Search results matching tags 'PASS' and 'Query Tuning'

Query Tuning Mastery at PASS Summit 2012: The Video

Adam Machanic — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:49:00 GMT

An especially clever community member was kind enough to reverse-engineer the video stream for me, and came up with a direct link to the PASS TV video stream for my Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism talk, delivered at the PASS Summit last Thursday. I'm not sure how long this link will work, but I'd like to share it for my readers who were unable to see it in person or live on the stream.

Start here.

Skip past the keynote, to the 149 minute mark.

Enjoy!

Query Tuning Mastery at PASS Summit 2012: The Demos

Adam Machanic — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 04:00:00 GMT

For the second year in a row, I was asked to deliver a 500-level "Query Tuning Mastery" talk in room 6E of the Washington State Convention Center, for the PASS Summit. (Here's some information about last year's talk, on workspace memory.) And for the second year in a row, I had to deliver said talk at 10:15 in the morning, in a room used as overflow for the keynote, following a keynote speaker that didn't stop speaking on time. Frustrating!

Last Thursday, after very, very quickly setting up and getting sound and video checks, the rest of the talk went surprisingly smoothly. My deck--a brand new version created specifically for PASS--helped me get across the message I wanted to communicate, my demos ran without any failure, and my jokes didn't drive too many people out of the room before the end of the talk. I even received a round of applause when I managed to take a 26 minute query plan and, using a few query rewrites, deliver the same exact data in 9 seconds. That, I have to say, was pretty cool.

Here's the abstract for the session:

Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism
As a database developer, your job boils down to one word: performance. In today's multi-core-driven world, query performance is very much determined by how well you're taking advantage of the processing power at your disposal. Are your big queries using every clock tick, or are they lagging behind? And if your queries are already parallel, can they be rewritten for even greater speed?

In this session, you'll learn to take full advantage of SQL Server query parallelism. After a terminology review and technology refresher, the session will go deep, covering T-SQL patterns that allow certain queries to scale almost linearly across your multi-core CPUs. You'll see when and why the optimizer makes a parallel plan choice and how to impact the decision. Along the way, you’ll manipulate costs and row goals, challenge generally accepted tuning practices, and take complete control of your parallel queries.

Since the talk was being broadcast live on "PASS TV," I had Paul White join me at the front of the room to moderate questions delivered via Twitter. This worked out reasonably well and I hope to do something similar in the future. Huge thanks to Paul for helping out -- and for giving me a really ugly scowl when one of my jokes fell totally flat.

Demos for the talk are attached. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks again to everyone who watched, either in person or at home. I had a blast. Hope you enjoyed it even half as much as I did!

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.