What is Networking Night?

Instead of a regular user group meeting, Networking Night is open to everyone in the Baton Rouge IT community, for free! 

Many professional organizations have an annual meeting dedicated to career development and professional networking. Networking Night is a special User Group format where we will have several short-format talks, networking and career development, and an opportunity for Baton Rouge SQL Saturday sponsors to have an official presence to do recruiting, tech talks, career development, etc.  

We need speakers with 7-10 minute talks! Complete info and sign up to speak here!  

Who should attend? Everyone should attend free Networking Night! Starting in 2014, each year 50+ IT professionals including many newcomers attended this fun event! 

Looking for a job? Meet and greet, bring your resume

Hiring? Introduce yourself to folks in your needed the field 

Current Student? Talk to your future colleagues and managers

Happy at your job? Share your experience and wisdom and contribute to discussion

SQLSatBR SPONSORS: 

Are you a Gold or Platinum sponsor of SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2019? Part of your sponsorship comes with an official presence at Networking Night! Please join us and fill out the speaker signup form.

Date: Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Location: The Louisiana Technology Park - http://www.brssug.org/where

Agenda:

5:00 - 5:30 pm: Networking and Dinner

5:30 - 5:45 pm: Announcements

5:45 - 7:00 pm: Networking Nights Speakers

Also please register for SQLSaturday Baton Rouge today!

When: Wednesday, 05/08/2019

Agenda:
• 5:30 - 5:45: Introduction/Food and Drinks <-- Note our earlier start time!
• 5:45 - 7:30: Presentations
• 7:30 - Until: Open forum for questions

Location: Louisiana Technology Park- location info here

Main Presentation:

Fundamentals That Will Improve Your Query Performance! - John Wells

Time and time again the same misunderstandings by developers and query writers appear when query performance issues arise. In this demo heavy presentation, we will review these specific topics such as data types, implicit conversions, sargability, and some others that all have an impact on query performance. Come join me and by the end of this session you will have the knowledge to boost your query performance!

Lightning Talk:

Introduction to Cosmos DB - Brandon Brockhoeft

Presenters:

John Wells is a DBA at Lamar Advertising in Baton Rouge. He is a member of the Baton Rouge User Groups Board and helps out for the ONLY SQLSaturday that serves Jambalaya for lunch! John is known to some as "Mr. SQL Saturday" because he attends so many and started speaking last year.

Brandon Brockhoeft is a career software engineer working primarily with Microsoft solutions with over 15 years of professional experience. He is an LSU alumnus and native of the Baton Rouge area. Brandon is employed as a Principal Consultant for Austin-based Headspring custom software consultancy. He has provided development and architecture technology solutions in the finance, state government, energy, and aerospace industries.

Our Sponsor this month is TekChix

When: Wednesday, 04/10/2019 Agenda: • 5:45 - 6:15: Introduction/Food and Drinks • 6:15 - 7:30: Presentations • 7:30 - Until: Open forum for questions Location: Louisiana Tech Park - location info here Main Presentation: Replacing Profiler with Extended Events Extended Events was released over 10 years ago, with SQL Server 2008, and DBAs and developers alike *still* prefer Profiler. However, if you want to troubleshoot anything related to new features, you have to use Extended Events. If you've tried XE and struggled, or if you've been thinking about it but just aren't sure where to begin, then come to this session. Using your existing knowledge and experience, we bridge the gap between Profiler and Extended Events with demos, starting with the Profiler UI you know and love, and ending with an understanding of how to leverage functionality in the Extended Events UI for data analysis. By the end of this session, you’ll know how to use Extended Events in place of Profiler to continue the tasks you've been doing for years, and you'll have the foundation to better understand how you can leverage Extended Events to troubleshoot other issues in ways not previously possible. Main Speaker: Erin Stellato Erin Stellato is a SQL Server MVP and lives in Cleveland, OH. She has over 15 years of technology experience and has worked with SQL Server since 2003. Her areas of interest include statistics, performance tuning, Extended Events, and helping accidental/involuntary DBAs figure out how SQL Server works. Erin is an active member of the SQL Server community, has volunteered for PASS at the local and national level, and is a regular speaker at conferences like SQLintersection and the PASS Summit. Outside of time with family and friends, she enjoys running, spinning, movies, and all things chocolate. All of our meetings are open to the public, open to students, folks looking to get into the field and those looking to move up! Please spread the word and come prepared to learn and share your knowledge and experience!

Join us Wednesday, 11/14/2018 at the Alliance Safety Council for this month's user group! This month will be out speaker idol where we'll have 5 short form presentations by local speakers plus a demo presentation by this month's sponsor Quest Software!  

