker: Suyog Pagare 

This was a good overall discussion of Vacuum,  I knew most of the key points here already so I was attending mostly to see if I was missing anything and to see how the presentation was laid out for future use.  

Key points: 

1. Every DB needs Maintenance,  Couldn’t agree more.  Let’s make sure they all get it! 
2. Bloat,
   1. Caused by inserts/updates of data.  Going to happen no matter what.  If it’s excessive check your insert/update patterns. 
   2. Symptoms of the problem, are higher disk usage, slower queries, and bad overall performance. 
   3. Identify, through bloat queries, Available here and here.
   4. Make a plan to deal with it and manage it via a schedule 
3. Good Overview on Transaction Wrap around and what to look for.
   1. Set up alerts around the numbers and make sure to monitor it. 
4. Review your parameters around work_mem and parallel processes on the vacuum.  It is important to know if the AutoVacuum is meeting your needs.  
5. Pg_Repack,  Great utility/tool for rebuilding tables/indexes.  Should use it to handle bloat items.  

Things to Improve: 

1. Overall this was a good overview of all the options around Vacuum and what was needed.  The only suggestion I had was for the presenter to slow down a little and perhaps pause to ask questions. 

The last 2 sessions of the day I presented.  Here is the feedback I received for my sessions. Some of this is the feedback I have for myself. 

How to: Never be on call as a DBA! 

Key points

1. Focus on documentation and training others so they can be prepared to handle anything that comes up. 
2. This can greatly improve your career and help you in lots more ways than just not getting phone calls. 
3. If you want Peace and Quiet you should focus on something like this. 
4. See more about this session in this Blog post. 

Things to Improve: 

1. First time giving this presentation so I need to move around a few slides/talking points. 
2. The title was confusing for some, thinking they were going to get the ultimate scripts to fix all problems.  I need to work on the title. 
3. I need to work on the stories. I think they were not as concise as I would have liked. Since this was the first time run of this presentation I expected that.  I need to present it a few more times to improve this.  

Postgresql For the SQL Server DBA 

Key points. 

1. Showed the first 7 days of being an accidental DBA.  Aka you were just handed a PG Database and said “Fix it”  
2. Showed general 101-level items to get started with Postgres. 
3. Got into some key OS level and system level differences about PG vs SQL Server. 

Things to Improve. 

1. This is a very high level and needs some more deep-dive aspects. 
2. Add a slide/info about Case Sensitivity 
3. Need to update it since it was written 4 years ago and some of these things are not as applicable now as before. 
4. Might retire this one or re-write it since I think most have gotten around the basic information I present here.