Our September meeting saw our Chapter leader Jonathan away, so Annette took the reins for the evening.

Pavol Rovensky led off with a lightning talk on Mocking, telling us how this works in C# rather than SQL Server unit testing.

John Martin then did an impromptu lightning talk on Azure fault domains and availability sets using a pen and a whiteboard!

Rob Sewell then did a talk on the merits of Control-J for Powershell snippets.

Our main talk was from Steph Middleton

Bio:  Steph is a SQL Server and BI Developer working for a SaaS vendor based in Southampton, delivering enterprise class services that integrate with their customers systems. Currently Steph is leading the migration to SQLServer 2012 of a large scale solution using the whole Microsoft SQL Server Stack, making heavy use of Red Gate products to speed the build, test and deployment process.

Abstract:  At HTEC we had a large development team working – simultaneously – on many projects that used the same database back-end. Each project team had their own out-of-sync version of the dev database, and integrating the changes for frequent releases was agonising. We’ll walk through how we managed to get our databases into source control to painlessly manage changes and deployments – and explain the mistakes we made along the way. You’ll learn how to gradually bring your development databases under source control, as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid, and the benefits both in development and deployment.

Steph presenting to the group

Annette Allen gave a lightning talk on Database Unit Testing.

Terry McCann closed the meeting with a lightning talk on SQL Certifications, bringing us up to date with the latest changes.

A great meeting, and a number of attendees finished off with a meal in Exeter to chew over any left over questions.

Next meeting we are pleased to welcome Alex Whittles and John Martin with sessions on PowerPivot and SQL Server AlwaysOn.

Alex from PurpleFrog Systems will be presenting “Using PowerPivot to predict and win Fantasy F1”

How do you select the optimal team line-up to beat your mates at fantasy Formula 1? With over 1/4 million combinations of team and drivers and a complex points scoring scheme, your odds aren’t much better than a lottery. In this session we’ll walk through creating and using a PowerPivot model which will tell you the optimal team line up, and guarantee you eternal glory as a braniac petrol head. And become a PowerPivot and DAX pro in the process.

John Martin is a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft in the UK, working with SQL Server for the last six years covering BI, Core Engine and SQL Development has given John an appreciation for the many different ways that organisations make use of SQL Server. His session will be “AlwaysOn – Availability Groups, up and running in an hour.”

With SQL Server 2012 Microsoft brought AlwaysOn Availability Groups to the party, and then gave them some new toys to play with in SQL Server 2014. Availability Groups change the way that we look at building High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions to meet the needs of our businesses. This session will help give you the knowledge of just what Availability Groups can and more importantly cannot do when it comes to building a High Availability Solution, looking at when we might want to make use of this feature and how to implement a basic single site availability group.