Here are the abstracts for the three sessions:

Dr. DMV’s Troubleshooting Toolkit

Dynamic Management views and functions allow you to easily see exactly what is happening inside your SQL Server instances and databases with a high level of detail. You can discover your top wait types, most CPU intensive stored procedures, find missing indexes, and identify unused indexes, to name just a few examples. This session presents, demonstrates, and explains a complete set of diagnostic DMV queries that you can easily use to detect and diagnose configuration and performance issues in your SQL Server instances and databases. This session goes into exhaustive detail on how to interpret the results of each of the diagnostic queries, including relevant background information on how to properly configure your hardware, storage subsystem, operating system, SQL Server instance, and databases in order to avoid performance and scalability issues.

Why You Need Query Store

Have you upgraded to SQL Server 2016 or higher, but still have databases using the old Cardinality Estimator? Do you know that you have queries with inconsistent performance, but you’re just not sure how to find them, or fix them, quickly? Are you tired of flailing around in SQL Server, querying DMV after DMV to figure out the *real* problem with performance? Query Store can help. We’ll cover Query Store end-to-end in this full day workshop built using real-world examples based on customer issues resolved over the last 2+ years. You’ll understand how to configure it, what data it captures, and how to use it to analyze performance, find regressions, and force plans. The demos will teach you how to find common patterns in query performance using T-SQL, and how to understand your workload. This class is applicable for those running SQL Server 2016 or higher (or planning to upgrade), or Azure SQL Database, and will provide practical and applicable information you can use whether you’re a new or veteran DBA, a developer that has to troubleshoot query performance, or an application administrator just trying to keep the system afloat. You’ll learn how to find and leverage important information in Query Store to make solving common performance problems easier the moment you walk back into the office.

Bigger Hardware or Better Code and Design?

Whether you are running SQL Server in the cloud or on-premise, more hardware often becomes the first answer to performance problems. The cost of scaling up in effort is relatively low, especially in the cloud where changing resource sizes is only a drop down option away, but financially this can quickly become a deal breaker. Even the fastest hardware won’t keep up with bad design and coding patterns. This session will take a look at many of the new features of SQL Server and how they can best be leveraged for performance tuning your workload. From In-Memory OLTP to Columnstore Indexes, Query Store, and Extended Events, this session will guide you in finding the source of the problems, and solutions available to make your workload faster and consistently reliable. We’ll even take a look at different alternatives using older features of SQL Server that you may be leaving on the shelf that are a better fit to solving certain kinds of problems.

Erin Stellato recently wrote about the SQLskills presence at PASS Summit 2019, where both Erin and Jon have full day pre-conference workshops, and I have a half-day session during the conference. I hope to see you both at 24 Hours of PASS and at the PASS Summit 2019!

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My half-day session is Dr. DMV’s Troubleshooting Toolkit, and here is the abstract:

Dr. DMV’s Troubleshooting Toolkit

Dynamic Management views and functions allow you to easily see exactly what is happening inside your SQL Server instances and databases with a high level of detail. You can discover your top wait types, most CPU intensive stored procedures, find missing indexes, and identify unused indexes, to name just a few examples. This session presents, demonstrates, and explains a complete set of diagnostic DMV queries that you can easily use to detect and diagnose configuration and performance issues in your SQL Server instances and databases. This session goes into exhaustive detail on how to interpret the results of each of the diagnostic queries, including relevant background information on how to properly configure your hardware, storage subsystem, operating system, SQL Server instance, and databases in order to avoid performance and scalability issues.

This is a topic that I have presented and taught multiple times, and it is something I am quite passionate about. I use my Diagnostic Information Queries on a daily basis in my consulting work, and they are extremely useful. Having 2.5 hours to go through them gives me plenty of time to cover them in detail without having to rush through them.

My general session is Hardware 301: Choosing Database Hardware for SQL Server 2019, and here is the abstract:

Hardware 301: Choosing Database Hardware for SQL Server 2019

Microsoft made some sweeping changes to their software licensing model for SQL Server 2012; moving from socket-based licensing to core-based licensing. This new licensing model alters much of the conventional criteria for hardware selection for database servers that will be running SQL Server 2012 and newer. This change still causes a significant amount of angst, with fears of huge increases in SQL Server licensing costs compared to older versions of the product. This session will cut through the uncertainty and hype to show you how to properly evaluate and choose your database hardware for usage with SQL Server 2016 and newer. You will learn how to choose hardware for different types of workloads and how to get the best performance and scalability for the lowest licensing cost, whether you are running in a physical or virtualized environment.

