Search results matching tags 'PASS' and 'performance'

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!

Two New Slide Decks. Plus, the Week in Colorado.

KKline — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:03:00 GMT

I had the honor of traveling the great state of Colorado last week, speaking at the PASS chapters in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Denver. At all three events, we had a stellar attendance and, at least in Denver, broke all the records in recent memory both in terms of overall attendance and in first-timers. Denver, in fact, was standing room only and had nearly 30 first time attendees. Great news! I also want to give a special shout-out of thanks and appreciation to Chris Shaw (Twitter | Blog) whose hard work and tenacity ensured that all of Colorado got to see me speak. From left to right, Gabriel Villa (Twitter), me, Chris Shaw, and Rebecca Mitchell (Twitter). If it weren't for Chris, I wouldn't have been there. Thanks for putting in the time, amigo!

New Slide Decks!

During the 3-day jaunt, I presented two of my more popular sessions. These are updated slide decks, in case you want to download them here:

UG - End-to-End Troubleshooting

and

UG - Top 10 SQL Server Administration Mistakes

Be sure to check in the Slides area of the website, if you want to see the links for SpeakerRate, and in the case of several of my presentations, white papers, video recordings, etc. It's the People that Matter

A Blast from the SQLPASS Past!

I've always tried to maintain the relationships I built with the founding members of the PASS board of directors. After their time on the PASS board, almost all of them have moved on from SQL Server to other adventures. Pam Smith, the first president of the organization, is now a professor. Guy Brown, the second president, is now the director of IT at his same employer, rather than just SQL Server as when he was on the PASS board. A few, such as Kurt Windisch, a former VP of PASS, and my good friend Joe Webb (Twitter | Blog), are still active in the SQL Server space. One relationship that I've enjoyed over the years is with PASS' original Microsoft liaison and now a Denver-area software entrepreneur Steve Murchie (at right) running his own healthcare IT outfit. Steve has been a source of inspiration to me and also of great advice for all things startup-related. It was great to connect with Steve and catch up on his latest doings.

I also got to enjoy an evening out with the local attendees after the Denver user group meeting. It was great to hang out with folks there. I got to meet Kevin Cox (twitter), a member of Microsoft's incredibly talented SQLCAT group, and for whom I was a technical editor on a SQL Server v6.5 book back in the Neanderthal era. That shows just how old both Kevin and I actually are. Other cool folks that I got to meet included Steve Wake, Mike Fal, Marc Beacom, Jason Kassay, Jason Horner and my ol' buddy, Kelly the Greeley Geek.

On top of that, long-time SQL Server MVP and all-around awesome guy Steve Jones (Twitter | Blog) visited. I kept him out way too late that night which, to be honest, isn't usually my style. But the good conversation propelled us on past midnight.

The Good Folks at SQL Server Professional and Windows IT Professional Magazines

I've written for SQL Server Professional (formerly the artist known as "SQLMag") in some form or another starting from my first cover article for them way back in the mid 1990's. My Tool Time column has been going strong there since, oh, around 2006 iirc. For most of the time I've known the folks at SQLMag, they were located in Loveland, CO but they were able to move to some incredibly nice digs just up the road in Fort Collins. In all the many years, I've written for them, I'd never been to their offices - until now. It was great to visit and break bread with Megan (to my right), Blair (across), and Jaylee (across and to my right)!

I've always supported SQLMag and encourage you to subscribe. On top of the goodness already in the digital magazine, there are some neat developments coming down the pipeline with SQLMag which I think we'll all enjoy. Be sure to subscribe today! (You can click the badge on the left or simply go to http://www.sqlmag.com).

What's Next?

My current travel schedule is pinned up on this blog post HERE. However, I also know of a couple on-line appearances and probably a trip between the long gap between now and my next in-person appearance at the Orlando SQL Saturday at the end of September, where I'll also be teaching a pre-conference seminar (register HERE for the seminar).

SSWUG

The first on-line event to note is my a presentation by SSWUG of my Leadership Skills for IT Professionals video series, starting on August 24th. Sign up using the hyperlink (note that a video plays immediately upon loading the webpage, in case you want to be ready to pause or stop it). You can also buy a DVD set of the 14 hours of leadership training content.

24HOP - The 24 Hours of PASS Event

I'll also be speaking on the topic of influence in the next 24 Hours of PASS coming up on September 20th and 21st. Registration for the twenty-four hours of around the clock presentations is completely free and well worth your time. Check the schedule for the event and register! Even if you can only watch one or two sessions (or even zero sessions), be sure to register so that you'll automatically be notified when the sessions become available as streaming media.

Enjoy!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

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!

NOSQL- A Quick Overview

KKline — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:55:00 GMT

Several attendees at the SQLRally were asking about NoSQL ("Not Only SQL") and its benefits. This article gives a quick overview: HERE.

Also, two good resources have come out from my friend Guy Harrison. This piece on Cassandra, one of the most popular NoSQL databases, was published a while back in Database Trends and Applications Magazine. I also really liked these entries from Guy at TechRepublic and TechTarget. Guy also had the good fortune of having one of his articles published on GigaOm and then picked up in the New York Times Technology section.

The article, titled “Real World NoSQL: HBase at Trend Micro,” is the first in a five-part series Guy wrote, spotlighting NoSQL (non-relational) database deployments at five different companies. The other good learning experience for me was hearing about GigaOm for the first time. GigaOm, now on my reading list, is considered an influential and prestigious publication in the NoSQL realm.

