In just a few short days, it will be time for SQL Saturday #98 in Iowa City. If you’ve got some free time this coming Saturday and are within driving distance– take the time now to register and come get some free training.
While you are there, think about stepping into one of the sessions that I’ll be presenting. These should be pretty good and we’ll all have a good time.
Discovering the Plan Cache
Execution plans are stored after execution in the plan cache. This metadata about how queries are executed can provide insight into how your SQL Server environment is functioning. By using XQuery to browse and search the plan cache you can find potential performance issues and opportunities to tune your queries. This information can be used to help reduce issues related to parallelism, shift queries from using scans to using seek operations, or discover exactly which queries are using what indexes. All of this and more is readily available through the plan cache. In this session we will explore the plan cache and start you on the road to discovery.
Getting To Know Your Indexes
Without proper indexing SQL Server can be hard pressed to create efficient and performant execution plans. Dynamic Management Views (DMV) and system views provide a slew of information about indexes that can be used to analyze indexes within SQL Server. In this session we’ll go under the hood of SQL Server to look at DMVs and system views to know what indexes you have, should have, and how they feel about the way applications are treating them.
XQuery Basics for the DBA
For the past few years, XML has been making its way more and more into our SQL Server instances. For a moment let’s forget that developers often find the need to store XML data in their databases. Outside of those databases, XML has already invaded our SQL Servers. It’s made its way into execution plans with the SHOWPLAN XML. It’s telling us about deadlock through deadlock graphs. It’s also presented to us through service broke, event notifications, and extended events. XML is there and we need to learn how to query it. In this session, we’ll explore some of the basic methods for querying XML through XQuery. By the end of the session you’ll be equipped with the tools and understanding needed to ease yourself into XQuery.
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