I will be talking about the latest developments with AMD and Intel server processors, and how they affect you as a data professional. With the upcoming release of the AMD EPYC “Rome” server processors (which I am 100% sure will be released by early November) the landscape of the server market has drastically changed. The old guidance about always buying an Intel-based server is not going to be a slam dunk any longer. This session is relevant for all versions of SQL Server, whether you are running virtualized or not.

Hopefully I will see you at both of my sessions and at PASS in general!

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How do you design and implement a safe and successful migration from an older version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2017 with no data loss and virtually no downtime? What if you have a limited hardware budget for the upgrade effort and you are worried about the core-based licensing in SQL Server 2017? How can you choose your hardware wisely in light of the new licensing model? How can you convince your organization that the time is right to upgrade to SQL Server 2017? This session will cover several different methods for migrating your data to SQL Server 2017 while meeting these objectives and minimizing your hardware and licensing costs.

I will also be covering some SQL Server 2019 considerations in this session.

This is a fun session that I really enjoy presenting. I think this subject is especially relevant with the upcoming end of extended support of SQL Server 2008/SQL Server 2008 R2 and end of mainstream support for SQL Server 2014, which both happen on July 9, 2019.

I honestly believe that CY 2019 is going to be an ideal time for many organizations to migrate from legacy versions of SQL Server (SQL Server 2014 and older) to a modern version of SQL Server (SQL Server 2016 and newer).

This is because you will have the opportunity to upgrade your entire data platform stack with significant new releases, including new processor families from Intel and AMD, wider availability of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, a new server operating system release (Windows Server 2019), and a new SQL Server release (SQL Server 2019).

BTW, if you are going to a Tuesday pre-con session at PASS, you should strongly consider Kimberly’s Query Performance Problems from Estimates, Statistics, Heuristics, and Cardinality. I have more information about why this session will be a great choice here.

You can register for the PASS Summit 2018 here.

The post PASS Summit 2018 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

I will also be presenting High Availability/Disaster Recovery 101 at the actual SQLSaturday Oregon event on November 3, 2018. Here is the abstract:

How do you design a SQL Server 2017 infrastructure in order to meet specific Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) service levels? There are many aspects to consider, from technology choices and licensing, to policies and procedures. This session outlines and compares the various HA/DR technologies available in SQL Server 2017, showing how you can combine them to design and build a solution to help meet your HA/DR goals. This session also teaches you how to formulate policies that enable effective use of technology in your organization.

You can register for SQLSaturday Oregon here.

SQLSaturday Oregon is one of the larger SQLSaturday events in the United States, and they have a great roster of speakers this year. Portland is a fun city with a lot of good breweries and tap rooms…

I hope to see you there!

The post SQLSaturday Oregon appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Migrating to SQL Server 2017

How do you design and implement a safe and successful migration from an older version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2017 with no data loss and virtually no downtime? What if you have a limited hardware budget for the upgrade effort and you are worried about the core-based licensing in SQL Server 2017? How can you choose your hardware wisely in light of the new licensing model? How can you convince your organization that the time is right to upgrade to SQL Server 2017? This session will cover several different methods for migrating your data to SQL Server 2017 while meeting these objectives and minimizing your hardware and licensing costs.

This is a topic that I have presented and taught multiple times, and it is something I am quite passionate about. I think it is also increasingly relevant as SQL Server 2014 will be falling out of Mainstream support on July 9, 2019, and both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 will be falling out of Extended Support on July 9, 2019. Next July is sort of a looming deadline for many organizations!

I am also going to be doing a preview version of this session in the first slot of the next 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview event on June 12th, 2018.

Hopefully I will see you at both events!

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In my honest opinion, the most valuable session for most database professionals who care about query performance is Kimberly Tripp’s Fixing Query Performance Problems from Estimates, Statistics, Heuristics, and Cardinality on Tuesday. Kimberly is the world-class master on this subject, as evidenced by her many blog posts, presentations, and Pluralsight courses.

Kimberly is a very talented and passionate presenter and teacher. Long before I worked for SQLskills (way back in 2006 when I was working at NewsGator), I had the chance to take the week-long predecessor class to the current IEPTO1: Immersion Event on Performance Tuning and Optimization – Part 1. That class was a life-changer for me, and it had a huge effect on my career.

