Richard Douglas

Richard Douglas is a Solutions Engineer at Redgate Software. He spent over 20 years working with SQL Server, Couchbase, and other database platforms. Notably at Quest, SentryOne, and Couchbase where he presented sessions at conferences around the world. These days he helps companies scale to higher levels of performance with Redgate Software.

Sessions for 2026

Couchbase for the SQL DBA

As organisations add NoSQL platforms like Couchbase alongside relational systems, DBAs are expected to adapt. Drawing on four years at Couchbase, this session shares practical lessons to make managing distributed, multi-model data platforms easier.

Resource Governor: Reducing Dastardly Behaviour in SQL Server 2025

SQL Server 2025 allows bigger, busier workloads, and not all of them behave. Learn how Resource Governor can control noisy neighbours, when it genuinely helps, and when it quietly makes things worse.

TempDB: The Bottleneck You Can’t See in the Execution Plan

TempDB problems rarely show up where you expect. This session explains how modern SQL Server features drive TempDB contention, why execution plans hide it, and how to diagnose instance-wide TempDB pressure before it becomes a crisis.

The Lifecycles of Queries: How SQL Server Really Executes Your Code

Follow queries from the moment a client sends a request through optimisation, execution, and storage. This full day session explains where performance problems come from, and how to monitor, diagnose, and fix them.

Previous Sessions

Improving SQL Server Performance with Indexing

Indexing presents daunting challenges for even the most seasoned professionals, it offers countless options to choose from. With a little help you’ll see how to simplify indexing in your environment & improve the overall performance of your apps

Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes

Learn how to investigate the mysterious case of SQL Server performance problems in TempDB.

Alerting; Beyond the Basics

We'll look at events that you should be monitoring, how you can use various services & IoT enabled devices to alert you in ways that were never possible. You'll leave with a new outlook of how teams can be notified to fix problems faster than ever.

The Big Backup Theory

In this session, you'll gain invaluable guidance for optimizing your backup strategies. Using trace flags the session will cover how SQL Server manages its own backup options and how you can tune them to meet your SLAs.

Wait watchers-Gain Performance Increases Fast!

In this session you'll learn all about SQL Server wait statistics. These are statistics the database engine stores about the resources it is waiting on. Armed with this information you as a SQL Server professional can make better informed decisions.

The Day After Tomorrow; Why You Need to Baseline

Ensuring top performance is never easy. To maintain performance you need to make sure you’re monitoring the right things. How do you know if the figures you’re seeing are good or bad? Baseline comparisons can help.