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).

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PASS Summit 2010 Post-Conference Seminar on Parallel Processing

PASS Performance Virtual Chapter: Parallelize Your Queries!