Hello Dear Reader!  I've got some very exciting news!  Pragmatic Works is holding a Two Day Performance Tuning Workshop in Chicago Illinois on Wednesday April 3rd and Thursday April 4th.  Headlining this act will be the wonderful Kimberly Hathaway(Linked-In), and lil old me!

I was born and lived most of my young life in Peoria Illinois.  The last time I was in Chicago was for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, aka the Field Museum, with my Boy Scout Troop.  I was one of the Boy Scouts and it wasn't a reunion.

Chicago is home to some of the best resturants in the country, a main spot on shows like Man vs. Food, Diners Drive-Ins' and Dives, and Anthony Bourdain have made multiple episodes on the Windy City.

I've grown up a life long Cubs fan who has watched them in Atlanta, Washington D.C., and Miami, never in the Mecca of Wrigley Field.  Sadly the Cubs are out of town, heck even the Wrigley Field tours don't start until the week after I'm gone. I'm still hoping to stop by Wrigley and at least get a photo.

"So Balls", you say, "There was a Performance Tuning Workshop?"

Thank You Dear Reader.  My love for Chi-Town aside, I cannot wait for this workshop.  Kimberly and I are going to working very hard for you Dear Attendee, to make sure that in two days we can paint a picture and bring a lot of complex topics home.  Here's a link to the class if you're in town and would like to sign up (Some changes are coming to the outline, content will stay the same, but the flow will be streamlined)!   We are already 75% sold out, and space has been filling up fast. Space is limited so get your seat while you still can!

BUILD IT THE RIGHT WAY

A lot of the problems I see in servers deal with them not being set up correctly.  Most of the time it is a simple oversight.  When troubleshooting there are things that we will check for, and some of them are simple fixes.

Did you use SQLIO to baseline you're hard drives?  Did you take a perfmon baseline?  Do you know the correct calculations for PLE? Cough cough *hint*!  What about the best ways to set up and things to consider when using Virtualization?  Are your BIOS driver's up to date?  Do you have Green Driver Settings on, what is your Windows Performance Plan set to? All this and we haven't even installed SQL Server!

Our Configuration are only just beginning.  Once we install SQL Server there is more to do.  Have we set up Instant Database File Initialization, based on our security can we?   Max Memory, Lock Pages in memory, Max Worker Threads, Maxdop, Cost Threshold for Parallelism, and many other settings need to be considered.  We will cover each of these and what the best practices are for each.

Next up we will cover the Internals of how a Query flows through SQL Server.  We'll discuss the Optimizer, Statistics, and plan costing before diving into the Plan Cache and Execution plans.  We'll round things out by a full discussion on Indexes and end the day with a dive into Locking/Blocking and Deadlocks.

TROUBLESHOOTING SHARPSHOOTING

Anybody can run a DMV, (anybody with the right permissions on a SQL Instance that is).  Interpreting the results is what turns Troubleshooting into Sharpshooting.

To fine tune the process we will cover Waits and Queues, making sure we understand Preemptive vs. Cooperative Processing and how that helps us get Wait Stats.  We'll troubleshoot various types and discuss what we've seen.

We'll go back to our Baselines and talk about what to look for when things go south and how to start diving into the problem.  We'll use Extended Events to single out specific data and show how you can use them and powerful tools in your arsenal.

We will discuss some of the free tools, our SQL Community, and of course #SQLHelp.

We'll step into the BI world to discuss some performance issues you will see there, and how to troubleshoot them as well. Finally we'll get a hands on lab that we can all really get into.

THE WHOLE D@MN TEAM

One of the best things about the class?  When you get one of us from Pragmatic Works you get the whole crew. ( I call dips on being Nick Fury)

They might not be there in the class with us but great SQL Community members and teammates SQL MVP's Jorge  Segarra (@SQLChicken | Blog) and Jason Strate (@StrateSQL | Blog), .

Former Microsof-ties like Kathi Kellenberger (@AuntKathi | Blog) and Roger Wolter (@rwolter50 | Linked-In).

Finally Tremendous Sr. Consultants for Pragmatic works such as  Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan | Blog), Chad Churchwell (@ChadChurchwell | Blog), Kimberly, and myself all had are input on the class and worked on making the demos.

For $300 it's a can't miss!  Hope to see you there! (Click Here to Sign Up while Seats are still available!)

As always Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks,

Brad