Search results matching tags 'PASS' and 'Optimization'

PASS Summit 2011 - Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory - Demos

Adam Machanic — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:23:00 GMT

What a rush. Standing on the stage in an almost-full 1,000-person room, I (very) momentarily wondered what I'd been thinking when I submitted a 500-level talk for the biggest SQL Server conference in the world. But despite a rough start--my laptop crashed and I had to reboot it two minutes into the talk--I found my rhythm and the entire 90 minutes went by in a flash. I wish I'd been able to take 90 more!

The scene? PASS Summit 2011. Friday, October 14, 10:15 a.m. (Room 6E, to be exact.) The last day of one of the best PASS Summits I've had the pleasure of attending.

The topic? A fairly obscure area of SQL Server, called workspace memory. Here's the abstract for the talk:

Query Tuning Mastery: Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory
As SQL Server professionals, we often think of memory in vague, instance-level terms: buffer pool, procedure cache, Virtual Address Space, and so on. But certain tasks require a more in-depth focus, and query tuning is one of them. Large, complex queries need memory in which to work--workspace memory--and understanding the how's, when's, and why's of this memory can help you create queries that run in seconds rather than minutes. This session will teach you how to guide the query processor to grant enough memory for top performance, while also keeping things balanced for the sake of concurrency. You will learn advanced monitoring techniques, expert-level application of specialized query hints, and the memory internals needed to put it all together. If you work with large queries and are serious about achieving scalability and consistently great performance, you owe it to yourself to attend this session.

If you were in the audience, I thank you for choosing my session over the many others that were running concurrently. I had a great time, and I hope you did too.

The demos for the talk are attached to this post. Apologies, but I am not sharing the deck at this time as I'm going to be integrating it into a larger course that I hope to start delivering next year. (Through Data Education, naturally!)

Enjoy! And as always, let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Where Can You Find Me the Rest of This Year?

Adam Machanic — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:28:00 GMT

Autumn is creeping inevitably closer here in the US, and that means that speaking season is about to kick into high gear. Here's my current schedule for the remainder of the year:

September 8, 17:00 GMT (online) - 24 Hours of PASS webcast: "Baseline Basics or: Who Broke the Database?"

In this session, excerpted from my PASS Summit precon, I'll explain the whys and hows of using baselines to assist with performance tuning. If you find yourself more often than not tuning reactively rather than proactively, this session is for you. This is a free webcast, so why not join in?

September 8, 18:30 EDT (Waltham, MA) - New England SQL Server Users Group: "Windowing Functions in SQL Server 2008, Denali, and Beyond"

Two in one day! This session will kick off the 2011/2012 New England SQL Server season, and will cover what are (in my ever-so-humble opinion) the most important T-SQL enhancements in the past three versions of SQL Server: windowing function enhancements. I'll discuss what's there in today's shipping versions, and the new and incredibly powerful functionality that Denali brings to the table. If you're in the Boston area, don't miss it!

September 17 (Atlanta, GA) - SQL Saturday #89: (Two Talks)

After the great time I had at this year's TechEd show in Atlanta I could hardly wait to get back. Luckily, the fantastic SQL Server community in the Atlanta area scheduled this event, which gave me the perfect excuse to pack my bags for a return trip. The speaker lineup for this event is rock-solid, and I'll be contributing with two talks: my introductory dive into SQL Server parallelism, and an overview of my 15 favorite activity monitoring dynamic management objects. This should be a great event by anyone's standards, and it's free, so if you live nearby you have literally no excuse not to attend.

October 11, 08:30 PDT (Seattle, WA) - PASS Community Summit Pre-Conference Seminar: No More Guessing! An Enlightened Approach to Performance Troubleshooting

No more guessing! It's not just a catchphrase; it's a way of life. When faced with performance problems we have a choice: we can either run around panicking, wasting everyone's time (including our own), or we can use the huge amount of information at our disposal to figure out what's actually wrong and fix it. As the calm and collected type, I prefer the second option, and so should you. If you'll be attending the PASS conference, join me on Tuesday to learn how you, too, can quickly and accurately pinpoint the root cause of your performance issues.

October 12-14 (Seattle, WA) - PASS Community Summit Spotlight Session: Query Tuning Mastery: Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory

Your query is running, and it needs to sort some data. Or to hash some data. Or to perform a parallel operation. These things take memory, and as any SQL Server professional knows, in the world of SQL Server memory is worth much, much more than its weight in gold (even given today's hugely-inflated prices). Attend this session to learn the ins and outs of workspace memory: what it is, why it's needed, where the memory comes from, and most importantly, how to control it to make certain queries faster and other queries not have to wait as long. Workspace memory tuning is a mostly untapped performance opportunity that many DBAs can heavily benefit from learning how to leverage.

November 1-3 (Las Vegas, NV) - SQL Server Connections: (Three Talks)

My final speaking engagement of the year will be at the always-fun SQL Server Connections show in Vegas. (It's in Vegas! How could it not be fun?!) I'll be doing three talks during the course of the show: An introductory talk on my favorite topic the past couple of years, parallelism in SQL Server; a much more advanced parallelism talk to build on that one; and a talk on the various dynamic management objects that can be used in the quest for ultimate SQL Server performance. Save a spot for me at the poker table!

I'm really looking forward to these events. If you're going to be there let me know in the comments, and/or feel free to find me at any of the shows and say hi. (Buying me a drink or two wouldn't hurt either.) See you there!

TechEd 2011 - Performance Tuning and Optimization in SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server Code Named "Denali"

Adam Machanic — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:05:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who took the time out of their conference experience to join Mike Wachal and me for yesterday's session on SQL Server performance tuning!

For those who weren't there, we focused in on troubleshooting techniques, highlighting some of the key DMVs and new Extended Events features that will help with proactive diagnosis of problems. My section, in particular, was a bit of a taste of some of the sessions I've submitted for this fall's PASS summit: I showed a brief demo of troubleshooting using my No More Guessing methodology, and applied it to the problem of workspace memory contention. The sessions for PASS cover these topics in detail, so if you find this area interesting please vote here.

The demo script I showed yesterday is attached, along with a copy of the latest versions of my Who is Active stored procedure and the SQLQueryStress tool. Feel free to leave a comment below or drop me a line via e-mail if you have any questions.