This is my fourth day in the PASS Summit. I have already written about my first, second and third days.

The day started with another keynote session with Thomas LaRock (Blog | Twitter), vice president of marketing at PASS, and David DeWitt, director at Microsoft. David presented a great session about memory optimized tables, which made everyone realize how much effort has been invested in this technology. I’m really looking forward to working with it on production systems.

From this point I attended 4 sessions, out of which 3 were presented by speakers from SQLskills. This is great, because these guys are really good!

The first one was Skewed Data, Poor Cardinality Estimates, and Plans Gone Bad by Kimberly Tripp (Blog | Twitter). When SQL Server 2005 was released, Kimberly had a series of 10 podcasts or so for developers and another series of 10 podcasts for DBAs about all the new features in SQL Server 2005. At that time I was jogging 3 times a week and I had an MP3 player, which I took with me when I was running. I downloaded both series and listened to one podcast each time. I enjoyed listening to Kimberly so much, and since then I have been following her.

So I am familiar with Kimberly’s blog and with her scripts and demos, which is why I didn’t expect to learn anything new in this session. I still chose this session, because I really wanted to attend a live session with her, rather than just listen to her podcasts or read her blog.

The session was excellent, and there are two reasons for that. First, Kimberly is a wonderful speaker, and she even exceeded my expectations. Even though I was familiar with everything she talked about, I enjoyed watching her so much. Second, Kimberly focused this talk on filtered statistics and prepared a whole new bunch of scripts just for this session, and I love the work she did. Thank you, Kimberly!

Generally, her scripts analyze skewed data in all the index statistics in a given database based on all kinds of configurations, and then they create filtered statistics dynamically just for the regions with the skewed data. Kimberly promised to upload all the scripts from her session to the resources section on SQLskills, so I’m waiting for that…

The second session I attended today was SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP: DBA Deep Dive by Kevin Liu, principal lead program manager at Microsoft. This was a continuation to the keynote presentation. This stuff is really interesting, but there was so much new stuff to learn and it was right after lunch, so this session was a tough one for me. You can download the presentation here.

Back to SQLskills, this time with Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter), my Extended Events guru. His session was about the “system_health” event session and what you can dig from there. Jonathan first demonstrated how to query all the information in that event session using XQuery. Then he demonstrated a nice set of reports for SQL Server 2012 written by Denzil Ribeiro (Twitter), senior premier field engineer at Microsoft, which can be downloaded from here. Finally, he presented a nice add-on to SSMS that he wrote together with Paul Randal, which also includes a nice set of built-in reports to look at the data available in the “system_health” event session. You can download the presentation from Jonathan’s session here. All the scripts and the SSMS add-on will hopefully be available soon on the resources page on SQLskills website.

The last session today was presented by Paul Randal (Blog | Twitter), and it was about waits, latches and spinlocks. Paul explained the waits and queues methodology and talked about a lot of things related to locks, latches and spinlocks. He provided many tips and best practices to follow. It was a very interesting session, and it was a pleasure listening to Paul explaining everything so clearly. You can download the presentation here.

At the end of the day we all headed to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, where the community appreciation part was held. So now you know where all those pictures came from. I love that Cadillac…

Tomorrow is the last day of the summit with several promising sessions.

See you tomorrow!

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