A few days ago, SQLPASS opened the voting for the precon’s and sessions for the annual SQLPASS community summit. I’ve also submitted 4 sessions and one precon, and I would be very happy if you can vote for them. Here are the 4 session abstracts:

Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting
It’s Friday, 05:00pm. You are just receiving an email that informs you that your SQL Server has enormous performance problems! What can you do? How can you identify the problem and resolve it fast? Which tools provides you SQL Server for this task? In this session you will see a lot of different tools with which you can do effective SQL Server troubleshooting. You will learn how to identify performance bottlenecks with those tools, and how to resolve the identified bottlenecks.

Service Broker: Message in a bottle
Service Broker provides several new key features for building SOA applications directly with SQL Server 2008. This “No slides – just code” session shows you, in just 75 minutes, how to build an SOA-based, secure, reliable, and distributed messaging application with SQL Server 2008 Service Broker from scratch. In this session you will see:
*) The core architectural concepts behind Service Broker
*) How you can do SOA with Service Broker – a practical approach
*) Routing between several SQL Server instances
*) Implementing reliable messaging
*) Securing a Service Broker conversation between you and your trading partners
*) Using managed code in Service Broker applications

SQL Server Database Internals
Do you already wanted to know how SQL Server 2008 stores a database file physically on the hard drive? In this session you will learn the internal structure of a SQL Server 2008 database file, and how SQL Server stores tables and indices internally in the file system. Furthermore you will see the DBCC T-SQL command in action, with which you can analyze the internal storage format of your database files. All these information from this session helps you in your next database design to get out the last percent of performance from your new database solution.

Troubleshooting SQL Server TempDb
For the most DBAs and DEVs the TempDb is a crystal ball. But the TempDb is the most critical component in a SQL Server installation and is used by your applications and also internally by SQL Server. TempDb is also one of the performance bottlenecks by design, because it is shared across the whole SQL Server instance. In this session we will take a closer look into the TempDb, how it is used by SQL Server, and how you can troubleshoot performance problems inside TempDb and how you can resolve them.

I’ve also submitted my workshop titled “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Performance Monitoring and Troubleshooting” as a precon for SQLPASS:
It’s Monday, 10:30am. You are just receiving an email that informs you that your SQL Server has enormous performance problems! What can you do? How can you identify the problem and resolve it fast? Which tools provides you SQL Server for this task? In this workshop you will see you can do effective performance monitoring and troubleshooting with SQL Server. You will learn how to identify performance bottlenecks with tools and information provided by SQL Server and how to resolve the identified performance bottlenecks.
We will start by giving a general overview about SQL Server and the life-time of a query inside SQL Server. You will learn about Wait Statistics and how you can use them to identify your performance bottlenecks. After laying out the foundation we will move on with SQL Server Profiler and the Windows Performance Monitor. We will also have a look into the TempDb, because TempDb is a performance bottleneck by design, because it is shared across a whole SQL Server instance. We will also have a deep look into Memory Management and how SQL Server interacts with the Windows OS to acquire and release memory. Finally you will learn about SQLDiag and SQL Nexus which are 2 tools for advanced performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

I’ve already done this precon at SQLbits a few weeks ago in Brighton/UK with about 40 people in it, and got amazing feedback on it. Here are some feedbacks, so that you can get a picture what you can expect from this precon:

• “I attended the one-day workshop that Klaus ran at the recent SQLBits conference in Brighton, and it has been the most useful training I have attended in years. It was not just the level of knowledge presented, but the way that Klaus explains concepts in ways that really make them stick, which makes it so valuable. I came away from the course as a better DBA, armed with a better understanding and new practical tools which I can immediately use, plus he has opened my eyes to different ways to approach the whole area of performance tuning and troubleshooting. I can recommend Klaus very highly as a trainer, and I have no doubts about his ability to deliver as a consultant.”
• “I just want to say that I think it was an amazing workshop and gave me  a lot of tips and a better understanding on SQL Server. I work as an administrator and only have 20 % of my time to SQL Server so the workshop helped a lot.”
• “Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this training. I learned a lot of good things that I can apply at work now.”

Here’s the link for the session/precon voting: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/Speakers/SessionPreferencing.aspx

-Klaus