22-25 April 2026 
SQLBits 2018
SQL Server Infernals - A Beginner’s Guide to Worst Practices
When you're in a rush, following best practices is a luxury you may not be able to afford. What about just avoiding worst practices instead? Join me for this session and learn from my mistakes!
Are you faced with complaints from users, poor performing code from developers, and regular requests to build reports? Do you uncover installation and configuration issues on your SQL Server instances? Have you ever thought that in dire times avoiding Worst Practices could be a good starting point? If the answer is “yes”, then this session is for you: together we will discover how not to torture a SQL Server instance and we will see how to avoid making choices that turn out to be not so smart in the long run.
You are probably thinking: “Hey, wait, what about Best Practices?”. Sometimes Best Practices are not enough, especially for beginners, and it is not always clear what happens if we fail to follow them. Worst Practices can show the mistakes to avoid. I have made lots of mistakes throughout my career: come and learn from my mistakes!
As your pesonal Virgil, I will guide you through the circles of the SQL Server hell:
You are probably thinking: “Hey, wait, what about Best Practices?”. Sometimes Best Practices are not enough, especially for beginners, and it is not always clear what happens if we fail to follow them. Worst Practices can show the mistakes to avoid. I have made lots of mistakes throughout my career: come and learn from my mistakes!
As your pesonal Virgil, I will guide you through the circles of the SQL Server hell:
- Design sins:
- Undernormalizers
- Generalizers
- Shaky Typers
- Anarchic Designers
- Inconsistent Baptists
- Development sins:
- Environment Pollutors
- Overly Optimistic Testers
- Indolent Developers
- Installation sins:
- Stingy Buyers
- Next next finish installers
- Maintenance sins:
- Careless caretakers
- Performance killers
Speakers
Gianluca Sartori's other proposed sessions for 2026
Babelfish: The SQL Server Killer? - 2026
Questioning My SQL Server Faith… So You Don’t Have To - 2026
Gianluca Sartori's previous sessions
Time Series with SQL Server 2022
SQL Server 2022 introduces new time series capabilities, that will allow us to to work with time series data in the same database that we use for all the rest of the data.
Join me to see what SQL Server 2022 brings to the table for time series data, how to use the new features and what are the opportunities and the limitations.
3 things you don’t want to store in a database (but sometimes have to)
Some types of data are a very bad fit for a database. Join me to see how to survive with a database full of data that should not be stored there. I will demonstrate how to deal with billions of rows of logs without trashing the database, how to store millions of pictures effectively and how to deal with dynamic attributes in a sensible way.
Using WorkloadTools to analyze your workload
In this session I will show you how to use WorkloadTools to connect to a SQL Server database, on-premises or in the cloud, and analyze all the queries that are run against it.
Baking Extended Events recipes without breaking a sweat
In this demo intensive session I will show you how to tackle the most challenging tasks with Extended Events without writing a single line of code.
Benchmarking in the Cloud
Join me in this session and learn how to capture a production workload, replay it to your cloud database and compare the performance. I will introduce you to the methodology and the tools to bring your database to the cloud without breaking a sweat.
SQL Server Infernals - A Beginner’s Guide to Worst Practices
When you're in a rush, following best practices is a luxury you may not be able to afford. What about just avoiding worst practices instead? Join me for this session and learn from my mistakes!
Simplifying XEvents Management with dbatools
Bye #TeamProfiler and hi #TeamXEvents with the power of dbatools