In preparation for SQLCruise 2010, I’ve put together a recommended reading list.  Reading the blogs, articles, and scripts in this list will help you get the most out of your time on board.

Gather Queries From Your Procedure Cache – this script from SQLServerPedia will fetch queries and their execution plans out of your SQL Server’s memory.  This can be useful to identify queries that are causing performance problems.  To find the worst queries, use “SELECT TOP 20” instead of all records, and add an ORDER BY statement with one of these:

• ORDER BY total_elapsed_time DESC will find the longest-running queries in total (not the average runtime per query)
• ORDER BY by total_worker_time DESC will find the highest CPU users
• ORDER BY execution_count will find the ones running most frequently

Try clicking on the execution plans to view them.  You can export them to XML by right-clicking anywhere in the white space of the execution plan, and click Save As.  You can save these as .sqlplan files, and bring them with you on the cruise.  In the “Tuning T-SQL Step by Step” session, we’ll walk through execution plans, how to read them, and how to make queries go faster based on what you see in the plan.

Download ClearTrace – this free utility from Bill Graziano helps make sense of trace files.  It’s like a slice-and-dice reporting engine for your Profiler results.  If you’re bringing a laptop on board, try running a trace on your challenging servers at the office.  Take the trace files, put them on your laptop, and during “Tuning T-SQL Step by Step” session, we’ll show you how to use it effectively to find the easiest-to-tune queries.

Alton Brown’s Margarita Recipe and AllRecipe’s Simple Summer Smoothie Recipe – Alton Brown hates unitaskers: things that only serve one purpose in the kitchen. His margarita recipe calls for agave nectar, something that might sound at first like a unitasker, but it serves as an excellent replacement for the honey in smoothie recipes. Agave nectar: it’s not just for margaritas anymore.

8 Steps to Better Transaction Log Throughput – Kimberly Tripp explains how to configure your log files to make your database run faster.  In our “Trouble with a Capital T: Terabyte Databases” session, we’ll talk about why this is important to master long before your database hits terabyte scale, and why it usually pops up whenever you take over a big database for the first time.  If you need help sizing your logs, check out Paul Randal’s article on transaction log sizes.

CruiseCritic – this active site boasts all kinds of tips and reviews for ships, ports, and excursions.  Take the posts with a grain of salt – some folks can’t even be happy on a cruise ship – but you can find some gems of information in here.

Rock Stars, Normal People, and You – also known as the fall and rise of Brent’s career, this story helps set the background of why Brent’s such a passionate believer in building your own brand and promoting it.  This sets the stage for our opening session, “Why We’re Here.”

How to Start a Technical Blog – in the session “What I Wish I Would Have Known When I Started,” we’ll talk about what we’ve learned along the way, building our blogs and our businesses.  When we’ve got you fired up about writing regularly, this post will help you get the infrastructure in place.

How to Make Cuban Coffee – on Sunday before the ship departs, cruisers are welcome to join me as I tour through my old neighborhood, South Beach.  We’ll do breakfast at the Van Dyk Cafe, then pick up some Cuban coffee from David’s Cafe before a morning of shopping, strolling, and sightseeing.  Before you partake, you might want to know what you’re drinking – it’s good stuff, but you certainly don’t want too much of it:

Just three working Fridays left – you’re not working on 7/31 right before SQLSaturday, are you?