Last Saturday, September 17, I was lucky to be able to present two sessions at an excellent SQL Saturday in the Atlanta area. The day drew a large crowd and had a great speaker lineup. All in all, a huge success, and a very well-managed event. Congratulations to the organizers!
One of the highlights for me, aside from speaking, was helping out with logistics the night before and creating a cocktail for the event. Check out Audrey Hammonds's blog for details.
My two sessions were:
"SQL Server Parallelism and Performance"
Over the past five years,
multi-core processors have made the jump from semi-obscure to
commonplace in the data center. Today we regularly expect to see 16, 32,
or 64 cores in even our lower-end servers. Are you getting everything
you can out of the wealth of processing power at your disposal? Attend
this session to take a detailed look at how and why SQL Server processes
queries in parallel, as well as methods for controlling parallel
processing via configuration options, the Resource Governor, and
query-level hints. This session will enable you to immediately evaluate,
understand, and improve the state of parallel processing on your
servers.
and
"15 Powerful SQL Server Dynamic Management Objects"
The Dynamic Management
Objects--a set of views and functions that first shipped with SQL Server
2005--are a window into the inner workings of your SQL Server instance.
Locked within is the data you need to help solve virtually any
performance problem, quickly debug issues, and gain insight into what's
actually happening on your server, right now. This session is a
fast-paced tour of the ins, outs, whys, hows, and even pitfalls of 15 of
the most important views and functions--information gleaned from heavy
use of the objects in a number of environments. You will learn how to
understand transaction behavior, locking, wait statistics, sessions,
requests, and much more. Attend this session and you will be the master
of your SQL Server instance.
I promised to share the slides and demos from the second session, and those are attached to this post.
Many thanks to everyone who attended my sessions and for all of the positive feedback I received! (I would also thank anyone who gave me negative feedback, but in this case the worst I received was that I had a typo on one of my slides.) I had a great time, and hope to return to Atlanta again sometime soon.