Who’s flying the Plane? What IT can learn from plane crashes

• This is a one hour presentation that compares and contrasts two airplane crashes, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in 1972 and the Miracle on the Hudson in 2009 and how in the first case, a perfectly good plane flew into the ground, killing 101 people and in the second place, a plane with no engine thrust, over one of the most populous cities in the world can land without any fatalities.
• Ideal for both IT and management to attend
• I then take some of the lessons learned from this and explain what IT can learn from them.
• Will you land your plane safely in the Hudson, or crash into the Everglades?
• “I know I got some interesting and useful facts on procedure out of it, I have heard nothing but good things about the whole lecture.” – Frank Hill – RPI Sr. Systems Programmer

Whoa, Backup. What Happened

• A 101 Level talk on SQL Server backup and how it works
• Ideal for an entry level SQL Server team

Tips that Saved my Bacon

• There’s saying, never perform small miracles, people to rely on them, but isn’t it useful to have a few in your back-pocket.
• Everyone knows log-shipping is great for DR recovery, but what about using it for minor issues, like a delete or update gone bad?
• Want to move a large table someplace else (like that “oh it’ll just be a small audit table, it won’t grow large because we’ll write the functionality later to keep it small” and they never do?
• UNC backups… an often overlooked but useful option for making a backup AND getting it off your server.
• Run a small operation where too many fingers have access to the operational DB and you want to catch them?
• These are some of the tricks I’ve picked up over the years and used more than once to perform small miracles and have saved my bacon or the bacon of others

So You Want To Speak?

• Tips on how to become a speaker
• Tips on picking a topic
• Tips on building a good presentation

A SQL Server for under $200!

• Everyone is talking the cloud and Azure
• But what if you need something smaller?
• This session focuses on how I found a tiny computer and installed SQL Server on it
• The entire budget was under $200

A Dive into the System Databases

• We’ve all seen them
• We might know a bit about them
• But what can we do with them?
• Especially the Model and MSDB databases
• And did you know there are 5 of them? Sort of.

Access SQL Server with PowerShell

• If there’s one tool that you haven’t picked up but should, it’s PowerShell
• Some people think PowerShell is just a funky version of Windows CMD shell
• Others are intimidated by it
• This talk will introduce you to some basic concepts and show you how to leverage scripting to automate some of your tasks.