Towards the end of February, I was fortunate enough to attend SQLBits.  The theme for this year’s event was ‘Magic’, and the event took place at the London Olympia conference centre.  For the first time, I was there for the entire conference – a full day of focused training on both Wednesday & Thursday, with the pub quiz event on Thursday evening, then a full day of general sessions on Friday, followed by the SQLBits party, and finally the community day on Saturday, which consisted of general sessions across the various different learning tracks.

I first heard about SQLBits after reading Brent Ozar’s blog post about how much he liked this event, which inspired me to look at going.  Unfortunately, I missed 2015, but in 2016 I decided to make the trip to Liverpool, where it was taking place that year, and attended the community day.  I had a blast and then the following year I went again but this time went to one of the training days, plus the Friday and Saturday.

This year was a lot of fun, as over the last year or so I’ve attended a number of meetings at my local user group and gotten to know a few more people within the SQL Server community, whereas previously I didn’t know anyone interested in these events and was just there on my own.  Fortunately, a few people from my user group were there and it made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable.

On Wednesday I attended ‘Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017’, presented by Brent Ozar and Erik Darling.  This day was absolutely packed with content and a lot of great demos on many of the problems to be aware of when troubleshooting queries in SQL Server.  Unfortunately, there were a number of problems in the venue which made it more difficult to follow along during the class than would be ideal.  The rooms that each pre-con were in had no roofs on them and were all reasonably close to each other, which resulted in difficulties hearing Brent & Erik, as well as a lot of noise spilling over from the pre-con going on in the room next to us.  The Wi-fi was also pretty bad and there was a lack of plug points available, which wasn’t great for a day where a laptop was required.  This was actually more of an issue on Thursday when I attended ‘DevOps Your DB’, as Visual Studio Team Services was used extensively on Thursday and isn’t available at all without an internet connection.  For the Wednesday at least we were given access to the course online to work through in our own time, which is fantastic, as even without the technical problems there was so much content here it would be difficult to get the most out of it without being able to revisit it.

For Thursday’s training day it was ‘DevOps Your DB’ with Simon D’Morias.  This was a lot of fun and was mostly hands-on, working through a guided demonstration of how to put your DB into source control and linking to it through Visual Studio and then deploying it to different environments through VSTS.  I found it a little difficult to keep up at times due to the aforementioned internet problems, but for the most part, I managed.  I learned a few new tricks here and have already started to put some of the techniques here into practice. Thursday night was the pub quiz, which was very well attended and a lot of fun.

Between Friday & Saturday, I attended a lot of great sessions, including lessons learned from working with VLDBs from Bob Pusateri, converting from using SQL Profiler to Extended Events with Erin Stellato, simplifying Extended Events using dbatools with Chrissy LeMaire, and Exploring Execution Plans with Grant Fritchey.

Friday night was the party and was great fun.  Lots of people had made the effort to dress up and there were some really cool costumes. There was also a lot of interesting stuff going on, although overall the party felt like it was on a smaller scale than last years (which was very impressive and included a roller disco).

I spent most of the time chatting with friends and had a few drinks.  I also got to meet Brent Ozar and talked with him for a while.  This was something that was really cool for me because when I started out as a DBA, Brent’s blog was one of the first I came across and I have followed it ever since.  Also, had I not read his post on SQL Bits in 2014 there’s a good chance I still wouldn’t have known about the event and wouldn’t even have been there.  He was also kind enough to accommodate the large numbers of people asking to get photos with him (myself included).

Overall I had an awesome time at Bits this year, and would highly recommend it as an event to attend for anyone who works with or is interested in working with Microsoft SQL Server. There were a few problems, though I mainly put that down to the venue, and I’ve no doubt that these issues will be addressed going forward.  There are a huge number of volunteers who work hard to put the event together and they all do a fantastic job. Thanks again for another great event.