Gail Shaw

sqlinthewild.co.za

Gail is a Database Specialist focusing on database performance tuning and database recovery, with a particular interest in topics such as indexing strategies, execution plans, and writing T-SQL code that performs well and scales gracefully. She is a Pluralsight author and has spoken at SQL Saturdays locally and internationally, SQL Bits and at the PASS Community Summit. She can often be found on the SQL Server community Slack, Gail has been responsible for extending the lifespan of many an application by performance-tuning their databases as well as providing technical guidance on all things SQL Server related.

Sessions for 2026

All about Indexes - Part 1

Indexes are essential to good database performance, but it can be hard to decide what indexes to create. In this session we'll look at guidelines for index creation

All about Indexes - Part 2

Indexes are essential to good database performance, but it can be hard to decide what indexes to create. In this session we'll look at guidelines for index creation

Previous Sessions

Regressions, neurons and decisions. Oh My!

Linear regression, neural networks and neural networks are three of the foundational algorithms in machine learning. In this session, we'll look at how they work and how they generate the results that they do.

All about Indexes

Indexes are essential to good database performance, but it can be hard to decide what indexes to create. In this session we'll look at the design considerations for clustered indexes and for nonclustered indexes.

All about Indexes

Indexes are essential to good database performance, but it can be hard to decide what indexes to create. In this session we'll look at guidelines for index creation

Do's and don'ts of database corruption

In this session we'll look at the things you should and shouldn't be doing now, to protect yourself and your data against the risk of corruption and thing you should and shouldn't do should the database ever become corrupt.

Bad Plan! Sit!

In this session we'll look at the common causes of bad execution plans and examine options for resolving the problem, short term and long term.