Since then, I have seen how Kimberly presents and teaches many times over the years. I have learned so much from both her content and from her presentation and teaching style by watching her. Unlike some well-known presenters, she doesn’t use cute pictures or silly marketing gimmicks in her presentation content. She is not there to just “put on a show” for entertainment purposes.

She prepares very detailed, content-dense slides that are a very useful resource to keep and review long after the session is over. She also has the depth of knowledge and experience to actually improvise and modify her demonstrations in response to questions during a session. As any experienced presenter knows, that is a pretty big deal.

She actually understands what she is teaching at a very deep level, and she has the many years of teaching experience to explain it clearly to people with any level of experience. Despite the lack of cute pictures or costumes, she does her presentations in a very engaging manner because of her real passion for the subject.

Here are her relevant Pluralsight courses that I would recommend watching to prepare for this pre-conference session:

SQL Server: Optimizing Stored Procedure Performance

SQL Server: Optimizing Stored Procedure Performance – Part 2

SQL Server: Optimizing Ad Hoc Statement Performance

SQL Server: Indexing for Performance

SQL Server: Why Physical Database Design Matters

BTW, Kimberly did not put me up to writing this post. In fact, she might be a little embarrassed by all of this praise. She might even mock fire me on Twitter once she sees it. I just felt I needed to spread the word about this pre-conference session.

The post PASS Summit 2018 Pre-con:Fixing Query Performance Problems from Estimates, Statistics, Heuristics, and Cardinality appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Here are the abstracts:

Migrating to SQL Server 2017

How do you design and implement a safe and successful migration from an older version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2017 with no data loss and virtually no downtime? What if you have a limited hardware budget for the upgrade effort and you are worried about the core-based licensing in SQL Server 2017? How can you choose your hardware wisely in light of the new licensing model? How can you convince your organization that the time is right to upgrade to SQL Server 2017? This session will cover several different methods for migrating your data to SQL Server 2017 while meeting these objectives and minimizing your hardware and licensing costs. You will also learn how to help make the case that a complete data platform upgrade makes excellent sense from a business perspective. You will also learn how to do effective capacity planning for the new environment to ensure that you have the best performance possible with a manageable SQL Server 2017 licensing cost.

Improving SQL Server Performance

Has anyone ever told you that your SQL Server database or instance was running too fast? Probably not, but it is all too common to hear complaints about poor performance. As a database professional, you need to have the right tools and techniques for finding and correcting performance bottlenecks at all layers of your SQL Server instance. Starting with your hardware and storage, including virtualization, operating system considerations, instance-level configuration settings, database properties, and concluding with index and query tuning, we will cover all of the layers of common performance bottlenecks. You will learn detailed and practical information for improving SQL Server performance at every layer in the system.

My SQLskills colleague, Erin Stellato will also be at the PASS Summit 2017, presenting a pre-conference session called Solving Common Performance Problems Using Query Store on Monday, October 30, and then two regular sessions: Query Store and Automatic Tuning in SQL Server and Data Systems at Scale – A Panel Discussion on November 1 and November 2, respectively.

The PASS Summit is always a fun and useful conference, where you can connect and reconnect to people in the SQL Server Community. I hope to see you there, in my sessions and in the hallways and escalators!

Update: Just to make it easier to find, here are links to my Migrating to SQL Server 2017 session, Migrating to SQL Server 2017 demos, Improving SQL Server Performance session, and Improving SQL Server Performance demos.

The post Presenting Two Sessions at the PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle appeared first on Glenn Berry.

SQL Server 2005 fell out of extended support on April 12, 2016. SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 fell out of mainstream support on July 8, 2014, while SQL Server 2012 fell out of mainstream support on July 11, 2017. SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 4 is due to be released in September, so you should be planning on testing and deploying that when it becomes available.

Besides being out of support, these old versions of SQL Server are missing many very useful new features that can benefit your organization, and make your life as a DBA much easier. In my experience, you need to take the lead, and push your organization to start upgrading, making the business and technical case to justify the effort. I have done a lot of work and research to help you with this undertaking.

My latest Pluralsight course, SQL Server: Upgrading and Migrating to SQL Server 2016 has just been published. This is my eleventh course for Pluralsight, but the complete list of my courses is here. Speaking of Pluralsight courses, the team at SQLskills has 52 courses that we have developed and published. The complete list, along with guidance about what courses you should take depending on your interests and job role are here.

