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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...