Kevin Kline

kevinekline.com

Kevin Kline is a noted database expert and software industry veteran. A 20-year Microsoft Data Platform MVP and noted community leader in the IT industry, Kevin is a founder and former president of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS.ORG), as well as the author of popular IT books including the bestseller "SQL in a Nutshell". Kevin is a top-rated speaker at industry trade shows worldwide and has a monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine (DBTA.com). His product designs for database tools have won numerous awards at industry trade shows and from a variety of trade magazines. He is on social media as @kekline and blogs regularly.

Proposed Sessions for 2026

Career Transition Workshop: From Technologist to Leader

Skilled technologists often reach a ceiling in their career unless they move into management. Competent technologists seldom know the non-technical, soft skills needed to be a skillful manager and team leader. Attendees will learn how to both lead and managing teams, focusing on motivation, effectiveness, and team success.

Query Tuning Internals for the Advanced SQL Developer

Learn the hidden internals of query processing and apply those lessons in your SQL applications, diving deep into the algebrizer, simplifier, and query optimizer.

Query Tuning Telemetry for the Advanced SQL Developer

Learn the hidden tips and tricks for collecting information about query processing so that you can better tune query behaviors for better performance.

Previous Sessions

How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review

Learn a collection of important best practice for Transact-SQL code and how to integrate them into your code acceptance testing for better performance and efficiency.

Shift-Left: A DevOps and Database Story

Database code often works well in a test environment, but end up causing significant performance issues when rolled out to production. In turn, these performance issues lead to lost productivity, excess resource consumption, and lost time spent troubleshooting the issue. But what if we could catch those issues during development? Join Kevin Kline to learn how SolarWind's SQL Sentry can shift performance tuning left to the dev cycle so those issues never occur on production systems in the first place.

SQL Horror Stories

Join Kevin Kline as he takes you on a guided tour of some of the worst and most horrible SQL coding experiences. Some were intention and some were accidental. But all of them will make you wince and laugh! Learn new SQL coding tips and tricks from these cautionary tales.

De-risk Your Azure SQL Migration: 5 Critical Considerations

The session takes you through the most critical considerations for moving your on-premise data and databases into the Azure cloud, with a focus on the steps leading to the migration and immediately afterwards.

Pitch Perfect-Presenting Ideas That Win Executive Support

You want to make your IT organization better, new software or hardware, new team process, or other significant change? Is you organization’s management are prone to saying ‘No’ to things like this in the past. How do you move forward successfully?

Optimizer Secrets: Debugging using 860x Trace Flags

Learn about the powerful 8600 series of trace flags which additional details about how the query optimizer behaves as it processes a query.

Ten 10 Query Tuning Techniques Every SQL Programmer Should K

Learn how to assess query performance, ensure consistent and reliable query tuning, and avoid ten all-too-common performance killers in SELECT statements running on Microsoft SQL Server.

Top 10 Mistakes of New IT Leaders

New IT leaders are rarely trained in the soft skills needed to be successful when put in charge. This one-hour session will explore the ten most frequent and challenging mistakes that new IT leaders make, as well as discuss methods for combating thos

An End-to-End Troubleshooting Checklist for SQL Server

Microsoft ships a multitude of tools to help detect, diagnose and resolve problems inside of SQL Server. But which is best to use and when? This session teaches attendees how to tackle the troubleshooting process to achieve repeated, optimal results.

Practical T-SQL Tips & Tricks to coding problems

In this demo-packed session, you’ll learn practical tips and tricks for SQL code tuning from experienced SQL Server MVPs Aaron Bertrand and Kevin Kline as they walk you through some of the most problematic and troublesome SQL coding problems.

Top Ten Crucial Dev Skills to Make Your DBA Happy

Attend this session to learn about 10 techniques that developers can apply to their code which will calm your DBAs’ fears and earn their admiration

Top 10 Administrator Mistakes on Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is one of the easiest database to setup and administrate. But that doesn't mean it's problem free. Find out the most common DBA mistakes on SQL Server so that you can make sure not to make them!

Understanding and Preventing SQL Injection Attacks

SQL Injection attacks are one of the most common hacker tricks used on the web. Learn all about SQL Injection attacks in this perennially favorite session.

Understanding and Preventing SQL Injection Attacks

SQL injection can happen to you! But SQL injection is also very easy to prevent. Learn the ins and outs of SQL injection so that you don't become a victim.