Several weeks ago, while on a flight traveling home from San Francisco, I received an exciting email.  I had submitted to speak at SQL Bits and during my flight I was notified that one of my submitted sessions had been selected.  This means that I’ll be traveling to Manchester, England for my first international conference.  I am extremely honored to have been selected to speak at this prestigious conference.  It has been a goal of mine to one day be able to present outside North America and that achievement is finally realized.

SQL Bits is the largest Microsoft SQL Server conference held in Europe, having 4 days of sessions. This year the conference starts on Wednesday February 27th, 2019 running through Saturday March 2nd 2019. The first two days, Wednesday and Thursday, are all day long sessions that are given by some of the world’s foremost experts on SQL Server and related technologies.  Regular sessions will be held on Friday and Saturday following the training days.

I’ll be giving my presentation on database internals, which is one of my favorite subjects!

SQL Server Databaseology: Deep Dive into Database Internals

Have you ever taken apart a toaster or an alarm clock just to see how it worked? Ever wondered how that database actually functions at the record level, behind the scenes? SQL Server Databaseology is the study of SQL Server databases and their structures down to the very core of the records themselves. In this session, we will explore some of the deep inner workings of a SQL Server database at the record and page level.  You will walk away with a better understanding of how SQL Server stores data and that knowledge that will allow you to build better and faster databases.

This session will be held on Saturday March 2nd, 2019 @ 4:10PM in Room 8.  It will be the last session of the day and the conference.  I’m excited to present at this conference and share my passion for database internals with attendees.

I will also be traveling with two of my colleagues, Joey D’Antoni (B|T) and Monica Rathbun (B|T), who are both speaking as well.  Be sure to check out their sessions as well!!

Joey D’Antoni –
Azure Managed Instances—Your Bridge to the Cloud – Friday March 1st @ 2:25pm in Room 9

Many organizations would like to take advantage of the benefits of using a platform as a service database like Azure SQL Database. Automated backups, patching, and costs are just some of the benefits. However, Azure SQL Database is not a 100% feature compatible with SQL Server—features like SQL Agent, CLR and Filestream are not supported. Migration to Azure SQL Database is also a challenge, as backup and restore and log shipping are not supported methods. Microsoft recently introduced Managed Instances—a new option that provides a bridge between on-premises or Azure VM implementations of SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. Managed Instances provide full SQL Server surface compatibility and support database sizes up to 35 TB. In this session, you will learn about migrating your databases to Managed Instances, developing applications for managed instances. You will also learn about the underlying high availability and disaster recovery options for the solution.

Monica Rathbun –
Performance Tuning SQL Server on Crappy Hardware – Friday March 1st @ 4:50pm in Room 3

Many of us must deal with hardware that doesn’t meet our standards or contributes to performance problems. This session will cover how to work around hardware issues when it isn’t in the budget for newer, faster, stronger, better hardware.  It’s time to make that existing hardware work for us. Learn tips and tricks on how to reduce IO, relieve memory pressure, and reduce blocking. Let’s see how compression, statistics, and indexes bring new life into your existing hardware.

So if you happen to be in Manchester, England on Saturday March 2, feel free to stop by the conference.  There is still time to register!

© 2019, John Morehouse. All rights reserved.