Christian Bolton

In this session I'll cover advanced HA and DR architectures for SQL Server 2012 that also enable you to scale-out certain workloads.

Based on healthcheck reviews of hundreds of SQL Servers across dozens of customers, I'll talk you through the 10 most commonly made mistakes by action or inaction and what you can do to make sure your SQL Servers get a clean bill of health.

In this session you'll learn how SQL Server chooses parallel operations, how to investigate what's going on when you see the CXPACKET wait type, and whether your parallel query is running as efficiently as it could be.

This session will cover how and why you should configure tempdb, how to troubleshoot tempdb issues, and how to detect, resolve, and mitigate allocation contention issues by creating multiple data files, optimizing temporary object reuse, and using trace flag 1118.

SQLDIAG is a great tool that was introduced in SQL Server 2005 to help co-ordinate the collection of perfmon logs and SQLTraces as well as gathering other system data. In this session you’ll learn how to configure, customize and run SQLDIAG as well as the perfstats script from Microsoft which adds locking, blocking and wait stats to the list of collectors that SQLDIAG co-ordinates. This tool is one of the secrets of the trade for efficient data collection and this session is a must for anyone not using it extensively already. Using the output from sqldiag we'll then look at SQLNexus to analyze the results. I'll show you how to configure, run and draw conclusions from the reports created by this tool which is by far the most useful piece of software in the troubleshooting kit bag of people that have taken the time to learn it. This session is based on 2 chapters from Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting.

In this session I will be bringing together all the components of SQL Server to illustrate what happens when you issue a query from a client. From the TDS packet, through ODS, the optimizer and the buffer manager to returning the result. I'll walk you through when the transaction log is used, what happens when a checkpoint occurs and what the lazy writer does. I've illustrated the process in a way that's easy to consume and helpful to put SQL Server's architecture into context.

Learn the terminology, architecture, features and best practices that can help you understand, troubleshoot and avoid memory problems in SQL Server 2008.

In this session I will be exploring the role that statistics play in query optimization covering how and when they are created, what they look like, how they are updated, and what scenarios will benefit from you creating them yourself.

What Are You Waiting For?

A walk down memory lane