I am going to be one of the speakers at the Spring 2012 SQL Server Connections Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. This conference will be held from March 26-29, 2012, and you can register here. The banner on the conference web page says “We are excited to host one of the SQL Server 2012 Launch Events”, and “Take the journey into SQL Server 2012 at one of the premier launch events happening during the SQL Server 2012 Launch Season”, so that should give you an idea that there will be a very good amount of SQL Server 2012 specific content at this conference.
There are a LOT of good sessions scheduled for this conference! That should be no surprise, given the list of speakers that were selected. They include:
I am not sure how I got on this list, but I am honored. I will be giving three sessions, which are:
SQL301: Scaling SQL Server 2012
How can you scale SQL Server 2012? 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.
SQL302: DMV Emergency Room!
If you have ever been responsible for a mission critical database, you have probably been faced with a high stress, emergency situation where a database issue is causing unacceptable application performance, resulting in angry users and hovering managers and executives. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, thank your lucky stars, but start getting prepared for your time in the hot seat. This session will show you how to use DMV queries to quickly detect and diagnose the problem, starting at the server and instance level, and then progressing down to the database and object level. Based on the initial assessment of the problem, different types of DMV queries will help you narrow down and identify the problem. This session will show you how to assemble and use an emergency DMV toolkit that you can use to save the day the next time a sick database shows up on your watch in the database ER!
SQL303: Hardware 301: Diving Deeper into Database Hardware
Making the right hardware selection decisions is extremely important for database scalability. Having properly sized and configured hardware can both increase application performance and reduce capital expenses dramatically. Unfortunately, there are so many different choices and options available when it comes to selecting hardware and storage subsystems, it is very easy to make bad choices based on outmoded conventional wisdom. This session will give you a framework for how to pick the right hardware and storage subsystem for your workload type. You will learn how to evaluate and compare key hardware components, such as processors, chipsets, and memory. You will also learn how to evaluate and compare different types of storage subsystems for different database workload types. This session will give you the knowledge you need to make sure you get the best performance and scalability possible from your hardware budget!
Filed under: SQL Server 2012, Teaching Tagged: SQLConnections 
