Christian Bolton

Coeo Managed Support-More interesting support cases!

Come and hear about some of our most interesting SQL Server support cases from the last 12 months

Extending your datacentre to the cloud with SQL Server 2014

Microsoft is moving to the cloud and SQL Server 2014 is the first release with features designed specifically to extend your datacentre into the cloud. In this session we'll look at these features with end-to-end demos, discussions and scenarios so you can understand what the future could look like in your own SQL Server environment.

Advanced SQL Server 2012 HA and DR Architectures

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

The top 10 biggest SQL Server configuration mistakes

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.

Investigating parallelism and the CXPACKET wait type

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.

Optimizing tempdb and temporary object use

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.

Consolidating data collection with SQLDIAG and analysing it all with SQLNexus

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.

SQL Server Architecture: The life of a query

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.

Strapped for cache? - Troubleshooting memory problems in SQL Server 2008

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

Vital Statistics

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.

A walk down memory lane

A walk down memory lane