At SQL Live! you’ll learn how to do more with less. Become more efficient, productive, and deliver faster, more securely, and at lower cost. You’ll get pragmatic, technical information on administration, performance and optimization — PLUS you'll get a preview of Yukon to help you plan your working strategy for tomorrow.

Developing OLAP Applications with ADO MD.NET
Andrew J. Brust
March 25, 10:30 a.m.
Until now, from .NET, your only options for creating OLAP front-ends were ADO MD — the original COM API for OLAP — and XML For Analysis (XML/A). But now, ADO MD.NET (currently in Beta), a managed wrapper for XML/A, gives you the object model convenience of ADO MD without its COM InterOp dependency. How do you use ADO MD.NET? Should you use it? How does ADO.NET tie in with these various API choices? We'll explore these issues and more.

Building OLAP Web Parts
Andy Catlin
March 25, 11:45 a.m.
Web parts are used today in an increasing number of applications, including Sharepoint, Digital Dashboards, and Outlook Today pages. Whidbey developers will use wizards to generate dashboards as the standard intranet development framework. All of these dashboards will be voracious consumers of OLAP web parts that can deliver interactive, top down reporting. Using both SQL 2000 and Yukon, We'll learn the best ways to build, synchronize, and deploy interactive OLAP W.eb parts into our dashboard applications.

Security and Deployment of Office Solutions Built with Visual Studio .NET
Eric Lippert
March 25, 12:45 p.m. (Lunchtime Session)
In this session you learn how to deploy and secure your solutions built with Visual Studio Tools for Office. Learn how to deploy code you have written in Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET to client machines or intranet locations and have that code run behind Word 2003 documents and Excel 2003 spreadsheets. Downloading arbitrary code can be dangerous, so the CLR by default restricts what code is allowed to run. This session introduces the underlying details of .NET security policy and how you can leverage managed code safely and securely in an Office 2003 solution. If you are planning on deploying applications using Visual Studio Tools for Office, you can't afford to miss this important session.

Metropolis: Trends in Information Technology
Pat Helland
March 25, 2 p.m.
This talk will examine the changes that occurred in independent and largely disconnected cities as they were rapidly connected by railroads causing dramatic shifts in standardization, manufacturing, and retail. Parallels are drawn to the current changes in information technology as independent and largely disconnected IT shops have been rapidly connected by the internet causing dramatic shifts in standardization, structured data, and business process. This analogy offers some interesting insight into where we are going in information technology and a framework to understand the current trend towards service oriented architectures and Web services in our enterprise customers.

Creating, Tuning and Deploying Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services
Bill Vaughn and Peter Blackburn
March 25, 3:15 p.m.
SQL Server Reporting Services is the much-anticipated reporting engine for any .NET ODBC or OLE DB data source. We’ll talk about the Visual Studio .NET Report Designer addin used to create the reports, the ASP.NET-based Report Server and Report Manager used to generate and retrieve the reports as well as a lot of hints, tips and tricks Peter Blackburn and I discovered in the process of writing our latest book Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server Reporting Services.

Optimizing the Oracle Database for .NET Applications
Alex Keh
March 25, 4:30 p.m.
The Oracle database is used heavily within many .NET environments. To improve application performance, it is important to understand how to tune ADO.NET for Oracle. This session focuses on Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) tuning features, best practices, and where and when to use them within your applications. This talk will provide a quick introduction to the PL/SQL stored procedure language and Visual Studio .NET integration with Oracle. New ODP.NET features will also be discussed, including Oracle XML DB integration and Whidbey support.

Building DB2 Applications with Visual Studio .NET
Leon Katsnelson
March 25, 5:45 p.m.
As a .NET developer, you will one day need to work with data stored in DB2 and other IBM data stores. This session will show you how to use DB2 tools for Visual Studio .NET and your .NET skills to build applications that work with DB2 data on virtually any operating system. You’ll also learn how to use different APIs and techniques to integrate with DB2 and build DB2 server objects such as stored procedures, triggers, and user defined functions.

What’s New for Developers in Yukon
Thomas Rizzo
March 26, 10:30 a.m.
This session will cover all the new advancements in the next generation of SQL Server code-named “Yukon.” You will learn about and see demonstrations of topics such as .NET Framework integration, native Web services support, XML datatype and XQuery support and advancements in ADO .NET. If you need to understand how SQL Server “Yukon” will deliver its new developer productivity features and benefits, you don’t want to miss this session.

Notification Services for SQL Server 2000 and Yukon
Stephen Forte
March 26, 11:45 a.m.
Send relevant and timely notifications to any user, on any device, at any time. SQL Server Notification Services is an application development platform built on top of SQL Server that matches user preferences and subscriptions with events and incoming data to generate personalized notifications for delivery in such formats as mobile phones, SMS (Short Messaging Service) aggregators, e-mail and instant messaging. Learn how to develop applications with SQL Server Notification Services using both SQL 2000 and Yukon.

Developing Word and Excel Solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office – Tips & Tricks
Paul Cornell
March 26, 12:45 p.m. (Lunchtime Session)
Go beyond the basics of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System, Version 2003 by learning tips and tricks to enable you to quickly build more robust business solutions in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 targeting Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003. In this session, you'll learn how to debug Visual Studio Tools for Office solutions, use built-in and user-defined helper functions to make your coding tasks easier, understand how to modify .NET Framework security policy using the .NET Framework 1.1 security tools, and deploy a code-signed solution using a Setup project in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Querying XML: XML Query Essentials
Don Kiely
March 26, 2 p.m.
SQL Server 2000 has always supported XML as a data format, but without any equivalent to SQL for querying the data. That will change with Yukon, which includes the W3C's XML Query Language. It's a bit like SQL but works vastly different because of the radical difference between relational data and XML's hierarchical structure. This session will cover the essentials of XQuery so that you can start exploring the new XML features in Yukon.

Indexing for Performance — Finding the Right Balance
Kimberly L. Tripp
March 26, 3:15 p.m.
There is no other area in the product where you can get better performance gains than with indexes. Ironically, this is also the most misunderstood and improperly maintained area as well. In this session we will look at what indexes are, why they are beneficial, when they can become a burden and how to get the best balance of indexes for performance. This session will cover quite a few recommendations, a very broad number of concepts — including index maintenance and numerous tips on how to get better performance without being an indexing and internals expert.

Understanding Logging and Recovery — What Programmers Always Avoid Until It's too Late!
Kimberly L. Tripp
March 26, 4:30 p.m.
When the transaction log fills (or becomes large) many developers run right for automating periodic truncation of the transaction log. While you have simplified one problem, you have created another. In this session you will learn best practices for keeping the transaction log manageable, how transaction logging affects performance and recovery as well as when to set and or change between each of the Recovery Models. Know how to minimize data loss!