Christian Bolton

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

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.

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.

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.