Session room

The Agenda

Agenda Home

SQLBits encompasses everything from in-depth technical immersions to the enhancement of valuable soft skills. The full agenda will be announced in the spring; in the meantime check out the timetable and content we cover below.

2024 Training Days

Presenting 2024’s selection of training days, encompassing a deep dive into a range of subjects with some of the best data trainers in the world.

  • 08:00 Registration opens and breakfast served.

  • All training days run simultaneously across the venue from 09:00 – 17:00 with co-ordinated breaks.
  • All training days include regular refreshment breaks and a lunch stop to rest, recharge, and chat to fellow delegates.
  • No evening events planned, but if you’re staying over the night beforehand, why not join us in the Aviator on Monday night to meet the training day speakers for an informal drinks reception.

Index Magic: Rowstore, Columnstore and NoStore

Description

Indexes allow SQL Server to access your data in the most efficient manner. In fact, indexes are the only tuning technique that can improve query performance by orders of magnitude, so that queries that might have taken hours to run can be reduced to sub-second execution time. Understanding exactly how your indexes are structured and stored internally can give you a deeper understanding of what indexes will be useful for your queries.   SQL Server 2014 provides three very different kinds of index structures, useful for different purposes in different kinds of applications. Knowing how indexes are useful, and how each type is stored and managed can allow us to generalize some best practice recommendations.  In this seminar we’ll look at the following topics:
  • B-Tree Index Structures
    • Clustered vs nonclustered
    • Unique vs non-unique
    • Included columns
    • B-Tree maintenance: splits, fragmentation and defragmenting
    • Best practices
  • Columnstore Index Storage        
    • Nonclustered columnstore        
    • Clustered updateable columnstore        
    • Management of columnstore indexes        
    • Best practices
  • In-memory Index Structures        
    • Memory-optimized tables        
    • Storage and management of indexes for memory-optimized tables
    • Best practices        
  • Compare and contrast        
  • How to choose

Learning Objectives

Previous Experience

Tech Covered

performance, memory