Yesterday I attended Twin Cities Code Camp 4. This was my third code camp. It was probably one of my favorite ones. I went down to the cities with James, Manohar and Jordan. We also met Joel D a former developer where I work. It was kind of nice that they had some classes that were not strictly .NET. They actually had a RoR session, although it was pretty basic. The only thing that was mentioned that I hadn’t learned yet was the concept of using tasks to populate table in your database. It was nice to confirm that I was on the right track with rails. No pun intended! I am hoping that their might be a more advanced rails session for Code Camp 5. The second class I attended was regarding new features in SQL Server 2008, SSIS and SSAS. This was a pretty interesting class, however towards the end my mind was wondering. It was also kind of worrisome how he kept using words like “flaky”, “unstable” and others when describing features. He won’t be a salesman anytime soon for SQL Server. Anywho, some of the new features that I thought were cool that I am looking forward to are:
- Intellisense in SQL Server Management Studio.
- Regions – These are similar to what you see in C# code, however, there are some caveats according to the speaker. You can’t have comments in your regions. Pretty stupid if you ask me.
- Insert multiple rows using one insert statement. This one i will use. I have actually attempted to do this before, so I am looking forward to this one.
- Grouping Sets – Didn’t catch this one totally. If your dying to find out, google it.
- Merge (Upsert) – This is a new keyword and functionality that I know I will use as well. This is where you have two tables and if a record is in one and is in the other it will run an update statement. If the record in one isn’t in the other one it will run an insert statement.
- Star join query optimizations for joining facts to dimensions.
- Change Data Capture – This is a feature that records DML changes for a table to another table, so you can track data changes. The current implementation does not allow you to record who is making the change. Also, if you want to add another column to a table you have to set this up all over and lose all your previous history. Just another anti-agile feature from microsoft. Come on, who has database tables that don’t ever change.
- Sparse columns – This was demonstrated and was pretty cool. For two given tables, one with sparse specified on a column and one without, it made a huge difference in the size of the table with the same data inserted.
- Filtered indexes.
- Hierarchical Data Type – Here is a good post on this. Oracle has had this for quite sometime. You can see how to use it here with Oracle. It is pretty straight forward. I used this in queries at my past job and having this can remove some craziness in your data model.
I also went to “Things every ASP.NET developer should know.” Don’t let the title fool you into thinking that it was for beginners though. He got into some interesting stuff with IIS and querying IIS logs to figure out problems, HTTP Compression and setting expiration of content in IIS. “Writing better code” was also a great session by Jason Bock, the organizer of this event. One thing that he mentioned that resonated with me was keeping your coding standards to less than three pages. This is something that I think was a very good point. Currently the standards we use are many more pages than that, not to mention the SQL Server standards on top of that. I will be reducing our coding standards in the next couple of weeks.
Overall, it was a great code camp. I feel fortunate to be able to attend as do my teams. Free food, free event with high quality content. You can’t go wrong!
