A few weeks ago, I got my SQLBits attendee feedback, and therefore I want to talk about it today. As you might know I have presented 2 sessions in Telford: one about Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures, and another one about the Dangerous Beauty of Bookmark Lookups.
Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures
Let’s have a look at the first session about Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures. This will be – BTW – the same session that I will present at the SQLPASS Summit in Seattle in a few weeks. In this session I start by talking about thread synchronization mechanisms, and how SQL Server implements these mechanisms with Latches. To give you a more concrete idea about Latches, I also talk about the Last Page Insert Latch Contention that can occur on a Clustered Index. The following picture shows the feedback score of this session.
Not that bad ☺. I delivered this session at SQLBits for the first time in public, so I’m really happy that it worked out very well, and that attendees liked it. It’s always a gamble whether people like a session, or not. I also want to share a few feedback comments from my attendees:
“For the sessions I attended, this was the stand out one. Delivered by Klaus who is a master at speaking/training. Good pace, subtle humour thoroughly loved the session.“
“Great really detailed session from Klaus. I was surprised it was a little bit quiet – I’m sure Klaus packed out a room double the size in Liverpool a few years ago / possibly too specialist for most, but I enjoyed it.“
I also thought the same about my session, when I was finished. I had quite a large room, but the room was only half full. It’s quite an in-depth session (around level 400 – 500), maybe this has scared away some people from attending it. But trust me: I don’t bite! Let’s see how this works in Seattle, because there I also have a large room for my session.
The Dangerous Beauty of Bookmark Lookups
I have lost count of how often I have already delivered this session. I know this session inside out, and I could almost deliver it if you woke me up in the middle of the night. In the first step of this session I will always give an introduction to Bookmark Lookups, why they are needed in SQL Server, and how you can resolve them by providing a Covering Non-Clustered Index for your problematic query. And based on that foundation I go afterwards into the nasty details of Bookmark Lookups, and show several scenarios where they can lead to serious performance problems. I talk here about the so-called Tipping Point in SQL Server, for quite a long time about Parameter Sniffing, and finally about Bookmark Lookup Deadlocks, which always scares people. The following picture shows again the feedback score of this session.
It’s still quite a good result, but not as good as the previous session. Based on the feedback comments I have seen that some people thought that the session is DBA centric, but this isn’t the case. It’s a developer oriented session. Based on that great input I will rework my session abstract a little bit, so that people immediately know what they wil be getting when they attend this session. Here are some feedback comments:
”Great session, but not technical enough for DBAs; I guess this was more aimed at Developers.”
”Klaus you are a legend!!!! I loved this session!!!! The best of SQLBits!!!!”
The last comment really makes me feeling proud ☺. I always like it when I can share my passion around SQL Server with my attendees.
Thanks for your time,
-Klaus
