The technique of Recency Frequency Intensity/Monetary is a powerful analytical technique for identifying data patterns as well as business performance. An introduction to the technique will be given, however the main focus of the session will be on demonstrating on how RFI/M can be performed using a number of SQL features such as Data Windowing, the OVER clause and PARTITION BY, CROSS APPLY and Common Table Expressions and how you can nest the table expressions. The session should be of benefit to both inexperienced and experienced SQL coders and analysts, each construct will be explained as well as the query plans produced. Demo's will be done on AdventureWorks which we actually discover is going out of business!

SQL Azure is Microsoft’s new strategy for storing your data in the cloud, but what to do when you exceed the 10/50GB limit. This is where sharding or partitioning comes into play – this session shows you how it can be done in an OLTP system and show you some of the common pitfalls of SQL azure as we have discoverd in analyzing SQL Azure as an alternative to onsite SQL Server instances at different clients.