Building on this online course is a new three day class, IEUpgrade: Immersion Event on Upgrading SQL Server, taught by myself and Tim Radney. The first round of this course will be taught in Chicago from October 11-13, 2017.

In August, I will be doing a daily blog series about upgrading to SQL Server 2016/2017. Finally, I will be presenting a half-day session called Migrating to SQL Server 2017 at the PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle, WA from October 31- November 3, 2017.

The post Upgrading to SQL Server 2016 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Now, I will have a full day to go into much more detail, without having to hurry to cover everything. I will be using the SQL Server 2016 version of the diagnostic queries, which have even more useful information, including information about many new SQL Server 2016 features. If you are on an older version of SQL Server, most of the queries will still be relevant (depending on how old of a version of SQL Server you are using).

Based on past experience and feedback, Dr. DMV has always been a very popular session that people really seem to enjoy. This all-day, expanded version is going to be really fun and useful, and I hope to see you there!

Here is the abstract for the session:

Dr. DMV: How to Use DMVs to Diagnose Performance Problems

SQL Server 2005 introduced Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that allow you to see exactly what is happening inside your SQL Server instances and databases with much more detail than ever before. SQL Server 2016 adds even more capability in this area. You can discover your top wait types, most CPU intensive stored procedures, find missing indexes, and identify unused indexes, to name just a few examples. This session (which is applicable to SQL 2005-2016), presents and explains over seventy DMV queries that you can quickly and easily use to detect and diagnose performance issues in your environment. If you have ever been responsible for a mission critical database, you have probably been faced with a high stress, emergency situation where a database issue is causing unacceptable application performance, resulting in angry users and hovering managers and executives. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, thank your lucky stars, but start getting prepared for your time in the hot seat. This session will show you how to use DMV queries to quickly detect and diagnose the problem, starting at the server and instance level, and then progressing down to the database and object level. This session will show you how to properly analyze and interpret the results of every single query in the set, along with lots of information on how to properly configure your instance and databases.

I wanted to share a unique discount code: PRE250GB for $250.00 off of a full, three day Summit registration and a pre-conference session. This is a pretty good deal for this late in the process! This code expires at midnight, Thursday, October 13, 2016. You can register here.

The PASS Summit is always a fun and very useful and educational event. It is a great way to get to know more people in the SQL Server community and to connect with people that you may only know online. I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Seattle for PASS Summit 2016!

The post Special Discount Code for PASS Summit and Precon appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Here is the abstract:

SQL Server 2005 introduced Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that allow you to see exactly what is happening inside your SQL Server instances and databases with much more detail than ever before. SQL Server 2016 adds even more capability in this area. You can discover your top wait types, most CPU intensive stored procedures, find missing indexes, and identify unused indexes, to name just a few examples. This session preview (which is applicable to SQL 2005-2016), presents and explains over seventy DMV queries that you can quickly and easily use to detect and diagnose performance issues in your environment. If you have ever been responsible for a mission critical database, you have probably been faced with a high stress, emergency situation where a database issue is causing unacceptable application performance, resulting in angry users and hovering managers and executives. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, thank your lucky stars, but start getting prepared for your time in the hot seat. This session will show you how to use DMV queries to quickly detect and diagnose the problem, starting at the server and instance level, and then progressing down to the database and object level. This session will show you how to properly analyze and interpret the results of every single query in the set, along with lots of information on how to properly configure your instance and databases.

You can register here.

Ideally, after listening to this one hour preview session on September 7, you will decide to sign up for my PASS Summit 2016 Pre-Conference session.

On Monday, October 24, 2016, I will be doing an all-day, session on how to run and interpret my SQL Server diagnostic information queries. I have done many shorter versions of this session (such as 60 minutes, 75 minutes, or even a half-day) before, but I have always felt a little rushed as I went through the complete set of diagnostic queries, explaining how to interpret the results of each one, and also talking about related information that is relevant to each query.

Now, I will have a full day to go into much more detail, without having to hurry to cover everything. I will be using the SQL Server 2016 version of the diagnostic queries, which have even more useful information, including information about many new SQL Server 2016 features. If you are on an older version of SQL Server, most of the queries will still be relevant (depending on how old of a version of SQL Server you are using).

Based on past experience and feedback, Dr. DMV has always been a very popular session that people really seem to enjoy. This all-day, expanded version is going to be really fun and useful, and I hope to see you there!

You can register for the PASS Summit 2016 here.

The post Speaking at 24 Hours of PASS on September 7, 2016 appeared first on Glenn Berry.