Almost two months have passed since my last blog post. And while it’s true that I’ve had (much) longer breaks, I do have a good reason now. All the time that I would normally at least in part spend on preparing new blog posts is now reserved for preparing presentations for a few upcoming events. I’ll give you an overview – who knows, maybe you’ll have a chance to attend one of them and meet me there? I’m looking forward to it!

On Saturday, February 25, I’ll present my session on “Advanced Indexing” at SQL Saturday 108, in Redmond, WA. This session covers included columns, filtered indexes, indexed views, tools for finding the right indexes, and the dangers of over-indexing. I see several top speakers on the agenda, so this is definitely an event you don’t want to miss out – especially considering the price! Unfortunately, I hear that the event is fully booked, but you can still get yourself added to the waiting list. If other people have to cancel, you may get a chance to get admitted.

I’ll stay in the Redmond area the whole next week, attending the MVP Summit. Not as a presenter, but to soak up all the information the product team wishes to share with us, and to give feedback on current and planned functionality. And to have lots of funs with my fellow MVPs, of course!

Shortly after that, I’ll be heading to SQL Saturday 115, in Lisbon, Portugal. I will first present a full-day training session on database design on Friday, March 16. The design method I’ll teach is one that observes all the principles of modelling I presented in some previous blog posts. The next day, I’ll present two sessions: the one on advanced indexing I already mention above; and one about the MERGE statement, that covers not only the intended use but also several other interesting possibilities of this statement – and warns about some caveats that you need to know if you want to use MERGE. This event has an awesome line-up of speakers, so if you see a chance to go to Lisbon, do so!

And finally, I’ll head to London for SQLBits X, which lasts from Thursday, March 29 until Saturday, March 31. On Thursday, I’ll present a training day on database design, so if you can’t attend in Lisbon, you get a second chance in London. I then have a day off on Friday, which gives me a chance to attend some of the superb sessions that are scheduled for this day; on Saturday, I will present a session on columnar indexes, a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2012 that has the potential to yield enormous performance benefits for queries that have to process large tables of read-only (or mainly read-only) data. In this session, I will peek below the hood and disclose a bit about how this new kind of indexes works, and why that results in such enormous performance benefits.

So, if you were waiting for my next blog post with actual technical content, I have to disappoint you. That will probably have to wait until after these busy conference weeks are over.