Let me know what you think. Enjoy!

-Kev

~~~

Twitter at kekline

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.

What PASS sessions will I try to attend?

AaronBertrand — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:55:00 GMT

Every year at PASS, I do the same thing. I hmm and haw over which sessions I want to go to, and I end up making some tough choices at game time. This year I believe I'll be pretty busy, so my typical pie-in-the-sky view of how much I'll be able to attend just isn't going to pan out. Instead, I have selected 5 sessions that I really want to try to attend; it may be a lofty goal, but I'm going to do what I can to make it happen. This post is as much of a reminder for myself as it is meant to be interesting to you; probably even more so.

(As a side note, I believe you'll need to be signed in to the PASS web site in order to click any of the below links.)

Tuesday, November 9th

DBA-492S : Tracking Waits with Extended Events : Andrew Kelly
4:30 - 6:00
This was a tough choice; there are a LOT of good sessions in this time slot! In the end, my curiosity about Extended Events won out over interesting sessions from SQLCAT, Adam Machanic, Kevin Kline and Ben Nevarez.

Wednesday, November 10th

DBA-588C : CSS Update Queries - Under the Hood : Conor Cunningham
10:15 - 11:45
DBA-599C : Inside SQL Server Latches : Bob Ward
4:30 - 6:00
These both look to be excellent sessions, and I don't think my brain will have room for much else on this particular Wednesday.

Thursday, November 11th

DBA-449M : Expert Query Performance Troubleshooting : Boris Baryshnikov, Conor Cunningham
1:00 - 2:15
DBA-346M : What's new in T-SQL in the Next Release of SQL Server : Tobias Ternstrom
2:30 - 3:45
Again, I just don't see how I can go wrong at either of these sessions. I always feel I have performance troubleshooting skills to learn, and of course I am interested in what new T-SQL functionality will be coming our way in Denali.

PASS Summit 2010 Post-Conference Seminar on Parallel Processing

Adam Machanic — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:37:00 GMT

I am honored to have been selected for a second year in a row to present a full-day seminar at the PASS Summit. This year's seminar will be a "post-con", and will be delivered on Friday, November 12.

The title of the seminar is "A Day of Doing Many Things at Once: Multitasking, Parallelism, and Process Distribution," and the focus is on maximizing performance by taking full advantage of your server's CPU infrastructure.

As IT professionals we're all used to the ever-increasing nature of server resources, but things have changed over the past few years. Next-generation server hardware is shipping with more CPU power, but in the form of more CPUs rather than faster CPUs. This means that we can no longer expect that new hardware will automatically make all of our existing processes faster and better; we need to understand how to tune our software to properly leverage these resources.

A one-paragraph abstract and registration information is available here.

What follows is a basic outline of what will be covered over the course of the day. Feel free to leave me a comment below if you have any questions about the seminar and what will or will not be included. My goal is to deliver a seminar that will give you a number of useful tools and techniques that you can take back to the office and immediately apply, and I think that the list below encompasses the majority of what you'll see as you work with parallel processing in currently shipping versions of SQL Server.

Part 1: Background
A Brief History Lesson
CPU Evolution Over Time
Heat and Dissipation
A Brief Theory Lesson
Moore's Law
Amdahl's Law
Gustafson's Law
How This All Fits Together
Windows Process/Thread Internals
SQL Server Scheduler Internals

Part 2: Query Processor Parallelism
How Queries are Processed in Parallel
Parallel Iterators
Non-Parallel Iterators
Row Distribution Strategies
How to Read and Mine Data From Parallel Query Plans
Controlling Parallelism at the Query Level
Ideal Parallel Query Patterns
Parallelism Inhibitors and Workarounds
Part 3: Administration
Server Settings that Influence Parallelism
Affinity Masks
Worker Threads
MAXDOP
Cost Threshold
Resource Governor
How to Configure Server Settings
OLTP vs. OLAP vs. Mixed Workload Considerations
Monitoring Parallel Processes
Parallel Task Architecture and the Tasks DMV
Parallel Waits and the Waiting Tasks DMV
CXPACKET
LATCH_EX
Finding Out How Much Work is Being Done
Finding Parallel and Serial Plans in the Cache
Diagnosing Intra-Query Parallel Deadlocks

Part 4: Alternative Solutions for Parallel Data Processing
Service Broker
SSIS
SQLCLR

Looking forward to seeing many of you in Seattle!

PASS Performance Virtual Chapter: Parallelize Your Queries!

Adam Machanic — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:51:00 GMT

Last month a new PASS Virtual Chapter was introduced, one with a theme that is near and dear to much of what I like to work on: performance. Tomorrow, Tuesday August 3rd at noon Eastern time, the chapter will have its second meeting, and I will be doing the presentation. The topic is Parallelism and Performance. Here's the abstract:

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 available clock tick, or are they lagging behind? And if your queries are already going parallel, can they be rewritten for even greater speed? In this session you will learn the background necessary to take full advantage of parallelism. We'll cover what parallelism is, why it's important, and the basics of how to read parallel query plans. Examples will be shown to illustrate some of the huge performance gains that can be had when we learn to properly control SQL Server's parallel processing capabilities. This session is a small preview of some of the material that will be covered in Adam Machanic's full-day PASS Summit post-con, "A Day of Doing Many Things at Once."

This is a free webcast. Click here for more information and to register.

Looking forward to seeing you there (well, virtually speaking).