November is conference month for me, and I'll be giving away vouchers for signed copies of my new book, to be mailed to the winners as soon as I receive my author copies.

I'll be giving away one each day of my seminars in London and Seattle!

The London seminars, for SQLKnowHow, are taking place  the week of November 3-7, so I'll actually be out of the country the day of the US national elections. I haven't figured out if that is good news or bad news yet; I guess it depends on who wins.

Monday, November 3 is SQL Server Data Storage Formats: Internals, Performance and Best Practices. This will be the first delivery of the seminar I'll be presenting for my preconference session at PASS.

This seminar will describe all the different formats available for storing data, including the new filestream data, compressed data and sparse data columns in SQL Server 2008. We’ll look at the metadata to determine exactly what is being stored and where, and discuss best practices for choosing the particular type of storage format.

Tuesday, November 4 is  SQL Server Concurrency Control: Locking, Blocking and Row Versioning

In this seminar I'll look at the concurrency enhancements made in SQL Server 2005 based on  row-level versioning which implements optimistic concurrency. We’ll compare concurrency management with row versioning to concurrency management with locking and blocking. We'll look at the metadata that stores information about your transactions, and look at tools for troubleshooting concurrency problems.  We will also look at the locking enhancements added to SQL Server 2008.

Wednesday - Friday, November5-7 is SQL Server Data Internals and Tuning

This seminar is a 3-day version of my 5-day SQL Server Internals and Tuning class that I have delivered all over the world. The seminar includes extensive demonstrations that illustrate the details of SQL Server internals as well as tuning techniques. This course will be presented on SQL Server 2008 and cover features specific to that version, but most of the information is relevant to SQL Server 2005 and some is relevant to SQL Server 2000. Topics to be covered include the following:

• SQL Server Storage Metadata
• Tools for exploring storage structures
• Physical Storage Structures
• Index Design and Tuning
• Query Processing and Query Plans
• Optimization and Recompilation
• Query Tuning Tips and Techniques

So for each of these 5 days, I'll be giving away a book a day, plus other giveaways as well.

Then later in November, on 18 November, I'll be giving a preconference session at PASS, in Seattle.  In addition to vouchers for my new book, I'll have a couple of copies of my SQL Server 2005 books to give away.

So hopefully I'll see many of you soon!

~Kalen