Yesterday PASS announced the PASS Summit 2011 regular sessions and 4 new half-day sessions. At the same time they also announced the top sessions from the SQLRally conference in Orlando, FL last month. I was thrilled to have been in the Top 5 for the conference overall. A few weeks ago PASS announced the Pre-conference Sessions and Spotlight Sessions. This year I’ll be presenting a full day Pre-conference session on Extended Events, as well as a Spotlight Session on Event Notifications. This will be the fourth time I have attended PASS Summit, and my third time presenting.
Below is the abstract for the Pre-conference session on Extended Events.
Extended Events Deep Dive [400]
Session Category: Pre-conference Session (7 hours)
Session Track: Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment
Speaker(s): Jonathan Kehayias
At PASS 2010 after the public release of CTP1 of SQL Server Denali, the product team demonstrated a replacement for SQL Profiler built on top of Extended Events. The writing is on the wall for SQL Trace and the future of diagnostic profiling in SQL Server is Extended Events. In this workshop you will learn Extended Events from the ground up; from the original implementation in SQL Server 2008 to the enhancements that have been made in SQL Server Denali that redefine data collection for troubleshooting in SQL Server.
Extended Events provide more information about the operations of SQL Server than have ever before been available in the product. Unfortunately, there is a significant learning gap between Extended Events and SQL Trace; and the lack of a UI has only made the learning curve that much steeper. This full-day deep dive workshop will explain the basic concepts of extended events, spin that information into some basic patterns, and build on those patterns to create complex custom functionality that will prepare you for the future. Learn firsthand from the developer of the SSMS Addin for Extended Events in SQL Server 2008 how to leverage Extended Events in your own environment.
I really look forward to this session based on the feedback I have gotten on the Extended Events sessions I’ve done the last two years at PASS. One of the primary feedback items has been that the session was rushed and didn’t have enough time to cover the subject matter. Extended Events are such a drastic change in profiling system events from SQL Trace that there is a large learning curve that has to be made before it is possible to really begin leveraging the feature for diagnostics, and trying to cover the necessary background information in a 75 minute session is challenging at best.
The Event Notifications session is a updated version of a session I presented at SQLSaturday in Tampa, FL two years ago. The session abstract is below.
Using Event Notifications in SQL Server 2005/2008 [300]
Session Category: Spotlight Session (90 minutes, Invitation only)
Session Track: Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment
Speaker(s): Jonathan Kehayias
Event Notifications are a powerful tool in the Database Administrators tool kit that are often overlooked and rarely used. This session will provide an overview of the Service Broker components used by Event Notifications and the difference between Event Notifications and other features of SQL Server like SQL Trace and DDL Triggers. It will look at the events that are available for use with Event Notifications and how to find information about the data returned by those events in the Books Online. The session demos will teach you how to leverage the functionality of Event Notifications to automate responses to events inside of SQL Server, and how to build a monitoring solution for problems like blocking and deadlocks.
This session was very popular the first time I presented it, and includes a number of functional demo’s that can be applied to any environment to immediately begin automating responses to events inside of SQL Server.
If you are attending PASS Summit 2011 this year, I hope to see you in one of my sessions.