Speaker idol generally tends to be one of our more entertaining meetings of the year.  Come get a few nuggets of knowledge and get your final geek-friend fix before your holidays gets into full swing, as we won't be meeting again until January!

Agenda:

• 5:45 - 6:15: Introduction/Food and Drinks

• 6:15 - 7:30: Presentations

• 7:30 - Until: Open forum for questions

Contestant Topics:

• Theming Bootstrap
• Intro to Extended Events
• Embedded PowerBI: What Good is Data if Nobody Sees it?
• The Option Pattern: A pattern for eliminiating bugs like null-pointer exceptions, unhandled exceptions, and race conditions
• The Vim text editor

All of our meetings are open to the public, open to students, folks looking to get into the field and those looking to move up! Please spread the word and come prepared to learn and share your knowledge and experience!

This month's meeting is brought to you by Quest Software!

 See you there!

Wednesday, October 10, 2018
5:45 PM

Location: Louisiana Tech Park - Location Information

Agenda:

• 5:45 - 6:15: Introduction/Food and Drinks

• 6:15 - 7:30: Presentations

• 7:30 - Until: Open forum for questions

Main Presentation:

Advanced DAX - Mitchell Pearson

The data analysis expression (DAX) language is easy, most Power BI users learn DAX in days, if not hours! From there the analytical value of data models can be significantly improved with minimal effort by using simple DAX calculations. Eventually, every power bi user comes to the realization that there is much more to the DAX language than they could have ever imagined. 

Unfortunately, the gap between the basics of DAX and advanced applications of DAX is quite wide. In this session, you will start building the knowledge necessary to “bridge” that gap so that you can author, with confidence, DAX solutions that solve complex business problems.

Lightning Round:

Intro to Extended Events - John Wells

It's time to go all in on Extended Events! In this quick demo, I will go over Extended Events, show you how easy they are to set up and my favorite Event that makes capturing code simple! 

Bios:

Mitchell Pearson is a Business Intelligence Consultant and the Training Content manager for Pragmatic Works. Mitchell has experience developing enterprise level BI Solutions using the full suite of products offered by Microsoft (SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, & Power BI). Mitchell is very active in the community presenting at SQL Saturday events, PASS virtual chapters, the Power BI World Tour and giving free webinars for Pragmatic Works. Mitchell can also be found blogging at mitchellpearson.com.

Originally from Southern California, John Wells is enjoying the slower pace here in Louisiana. He continues his journey with PowerShell and Performance Tuning. If he is not at a SQLSaturday event or a LSU game, he is grilling something or killing some crawfish! Actually he smokes more than he grills, but when he says this people look at him funny.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018
5:45 PM

Alliance Safety Council
10099 N Reiger Rd
Baton Rouge, la 70809 

Agenda:

• 5:45 - 6:15: Introduction/Food and Drinks

• 6:15 - 7:30: Presentations

• 7:30 - Until: Open forum for questions

This week we will be doing BBQ for dinner so please RSVP so that we get an accurate head count!

Main Presentations:

Building Component Based UIs with Asp.Net Core Razor Page - Bryan McCoy

Asp.Net Razor pages are the newest aspect of the Asp.Net toolbox. In this talk we will go over some of the basic features of Razor Pages as well as how to design and build components and component based UIs.

Introduction to PowerApps - Devin Knight

In this session, you’ll learn how to create your first application using PowerApp. PowerApps is part of the Power Platform from Microsoft and provides a business-friendly way of creating applications quickly that can integrate with the Microsoft Power BI and Flow platforms for visualizing and moving data. This technology is one of the hottest new offerings from Microsoft and included in your Office 365 subscription.

Lightning Round:

TBA

Bios:

Bryan McCoy is a Software Developer who primarily focuses on the web side of things. He has worked for the City of Baton Rouge, various consulting companies both locally and in Chicago, and now works for BCBSLA. By day he focuses on the Microsoft stack, but by night he loves all things Linux. He spends most of his time programming in C# and/or Javascript with frameworks such as Asp.Net Core, AngularJs, and React.

Devin Knight a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and the Training Director at Pragmatic Works. He is an author of seven SQL Server and Business Intelligence books and speaks at conferences like PASS Summit, PASS Business Analytics Conference, SQL Saturdays and Code Camps. He is also a contributing member to several PASS Virtual Chapters. Making his home in Jacksonville, FL, Devin is the Vice President of the local Power BI User Group and SQL Server User Group (JSSUG).