The very first ever SQL Rally is taking place in a little less than four weeks in Orlando Florida. It’s going to be quite the event. There will be two full days of sessions on any number of topics. But before that all starts, there’s going to be a set of full day pre-conference seminars. These too are on a number of topics, but I’m hoping to draw your attention to just one, mine.

I’ve put together a seven hour session on query performance tuning. I’ve tried to make it as complete as I possibly can. I’m going to cover the whole process from collecting data on your machines to identify where problems may be, to understanding the optimizer so you know how things work, to reading execution plans so you can identify issues, to various methods of fixing all sorts of different performance problems. In short, performance tuning, start to finish. Here are the specific things that I hope to communicate to you with this seminar:

1. The ability to collect performance metrics on their servers as part of an overall query tuning methodology

2. The ability to generate execution plans from multiple sources in support of troubleshooting poorly performing queries

3. An understanding of how the optimizer works in support of writing better TSQL code as well as troubleshooting poorly performing queries

4. A working knowledge of DMVs that will help them identify and fix performance issues on their servers

5. The ability to address common query performance problems

That’s it. If you get all or part of these five topics, it’s a win. This is probably an low to intermediate level class. It’s not high level. If you’ve been teaching performance tuning to experts for years, you’re probably not going to get much out of this class. If you do want to prep for the class, I’d recommend getting a copy of my book, “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.”

There’s a good chance this seminar will sell out. If you’re interested, please click here to register soon in order to ensure that you have a spot.

I hope to see you there.