It’s just coming up in just a few more weeks… this is the first SQL Saturday in Fargo.  North Dakota is one of the few states that hasn’t had a SQL Saturday.  With the help of my fellow PASS Regional Mentor Ted Krueger (Blog | @Onpnt), my wife Sarah Strate (Blog | @DanceM0m), and my good friend Jes Borland (Blog | @grrl_geek), we’re working on changing that for North Dakota.

As part of the preparation, we’ve got the schedule posted.  For an area without a lot of PASS activity or membership, we had a great response to the call for speakers.  We even ended up having to turn a few people down, which was unfortunate   The schedule, though, looks great and features local and national speakers, as well as veterans to speaking at SQL Saturdays and some new faces.  The topics being covered offer a great opportunity for some training on SQL Server and networking with a growing community.

As for myself, I’ll be presenting my session from last year’s PASS Summit:

Discovering the Plan Cache

Execution plans are stored after execution in the plan cache. This metadata about how queries are executed can provide insight into how your SQL Server environment is functioning. By using XQuery to browse and search the plan cache you can find potential performance issues and opportunities to tune your queries. This information can be used to help reduce issues related to parallelism, shift queries from using scans to using seek operations, or discover exactly which queries are using what indexes. All of this and more is readily available through the plan cache. In this session we will explore the plan cache and start you on the road to discovery.

If you know anyone in or around the Fargo area, please let them know about the event.  Without a user group in the area, it is more challenging that usual to get the word out to people; which means any help letting people know is very welcome.  For those reading that are around Fargo, check out the SQL Saturday information on the sight and get yourself registered.  It’s a great time to learn about SQL Server and all of the training is FREE.