SQL Cruise 2014 Workshops

Tim Ford

Establishing Baselines for Consolidation Planning (and MORE!)

In this session, Tim provides you with the understanding of the structures available in SQL Server that allow you to collect performance metrics for use in planning for consolidations and virtualizations.  An added benefit is that this same process also allows you to get an understanding of what constitutes “slow” for your environment in order to separate perception of performance issues from reality.  Dynamic Management Objects, in this case, are just the beginning.

 

Grant Fritchey

Azure:  What Is It and How Do I Get Started With It?

This session introduces you to Microsoft’s extensive set of tools built in and around Azure. We focus immediately on talking about the data storage and management aspects of the tool set. Your learning includes what Microsoft has to offer you in terms of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. We cover how to set up your own platforms for testing and developing on this new tool set in order to give you the ability to being to experiment with it in your own environment.

Statistics and Query Optimization

There are any number of tricks and traps around getting the query optimizer to provide you with an optimal execution plan that gets you your data quickly and efficiently. But, at the end of the day, the principal driving factor of the optimizer, and therefore of your queries, are the statistics that define your data. This session teaches you how those statistics are put together and maintained by SQL Server. Different types of maintenance results in different levels of accuracy within statistics so we detail what the structures and information looks like after this maintenance. Your understanding of how the optimizer works with statistics will better enable you to understand why you’re getting the performance and types of execution plans that you are getting. Understanding enables you to write better t-sql statements and deal with performance problems such as bad parameter sniffing.

Best Practices for Database Deployment

The easiest part of any deployment is running the deployment script on production. But what have you done to prepare that script for production? Was the script tested? Is the script tightly coupled with the application code?  The difference between a successful deployment and a failed or problematic deployment is all the preparation work you’ve done to ensure that you’re deploying the right script, the right way to your production environment. This session will explore best practices that you can implement to ensure that your deployments are as successful as they can be.

 

Andrew Kelly

Demystifying Performance Monitoring

Too many DBA’s lack the confidence and experience to make the right choices when combating performance problems mainly due to a lack of understanding of the key aspects of SQL Server. We will break down the core aspects of SQL Server when it comes to performance monitoring and identifying potential performance bottlenecks. We will how you exactly how easy it is to identify the bottlenecks and poor performing queries without requiring an extensive infrastructure or years of experience. And more importantly you will begin to understand how to determine the proper course of actions to correct them. Of course experience is always a factor but we can give you the confidence to get started in the right direction so you can concentrate on what’s really important and what are simply side effects. Don’t let performance issues get the best of you. Come see how to better utilize your precious time.

Query & Procedure Call Statistics

Did you know that SQL Server keeps track of almost every stored procedure you execute or ad hoc SQL call you make? Not only can we see what the call was but what resources were consumed for each type of call as well. We can use the information gathered during the previous executions to identify which queries or stored procedures we should be spending our time tuning the most and in what order to achieve the biggest ROI on our time. This information can be obtained directly from built-in dynamic management views with the supplied code so you can get started in your environment immediately without relying on tools like trace or Profiler.

 

Kevin Kline

Configuration Option and Trace Flag Secrets: Surprising Behavior at the Flick of a Switch

If you’ve been a SQL Server Database Administrator or Developer for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of various options that you can set at the instance- or database-level that can impact performance. Do you know what they are, when to use them, or what they do? And what about all of those trace flags? There are so many of them and many are undocumented. What gives? In this session, you’ll learn about a variety of ways to speed up IO, adjust memory, change plan and buffer cache behavior, debug the SQL query optimizer, and how to punch SQL Server in the face!

 

Stacia Misner

Introduction to Power BI

Microsoft has brought business intelligence to the cloud. What does this mean and how does this work? In this session, we’ll review the BI components available in the cloud BI stack. We’ll also compare and contrast functionality of the cloud BI tools with on-premises tools. After attending this session, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s possible and whether it’s time to launch your BI-in-the-cloud solution.

 

Richard Douglas

Restore Strategies: Leveling-Up Your Backup Strategy

Do you already have a backup strategy? If so you’re doing it wrong. In this session Richard will be advocating the mind shift from backup strategies to restore strategies and “backing it up” with examples of the devastating affect that having a backup strategy can have when you don’t put restoring your data first. Richard will also be examining the internals of SQL Server’s file structures to further enforce how SQL Server handles transactional consistency which is imperative to any relational database platform. Things become much simpler when you consider the purpose of a backup and the affects of the different recovery models and backup options that are available have on your customers and effectively your livelihood.

Armed with this knowledge you will be able to reduce the risks of data loss to your company and performance tune your own backup and restore scripts through a mixture of rarely used parameters and trace flags.
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