It’s my T-SQL Tuesday! I’ve spent the last year learning and teaching Extended Events – because if you really want to learn something, teach. XE can be used for everything from very simple tasks, such as counting the number of query executions, to very complicated tasks, such as anything Jonathan Kehayias writes about! I’m encouraging other bloggers to write about XE today in hopes that I’ll learn some new stuff – and if people have questions, that we’ll be able to teach them.

We meet again for another edition of T-SQL Tuesday! On Tuesday, June 9, 2015, you’re invited to blog about a chosen topic. Link back to this blog post, read what others have written, and post about it on Twitter. We share knowledge and get to know other bloggers! The June 2015 topic is Extended Events. I want to know (and others do, too) how you’ve solved problems with Extended Events.

For those who haven’t noticed already: SQL Server 2016 CTP2 (or Preview as some call it) has just been released! This means it is play time! 🙂 You can either download a copy if you’re old school like me, or you can spin up a VM in Azure like all the cool kids. SQL Server 2016 first public preview now available! Some of my favorite features (although some are not yet in the preview):

CodeDOM provides dynamic compilation of .Net code and is commonly used in places like template generation or compilation of emitted code. I recently needed a way to evaluate code submissions against a known set of test cases, so this post will walk through building a small program to do take source code as files, compile it, and execute it against a series of known inputs and outputs to evaluate it.

This year I have the opportunity again to speak at ITPROceed, the biggest (Microsoft-related) conference in Belgium for the IT professional. The conference takes place the 11th of June at Utopolis Mechelen. My session is situated in the _Data Platform & Internet of Things track and is titled Demystifying Power_ BI. Basically it introduces the full Power BI stack and highlights what you can use for which purpose in order to get rid of some of the confusion that lives in the market place.

Here is an overview of the articles I published in the first quarter of 2015. INTENSE SCHOOL MCSE Prep: Overview of T-SQL Windowing Functions Part 3 This will probably be my last article for Intense School for a while. MSSQLTIPS But on the other hand, I've doubled my efforts for MSSQLTips.com: Calculate the Statistical Mode in SQL Server using T-SQL Passing SQL Server Agent tokens to an Integration Services package Using TOKEN and TOKENCOUNT in SQL Server Integration Services Using Visual Studio configurations in SQL Server Integration Services projects Continue a Foreach loop after an error in a SQL Server Integration Services package SQL Server Integration Services REPLACENULL Function Plotting data on a secondary axis in SQL Server Reporting Services There are a few tips about Power Query in the pipeline, which is very exciting stuff to be writing about.

I recently finished the book Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. Stephen Few is a data visualization guru and his books about designed visualizations has changed my career in BI and how I develop reports and dashboards. Few currently has three books published (with a fourth on its way): Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, which has already 2 editions.

PASS has been holding quarterly phone calls with chapter leaders, Carmen, Karla, and Grant. I’ve been attending them to see what PASS is working on for chapters, how they can help me, and how I can help other chapters. In today’s call, I mentioned that I had created a survey using Google Forms, emailed it to my chapter members, and collected responses. This worked really well for me!  I wanted to find out why people attended meetings, what was important at the meetings, and how I could make them better.

SQL Server execution plans are invaluable for figuring out how a query was run – and how to make it run better. Most of the time that I spend with execution plans is in either SQL Server Management Studio or, more frequently, SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer. However, many developers spend most of their time in Visual Studio. Is there a way for you to view execution plans using Visual Studio? Yes!

The Northeast Wisconsin Developer User’s Group (NEWDUG) held their annual NEW Code Camp on Saturday, March 28 at FVTC in Appleton, WI. What a great event! FVTC is my alma mater, so I love coming back for training events, walking the halls I used to see every weeknight, sitting in the classrooms I learned to code in. It’s also fun to see how things grow and change. I gave my “Execution Plans: The Secret to Query Tuning Success” talk.