Sometimes a swift kick in the rear is needed to become motivated. Recently, I was the recipient of the business end of a boot and it drove me to take a serious look at how I write abstracts for new sessions that I would like to teach. After reviewing things, I found that my methods weren’t the best and I needed to improve on how I write (not just abstracts but other things like this blog post).
So, I’m trying something new. I’m going to crowd source feedback for new abstracts using GitHub. Yes, you heard that correctly. I want you to give me honest, full bore, good, bad, or whatever feedback.
Each title is link to a Gist on GitHub where you can leave your feedback. Please, be honest and thorough. If you think the abstract is great, tell me that. If you think it sucks and I should start over, tell me that too. Don’t like the title? Shout it out. Tell me all of it.
Let’s get this party started!
Improving Performance with Intelligent Query Processing
One of the core pillars in the role of a database administrator is to ensure their systems run as efficiently as possible. We don’t sit around and want a SQL Server to run slower, so we implement steps to ensure our SQL servers perform at maximum capacity. Re-branded from SQL Server 2017 Adaptive Query Processing (AQP) to Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) with, Microsoft continues to bring forth enhancements in making the query optimizer a learning machine to help intelligently improve performance. Walking away after this session, you’ll have a better understanding on how IQP features, such as scalar user defined function improvements, table variable deferred compilation, or adaptive joins, will help ensure your SQL Servers run at optimal performance.
Indexes: The Voodoo of SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a large data ecosystem with many facets that can affect how your queries perform. Facets like what kind of hardware are you using, how much memory, CPUs. Many of these facets cost money and there are many things about them that can be turned on, tweaked, or implemented to help improve performance. Did you know that you can implement a low-cost solution of proper indexing? Proper indexes can help not only improve query performance but also help save money on hardware! In this session, we’ll examine the foundation of how indexes work, what the moving parts are and why they are important. We’ll examine some real-world examples of where queries were falling short but then were successful with proper indexing. You’ll walk away with techniques on how to know where and how to add indexes to help you start to save money!
SQL Server Performance Tuning for Beginners
We’ve all had to start somewhere in our current career path. My own adventure started what feels like eons ago when I became an accidental DBA overnight and I had absolutely zero clue on how to performance tune our SQL Servers. I was stuck and wasn’t quite sure where to turn. Things had to perform better but no idea where to start. Does this sound familiar? Ringing any bells? If so, this session is for you! We’ll start at the ground floor and talk about the basics of how-to performance tune your SQL servers so that they run at peak performance! We’ll look at configuration settings, database options, trace flags, query tuning and a few tools that can help you squeeze every ounce of performance out of SQL Server! By the end of this session, you’ll walk away with a good solid understanding of how to start performance tuning. You will take away some scripts and tool suggestions that will enable you to hit the ground running back at the office!
The Award for the Two Best SQL Server 2019 Features Goes to…
SQL Server 2019, in my opinion, is one of the greatest releases that has arisen from Microsoft in the last decade. It comes with a multitude of enhancements across the board in the data platform ecosystem. However, there are two features that significantly impact the day to day lives of data professionals everywhere, namely Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) and Resumable Index Creation. How impressive would it be to have a rollback operation complete in seconds where previously it would be hours or days? Would you like to have the ability to manage how you create that index on your multi-billion row table? Now you can! In this session we will examine in detail these two new features and demonstrate how they can help to accomplish both of those goals and improve your life when dealing with rollbacks and managing index operations. The days of horror stories around these two activities are a thing of the past thanks to SQL Server 2019.
Data Migration to Azure Made Easy
When you decided to move to any cloud provider, the thought about how to migrate all your data can seem like a daunting task. Thankfully, it isn’t as daunting as you might think thanks to some native tools as well as tools offered by Microsoft. In this session we’ll examine these methods and tools that will help you to migrate your data to Azure in a safe, secure, cost effective and successful manner. We will also look how these migrations work when working with three of the Azure data platform products, namely virtual machines, SQL DB, and Managed Instances. By the end of this session you will have gained newfound confidence to help you get your data up into the cloud!
Optimizing Query Performance in Azure SQL Database
Many think that moving to the cloud will not only help brighten your teeth but also solve all your bad coding practices that give you poorly performing queries. If it’s done correctly, implementing Azure SQL Database can help with one of those two and while it can mask things well, the best solution is to fix the bad code. In this hour-long session, we’ll examine several different methods that you can utilize to help fix bad query performance starting with the underlying service tier. Next, we’ll investigate what options are available directly from the Azure portal to determine where the bottlenecks might reside along with possible ways to fix them. Lastly, we will interrogate which native SQL Server tools exist within Azure SQL Database that can really help solve performance issues you might be having. You’ll leave this session with a solid understanding of how to trouble shoot performance issues in Azure SQL Database and what you might be able to do to help fix them.
Summary
Sometimes it is good to look at how you develop new things whether it’s writing, building, or communication. Deeper investigations into those processes should lead you to improvements and hopefully success. In this case, I’m trying to get better at writing abstracts. The competition is fierce these days for speaker selection and I want to be better. You can help me get there so please do so!
Thank you in advance for your honest feedback!
© 2020, John Morehouse. All rights reserved.
