This coming weekend is the SQL Saturday #293 in Portland, Maine with my precon on Friday. I am really looking forward to attending this event. I have never been to Maine but have always wanted to go.

I am very excited to be presenting two sessions at this event!

Easy SQL Server Benchmarking - Room 211 at 8:30am

Abstract: Do you have a new piece of hardware going into service and want to see how well it performs? Or do you have a few systems and want to see how they compare against each other? Multiple free and easy ways to stress test your SQL Servers exist by simulating an OLTP workload against a real SQL Server and the infrastructure underneath. In this session we will demonstrate how to test your storage and SQL Server instances to get raw performance numbers that you can use to compare performance of machines across your enterprise. The utilities DVDStore, HammerDB, and SQLIO will be demonstrated in depth. 

Session Level: Beginner

Squeezing Top Performance from Your Virtualized SQL Servers - Room 113 at 3:05pm

Abstract: Just about anyone can click through a SQL Server installation and get it working, but more than a little tuning is required to get the most performance out of your servers. Once virtualized, additional tuning can help get even more performance out of that virtual machine. David Klee (@kleegeek) will discuss valuable details for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V on how to tweak and tune your virtual infrastructure for business-critical virtualized SQL Servers. Tips on configuring your SQL Server installations for maximum performance when virtualized will be covered in detail.

Session Level: Intermediate

Virtualization for SQL Server DBAs Precon

Also, if you are interested, there are just a few seats left for my Preconference training session on Friday, aptly entitled ‘Virtualization for SQL Server DBAs’.

Session Information:

VMware vExpert and SQL Server performance expert David Klee leads this full-day introduction to enabling and managing a virtualized SQL Server environment. The focus of the course is to help those new to virtualization and/or infrastructure concepts to become familiar with the concept and purposes of virtualization and how it can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of virtualization underneath SQL Server, from storage to hypervisor to the SQL Server instance, and will learn how to construct the entire stack with the focus on SQL Server performance. 

Upon completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

• Understand key virtualization and cloud concepts
• Determine the optimal infrastructure configuration for best performance
• Construct a SQL Server virtual machine template with best practices for agility and performance
• Understand how and what stack metrics to benchmark and baseline to ensure proper objective performance measurement
• Identify and remediate common virtualized SQL Server performance killers
• Understand proper virtualized capacity management techniques for long term management 

Attendees with the following experiences will benefit the most from this course:

• Basic familiarity with the core components of a server
• SQL Server installation and configuration
• Exposure to SQL Server performance metric measurement and identification 

A working set of the screens and configuration settings referenced in the session, together with the reference slides and documentation, will be provided to attendees, for prospective reference in working with virtualized SQL Server in their own environments.

This Summer

This summer I am slowing down my weekend travel so I can get caught up on some side projects that I hope to be able to announce by the end of the summer. I also plan to spend some time spoiling my nieces! I’m taking about two months off of the SQL Saturday rounds (I know – I’ll be going through withdrawal!) so I can accomplish those goals, and then will jump back into things starting with VMworld and IT/Dev Connections in September and a whirlwind of activities planned after that!

I still have a number of webinars planned though! Stay tuned for more details on those events.