| February 2, 2012 This month, John Morehouse will be on hand to talk about how to prevent database fires.
Do you find yourself always putting out "fires"? Can't take the heat in the data center? Then come learn about some things that you can do to help you do "fire prevention" instead of "fire fighting". We will look at several things that you can take back to your shop and implement ranging from code tuning, backup maintenance, monitoring and performance tuning!
About 15 attendees stayed engaged in this interesting discussion that went on for about 2 1/2 hours. The slides and downloads are provided below.
December 1, 2011 Our December meeting was actually a Holiday Potluck held at the home of John Danley. Around a dozen of us gathered to enjoy good food and company. A great time was had by all!
November 3, 2011 This month we had another great presentation via Live Meeting. Kevvie Fowler (of Ringzero, Inc.) demonstrated numerous methodologies for tracking the actions of a hacker after the fact as part of a database forensics investigation. The Live Meeting presentation talked about the different types and locations of data that provide evidence for a hackers activity, both in the database and at the file system level. In particular, he discussed a number of system tables that may track information about DML or DDL statements executed in the database, as well as the query cache. Kevvie has over 12 years of professional experience securing and leading investigations on Microsoft technologies. He is the author of SQL Server Forensic Analysis, and is a contributing author of How to Cheat at Securing SQL Server 2005 and The Best Damn Exchange, SQL, and IIS Book Period. As an expert within the security industry, Kevvie is also a frequent speaker at leading information security conferences such as Black Hat and SecTor. You can find more information on this subject at www.applicationforensics.com. That site has a lot of great information, particularly this section specific to SQL Server.
October 6, 2011 For our fifth meeting, Rob Kraft of Kraft Software Solutions, Inc. gave an excellent presentation describing how SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) can be used to hack web pages and databases, and what can be done to prevent these attacks. He describes Defense in Depth as a strategy to address these kinds of attacks at multiple layers of the application. Click here to see a PDF of his powerpoint presentation.
August 4, 2011 Our fourth meeting featured the presentation “Powershell Scripting for the DBA” by Ed Wilson the Microsoft Scripting Guy. Ed Wilson is a well-known scripting expert, and writes the daily Hey Scripting Guy! blog. Ed discussed Windows PowerShell best practices as they apply to each stage of the script development lifecycle. He also demonstrated working interactively from the Windows PowerShell prompt, writing an inline script, adding basic function, advanced functions and finally the implementation of Windows PowerShell Modules.
July 7, 2011 Our third meeting was once again well attended by 23 attendees. David Brockelsby from 1Staff Training gave his presentation on "Creating and Maintaining a Data Warehouse Using SSIS for SQL Server 2008". David discussed some of the basic concepts of a data warehouse and how SSIS plays into maintaining a data warehouse.
May 5, 2011 Our first meeting was well attended by 24 folks not including myself, Bill Fellows or our sponsors from TEK Consulting. Bill Fellows presented his new topic, "Kama Sutra of SSIS: A guide to loving ETL". In this presentation Bill covered some of the following topics regarding SSIS: - Configuration
- Logging
- Settings
- Deployment
- Performance
- Common mistakes
You can find Bill's blog here: http://billfellowsblogspot.com/
Steering Committee Meeting Steering Committee meeting on Wednesday, March 23th, 2011. We discussed what has happened since the last meeting and discuss where we want to go from here. This includes getting this website started, starting a Twitter account @LincolnSSUG, an email account LincolnSSUG@gmail.com and the continued growth of our LinkedIn group "Lincoln SQL Server User Group". We have a number of potential speakers and sponsors, but nothing is firmed-up yet. It looks like Embarcadero and Aureus Group may sponsor a meeting. Potential speakers/visitors may include Bill Fellows from K.C., Kevie Fowler may speak on Database Forensics, John Morehouse from the Omaha User Group, Jorge Segarra could do a webinar with us, Chris Shaw and Steve Jones might visit us from Colorado. I've also discussed the possibility of having a speaker provided by Aureus Group speak on the topic of professional development, perhaps later this Fall. When I go to SQLSaturday #63 in Dallas I will do some additional networking to try to locate speakers and sponsors. The number of folks joining our LinkedIn group continues to grow. We have had an interest from DBAs from Nebraska Book Company, Fiserv, Ameritas, the State of Nebraska, Healthcare Data Solutions and many other locations. Keep spreading the word. Some ideas for meeting topics included a Panel Discussion between DBAs and Developers, a comparison between SQL Server and Oracle, Reporting Services, and Managing VLDBs. |