On Friday, October 14, 2011, I had the pleasure of delivering my new Scaling SQL Server presentation at the PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle. This was a half-day session, so I had plenty time to present the material and not have to feel like I was rushing through the session.
It also gave me more time to answer questions during the presentation. I got a lot of positive feedback during the break, and people seemed to enjoy the session. We will see when the session evaluations are released…
Here is the abstract:
How can you scale SQL Server? Scaling up is relatively easy (but can be expensive), while scaling out requires significant engineering time and effort. If you suggest hardware upgrades you may be accused of simply “throwing hardware at the problem”, and if you try to scale out, you may be thwarted by a lack of development resources or 3rd party software restrictions. As your database server nears its load capacity, what can you do? This session gives you concrete, practical advice on how to deal with this situation. Starting with your present workload, configuration and hardware, we will explore how to find and alleviate bottlenecks, whether they are workload related, configuration related, or hardware related. Next, we will cover how you can decide whether you should scale up or scale out your data tier. Once that decision is made, you will learn how to scale up properly, with nearly zero down-time. If you decide to scale out, you will learn about practical, production-ready techniques such as vertical partitioning, horizontal partitioning, and data dependent routing. We will also cover how to use middle-tier caching and other application techniques to increase your overall scalability.
You can get the PowerPoint for this session from Dropbox here. You can get an even deeper dive into much of the subject from my book, available here.
