2013 has started great and the SQL community is already brimming with events. At some of these events you can come say hi. I’ll be glad you do!

These are the events with dates and locations that I know I’ll be speaking at so far.

February 16th: SQL Saturday #198 - Vancouver, Canada

The session I’ll present in Vancouver is

SQL Impossible: Restoring/Undeleting a table

Yes, you read the title right. No, it's not about the usual "one table per partition" and "restore full backup then copy the data over" methods. No, there are no 3rd party tools involved. Just you and your SQL Server. Yes, it's crazy. No, it's not for production purposes. And yes, that's why it's so much fun. Prepare to dive into the world of data pages, log records, deletes, truncates and backups and how it all works together to get your table back from the endless void. Want to know more? Come and see!

This is an advanced level session where we’ll dive into the internals of data pages, transaction log records and page restores.

March 8th-9th: SQL Saturday #194 - Exeter, UK

In Exeter I’ll be presenting twice.

On the first day I’ll have a full day precon titled:

From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch

This pre-con will give you insight into both of the current tracing technologies in SQL Server. The old SQL Trace which has served us well over the past 10 or so years is on its way out because the overhead and details it produces are no longer enough to deal with today's loads. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. Mastering Extended Events requires learning at least one new skill: XML querying.

The second session I’ll have on Saturday titled:

SQL Injection from website to SQL Server

SQL Injection is still one of the biggest reasons various websites and applications get hacked. The solution as everyone tells us is simple. Use SQL parameters. But is that enough? In this session we'll look at how would an attacker go about using SQL Injection to gain access to your database, see its schema and data, take over the server, upload files and do various other mischief on your domain.

This is a fun session that always brings out a few laughs in the audience because they didn’t realize what can be done.

April 23rd-25th: NTK conference - Bled, Slovenia (Slovenian website only)

This is a conference with history. This year marks its 18th year running.

It’s a relatively large IT conference that focuses on various Microsoft technologies like .Net, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange, Security, etc…

The main session’s language is Slovenian but this is slowly changing so it’s becoming more interesting for foreign attendees. This year it’s happening in the beautiful town of Bled in the Alps. The scenery alone is worth the visit, wouldn’t you agree?

And this year there are quite a few well known speakers present!

Session title isn’t known yet.

May 2nd-4th: SQL Bits XI – Nottingham, UK

SQL Bits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe. It’s a 3 day conference with top speakers and content all dedicated to SQL Server.

The session I’ll present here is an hour long version of the precon I’ll give in Exeter.

From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch

The session description is the same as for the Exeter precon but we'll focus more on how the Extended Events work with only a brief overview of old SQL Trace architecture.