Richard Douglas

Richard Douglas is a Solutions Engineer at Redgate Software. He spent over 20 years working with SQL Server, Couchbase, and other database platforms. Notably at Quest, SentryOne, and Couchbase where he presented sessions at conferences around the world. These days he helps companies scale to higher levels of performance with Redgate Software.

Sessions for 2026

In Control of Your Database: Design, Code, Version, Test, and Deploy Without the Firefighting

Four workflow problems database teams face every day and how to solve them. From schema design to safe deployment, see what it looks like when your database development process actually works.

Previous Sessions

Improving SQL Server Performance with Indexing

Indexing presents daunting challenges for even the most seasoned professionals, it offers countless options to choose from. With a little help you’ll see how to simplify indexing in your environment & improve the overall performance of your apps

Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes

Learn how to investigate the mysterious case of SQL Server performance problems in TempDB.

Alerting; Beyond the Basics

We'll look at events that you should be monitoring, how you can use various services & IoT enabled devices to alert you in ways that were never possible. You'll leave with a new outlook of how teams can be notified to fix problems faster than ever.

The Big Backup Theory

In this session, you'll gain invaluable guidance for optimizing your backup strategies. Using trace flags the session will cover how SQL Server manages its own backup options and how you can tune them to meet your SLAs.

Wait watchers-Gain Performance Increases Fast!

In this session you'll learn all about SQL Server wait statistics. These are statistics the database engine stores about the resources it is waiting on. Armed with this information you as a SQL Server professional can make better informed decisions.

The Day After Tomorrow; Why You Need to Baseline

Ensuring top performance is never easy. To maintain performance you need to make sure you’re monitoring the right things. How do you know if the figures you’re seeing are good or bad? Baseline comparisons can help.