Yesterday SQLPASS revealed the sessions that were selected for the upcoming SQLPASS summit in Seattle from November 6 – 9. I’m very happy to announce that I’m presenting 2 regular sessions and a precon about SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting! I’m really happy to have a chance to present a precon, because this was one of my biggest dreams when I first presented about SQL Service Broker back in 2006 in Seattle. I have presented at every summit since then (expect 2008 for some personal reasons), and I have taken one step after one step to finally reach that ultimate goal.

I have already presented last year a session about Advanced SQL Server Troubleshooting (which I’m doing this year again!), and it was a real blast: it was the largest session with more than 900 attendees. I never thought about that back in 2006, when I presented about a very niche technology like Service Broker in front of a few people. So I have really enjoyed my SQLPASS journey through the last years, and I’m really happy to finally ending up with my own precon about one of my favourite topics – SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting:

Practical SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting

Learn how to configure the Windows OS, SQL Server, and your database for optimal performance. In this pre-conference workshop, we’ll start by taking a default installation of SQL Server and running an OLTP workload with several hundred users to generate our initial baseline for performance tuning and troubleshooting. Throughout the day, we’ll work with various areas of SQL Server to implement different performance optimizations and then see how those changes impact the throughput of our initial test workload. At the end of the day, we’ll have a well-performing SQL Server that can handle a much larger workload than the initial (default) installation.

Topics for the day include: 
• Windows OS settings 
• Storage configuration 
• SQL Server instance settings 
• Database settings 
• Index and statistics maintenance 
• Locking, blocking, and deadlocking 
• Memory management

Besides the precon I’m also presenting two regular conference sessions:

ColumnStore Indexes: The Turbobooster inside SQL Server 2012

Can you improve your data warehouse query performance by 100 times just by adding one additional index? With SQL Server 2012’s new columnstore index, the paradigm for DW queries has changed completely. In this session, we will look at the details of the columnstore index, when it does and doesn’t make sense, and current restrictions.

We will explore row store vs. column store and how to change data in tables that have a columnstore index defined. We will also discuss segment elimination, batch mode execution, query memory grants, and how you can ensure that SQL Server will use your columnstore index as effectively as possible. Then, you will see a real-world example of how fast the columnstore index works on a table with more than 2 billion records – on commodity hardware.

Advanced SQL Server Troubleshooting

It’s Friday, 5:00pm, and you just received an email alert that your SQL Server has enormous performance problems! What can you do? How can you identify the problem and resolve it fast? Which tools does SQL Server give you for this task? 

In this session, we will look at the key resources that SQL Server uses – storage, CPU, memory – and how you can effectively troubleshoot them. You will learn how to identify performance bottlenecks and how to resolve them.

I’m looking forward to see you all very soon in Seattle, and thanks for attending all of my sessions in the past 6 years!

Thanks

-Klaus