I will be presenting a day long preconference session on Scaling SQL Server for SQLSaturday #104 on Friday, January 6, 2012 from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM (MT) in Colorado Springs, CO. This will be a revised and expanded version of the half-day session I gave at the PASS 2011 Summit in Seattle. Here is the abstract and biography for the session.

Scaling SQL Server

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.

Biography

Glenn works as a Database Architect at Avalara in Parker, CO. He has been a SQL Server MVP since 2007, and he has a whole collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCAD, and MCTS, which proves that he likes to take tests. His expertise includes DMVs, high availability, hardware selection, full text search, and SQL Azure. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at University College – University of Denver, where has been teaching since 2000. He has completed the Master Teacher Program at Denver University – University College. He is heavily involved in the SQL Server community, and is a frequent speaker at user groups, SQL Saturdays, and the PASS Community Summit. He is the author of the book SQL Server Hardware, and he wrote chapters for SQL Server MVP Deep Dive and SQL Server MVP Deep Dives Volume 2 books. Glenn blogs regularly at http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com. He is active on Twitter as @GlennAlanBerry.

This precon session should be a lot of fun, and it will have the advantage of me not being exhausted like I was when I presented the half day version of it on the last day of the PASS 2011 Summit. I hope to see you there!

Filed under: Computer Hardware, PASS, Processors, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, Teaching Tagged: SQLSaturday #104