Kicking bad code to the touchline

2016

TL; DR

In this demo-packed session, you’ll learn practical tips and tricks for SQL code tuning. Using both free and paid tools from SQL Sentry, you’ll learn tips and tricks you can immediately apply to your SQL code, not to mention the free tools!

Session Details

In this demo-packed session, you’ll learn practical tips and tricks for SQL code tuning from SQL Sentry’s Richard Douglas as he walks you through some of the most problematic and troublesome SQL coding problems. Using both free and paid tools from SQL Sentry, you’ll learn tips and tricks you can take home
and immediately apply to your SQL code. You’ll learn things like what’s the best way to write a cursor, a quick trick that can save you 20-30% processing times on your big stored procedures, some major T-SQL bad habits, and even some new SQL Server features. And, you might end up seeing something in the free tools
that will significantly improve the way that you work!

3 things you'll get out of this session

Richard Douglas's other proposed sessions for 2026

Couchbase for the SQL DBA - 2026

Resource Governor: Reducing Dastardly Behaviour in SQL Server 2025 - 2026

TempDB: The Bottleneck You Can’t See in the Execution Plan - 2026

Richard Douglas's 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.