The Agenda

This full day seminar will teach you introductory, intermediate, and advanced techniques for troubleshooting (including detecting, diagnosing, and resolving problems) and performance tuning (discovering sub-optimal performance and making SQL Server faster) using a variety of SQL Server's built-in features, including Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), Profiler, PerfMon, and other free tools from Microsoft. In addition, we'll provide a license for SQL Sentry Essentials and use it to teach you how to multiply your productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness at one of the hardest tasks for SQL Server DBAs. 

1. Context: We begin with an overview of SQL Server's internals and architectural components to make sure everyone is on the same page.
2. Essential Metrics: We explore wait statistics and performance monitor counters in SQL Server, the most important features built-in to SQL Server for troubleshooting and performance tuning. 
3. The Checklist: It's time to detect problems in our SQL Server! This checklist and methodology will help you get to the root-cause quickly and effectively.
4. Group Lab: Based on what we've learned so far, we will conduct some live troubleshooting walk-throughs.
5. Deep Dives: Intermediate problems solving and performance tuning requires more skill and information, especially the correlation of multiple data points.  This segment of the seminar will teach you important DMVs and built-in tools, plus how and when to combine them together for even more powerful performance information.
6. Get Proactive: Once you find a problem, don't be surprised by it again. This segment shows how to alert for future issues.
7. Mining the Repository: If you're using SentryOne, you have a fantastic well of performance data to draw from. We'll show you how to explore all the performance history and trends of your system.

By the end of the day, you will have a more thorough understanding of SQL Server's internal behaviors, the main sources of performance metrics, how to interpret those metrics, resolve the most common issues and performance problems, and then build a means of proactively managing future problems through alerting. Come join us!