Frikkie Bosch opened the day with a short keynote giving an overview of Denali, talking mostly from a marketing point of view about the major features coming in the next version.

The virtual sessions were very popular, we don’t get many good international speakers down in our part of the world and the opportunity to listen to some new speakers was well received.

Benjamin kicked off the virtual sessions with his ’10 query optimiser topics for better performance’. He covered parameter sniffing, showing how the optimiser estimates row counts based on statistics and the sniffed value of parameters, cardinality estimation errors (poor stats or missing statistics) and scalar expressions (hard for the optimiser to guess rows affected). Also discussed were the missing index DMVs and DTA (the database tuning advisor)

My session on poorly performing SQL went very well. It’s a session I’ve done several times and enjoy thoroughly every time. The audience was great, lots of good questions, good comments and good fun. I ran a bit short on time to discuss the fixes for the multiple execution path problem, so I’ll just direct anyone reading to a blog post on it: http://sqlinthewild.co.za/index.php/2009/09/15/multiple-execution-paths/

Big thanks to all the organisers, all the speakers, all the attendees. Special thanks to the international speakers who either stayed up late or woke early to give their sessions.