Thursday, February 18, 2021

Presentation Time - The Golden Hammer @ The Online ColdFusion Meetup

Online ColdFusion Meetup
On Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 11a-12p CST, come check out my presentation, "The Golden Hammer: Confessions of a Recovering Database Abuser" with Charlie Arehart and  The Online ColdFusion Meetup.

I've given this talk once before, about 200 years ago, during the early days of COVID, way back in May 2020, at the Into The Box online conference. That was the first time I spoke, and this will be the second. Hopefully I'll be able to teach you something while also being at least a little entertaining. 

I'll be talking about some of the database mistakes I made when I was a budding developer. I've learned quite a bit about databases since the early 2000s, and as my SQL knowledge expanded I began to realize that I had developed some bad habits and some of my biggest problems were self-inflicted. Today, databases have grown much larger, but they've also become significantly smarter. In a smaller system, many problems are covered up. In a database with only a few thousand records, you won't notice the difference between a query that takes 2 ms to run vs one that takes 200ms. But when the database has millions of records, that same query may take 20 seconds. That's can become extremely troublesome, and it's not really something a user has the patience for. 

I used to blame a lot on the server hardware, or insufficient memory, or the slow network or whatever else wasn't my query code. Until I had a DBA show me that a report that took several hours to complete could run in a few minutes, with nothing more than changes to the database and queries.

Hopefully some of the things I go over will help some of you write better SQL that will make your applications fly. 

Join the Meetup here

And here's the link to the video stream. Or at least the link to what will become the video stream after my presentation's over.

Also, don't forget to sign up for The Online ColdFusion Meetup Group. Charlie has been putting these together for quite some time, and it's always been a fantastic place to find information.

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WRAP UP (FEB 25, 2021):

Thank you to all who attended. If there were any questions I didn't answer, please feel free to reach out to me, and I'll do my best to address them. 

YouTube Recording: LINK (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2t6ulM4hY&list=PLG2EHzEbhy0-QirMKgSxhjkUyTSSTvHjL)
Presentation Slides: LINK (https://www.dropbox.com/s/50bvj39fgs6q1e8/preso_ShawnOden_GoldenHammer_OCFMG20210225.pdf?dl=0)