In the past year, I’ve done a few presentations for Pragmatic Works Training on the T’s. If you aren’t familiar with Training on the T’s, it is a free training program offered by Pragmatic Works that delivers hour long training sessions over lunch on every Tuesday and Thursday. Right now there are more than 340 sessions available on topics from business intelligence to database administration.
Since it’s time for the end of the year posts to start coming out, I thought I’d recap the twelve that I delivered this year. I was kind of surprised when I found out that I did this many, I actually just won an award for doing the most of these presentations for 2013. In descending date order, here are the presentations that I delivered this year with links to the materials and the recordings.
XQuery Basics for the DBA (11/20/2013)
For the past few years, XML has been making its way more and more into our SQL Server instances. For a moment let’s forget that developers often find the need to store XML data in their databases. Outside of those databases, XML has already invaded our SQL Servers. It’s made its way into execution plans with the SHOWPLAN XML. It’s telling us about deadlock through deadlock graphs. It’s also presented to us through service broke, event notifications, and extended events. XML is there and we need to learn how to query it. In this session, we’ll explore some of the basic methods for querying XML through XQuery. By the end of the session you’ll be equipped with the tools and understanding needed to ease yourself into XQuery.
XQuery Basics for the DBA) – Session Link
How Do Non-Clustered Indexes Improve Performance? (10/17/2013)
We’ve all heard the mantra about the importance of clustered indexes, but what about non-clustered indexes? Do you really need non-clustered indexes or are they just something that consultants recommend to increase their billable hours? In this session, we’ll investigate the various flavors of non-clustered indexes and how they can be used to provide significant performance improvements.
How Do Non-Clustered Indexes Improve Performance?) - Session Link - Follow-up Post
Choosing Your Clustered Index (10/10/2013)
We often hear that you should always have clustered indexes on your tables. What’s left off of this discussion is the how to choose the columns for this index. Should it be the primary key? Or some other column or set of columns? Having the wrong key column(s) in the clustered index can lead to performance problems, possibly worse than having no clustered index on the table at all. In this session, we’ll review common patterns for selecting clustered indexes and how to determine which pattern you need. Also, we’ll look at how to analyze tables to help select the best clustered index for every table.
Choosing Your Clustered Index)- Session Link - Follow-up Post
Recognizing the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) Workload (9/16/2013)
If you are like many, you’ve been hearing a lot about Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) lately. PDW is Microsoft’s appliance solution with SQL Server 2012 that allows massively parallel processing (MPP) of database workloads. But how do you know that you have a workload that requires or could benefit from MPP over the standard symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture? In this session, we’ll review that question and more with a run through of how to identify MPP workloads? As part of the session, we’ll also review some of the key components and differentiators of the PDW platform.
Transform Your Profiler Skills to Extended Events (9/12/2013)
Do you still reach for SQL Profiler, even though you could use extended events? It’s a common choice, built upon our familiarity and habit in using Profiler. The times, they are changing, and it won’t be long before Profiler is no longer available in SQL Server. Already, the types of tracing available in extended events exceeds Profiler. In this session, we’ll look at common use cases for SQL Profiler and translate those directly into Extended Events. We’ll also look at how those scenarios can be improved upon just by changing tools.
Transform Your Profiler Skills to Extended Events) – Session Link
Building Security Audits with Extended Events (8/20/2013)
It’s 11 AM, do you know what your users are doing? One of the important roles for any database administrator is that of The Gatekeeper – standing in front of the data platform ensuring that only those with permission have access to the database. Along with that, DBAs also need to ensure that users are not abusing the access that they have already in the database. In this session, we’ll review these challenges and discuss how you can leverage extended with security audits.
Building Security Audits with Extended Events) - Session Link - Follow-up Post
5 Amazing Reasons DBAs Need to Love Extended Events (7/25/2013)
Extended events provide DBAs with a powerful tool that can be used to troubleshoot and investigate SQL Server. Throughout this session, you’ll walk through five great reasons, with demos. By the end of the webcast, you’ll be itching to grab the scripts from the demos to start building your own extended event sessions today.
5 Amazing Reasons DBAs Need to Love Extended Events) – Session Link - Follow-up Post
5 Ways to Improve Performance through Indexing (7/16/2013)
Sometimes the hardest performance issues in your environment have simple solutions. One of these simple solutions is through properly indexing the database. In this session, we’ll look at five ways that performance of a database can be improved through indexing. When we finish, you’ll be armed with scripts and methodologies that you can put into place today to improve database performance.
5 Ways to Improve Performance through Indexing) - Session Link - Follow-up Post and Q&A
Introduction to SQL Server Security (5/2/2013)
One of the most often overlooked feature sets of SQL Server is it’s security features. The focus is often on what type of data, how to store the data, and how to get the data out of SQL Server. As DBAs, we also need to be consider how to lock down the data and implement security. In this session, we’ll investigate the basic components of security within SQL Server. Also, we’ll review some practices for that you may want to adopt to secure your environment.
Introduction to SQL Server Security) – Session Link - Follow-up Post and Q&A
A Functions Is A Function – Comparison of the Performance Impacts of User Defined Functions (2/28/2013)
User defined functions provide a means to encapsulate business logic in the database tier. Often the purpose of the encapsulation is to provide standard method access segments of data within the database. Unfortunately, not all methods of creating user defined functions are equal. In this session we’ll review the types of user defined functions and investigate the performance impact in selecting the different types.
A Function By Any Other Name Is A Function) – Session Link - Follow-up Post
What Are You Waiting For – Explanation of the Value of Performing Wait Analysis (2/21/2013)
You’ve spent the afternoon sweating over your T-SQL query. You’ve wrung out all of the wrinkles. It’s deployed, it’s running… now its waiting. In SQL Server the most performant query can become a problem query if there aren’t any resources in the SQL Server for it to use. In this session, we’ll look at wait statistics and what they are. We’ll look into how they are accumulated and how they can be monitored. By the end of the session, you’ll be equipped with the tools needed to determine if there are resource issues in your environment and methods to start mitigating them.
What Are You Waiting For) - Session Link - Follow-up Post
Extended Events: Work Smarter, Not Harder (1/8/2013)
Of the many ways to monitor your SQL Server environment, Extended Events is one of the newer platforms that can help you investigate and resolve performance problems. In this special 90-minute session, we’ll review Extended Events and learn the ins and outs of how to get and analyze detailed information on the errors and events that occur within SQL Server. With a few T-SQL statements, you can research in minutes issues that used to take weeks to investigate.
Extended Events: Work Smarter, Not Harder) – Session Link
If you’d like to have any of the presentations in this list delivered to your user group or team, please reach out to me and we can work on scheduling a time. One of the most favorite things that I do with technology is to share my experiences through presentations to help people learn. Also, let me know your thoughts on any of the presentations if you’ve seen them, I’m always looking to improve them.
