Today's post is from Kalen Delaney, who will be presenting Locking and Blocking and Versions, Oh My - you can find more about her session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/DBA301P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
Understanding how SQL Server manages concurrent user access is crucial to database developers and DBAs. For a developer, failing to design an application with concurrency in mind, and failure to test an application with the maximum number of expected simultaneous users is one of the main causes of poor application performance. For a DBA, excessive blocking can be a major cause of poor overall system performance will a DBA may be called on to troubleshoot and "fix". Anyone who works with SQL Server and wants to get the most of the system and the applications will find value in understanding how SQL Server manages concurrency, how to troubleshoot concurrency problems, and how to alleviate the pain.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
- Through understanding of why concurrency management is a crucial part of database and application tuning
- Solid familiarity with the details of both concurrency models: how SQL Server implements pessimistic concurrency with locking, how locking causes blocking, and when /why optimistic concurrency can be a useful alternative
- Knowledge of the available tools for monitoring and troubleshooting concurrency problems: the metadata views and the Management Data Warehouse
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
This seminar does not require an expert background in SQL Server, but rather some experience with SQL Server Management Studio and TSQL queries, and an understanding of basic transactional work processing. The most important prerequisite is a desire to learn more about the way SQL Server works internally and how you can take advantage of the inner working to create the best performing system and applications possible.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I have been working with SQL Server for 23 years, as a technical support engineer, writer, trainer, curriculum developer and performance consultant. I have watched the product grow from the first true client /server database system running on small departmental systems to the World Class data processing system it is today in SQL Server 2008.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
Today's post is from Itzik Ben-Gan, who will be presenting Advanced T-SQL Solutions: Unleashing the Powerful Window Functions - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/AD438P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
T-SQL developers and DBAs. Anyone who needs to write or review queries and is looking for ways to improve existing solutions.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
- Simplify existing solutions.
- Optimize existing solutions.
- Understand better the ingenious windowing concept in SQL.
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
At least half a year to a year of experience writing queries using T-SQL.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
Over a decade of experience with SQL Server, specializing in T-SQL, querying and query tuning, as well as over a decade of writing, teaching and speaking experience.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
We have yet another post this morning. This one is from Adam Machanic, who will be presenting A Day of Doing Many Things at Once: Multitasking, Parallelism, and Process Distribution - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/AD311P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
As database professionals, we must learn to adapt to change. And it is easy to see that our world is changing, rapidly. As recently as five years ago, I/O performance was the name of the game -- almost to the exclusion of everything else. Since then, CPU power has rapidly multiplied, memory capacity has exploded, and solid state devices have become commonplace in the data center. All of which means that I/O is simply not as important as it once was. Data sizes continue to grow, so even as the I/O system delivers data more quickly -- or that data is read directly from the massive in-memory cache -- many queries don't seem to get any faster. The reason? Systems generally fail to consider the new bottleneck: processor resources. This seminar will teach you how to use CPU power to your advantage, making those slow queries scale to meet the demands of your end users.
The seminar is geared toward developers working with large sets of data -- queries that deal with millions or even billions of rows -- but there will also be plenty of material of interest to production DBAs tasked with managing these large SQL Server instances. And even if you don't work with large data today, you eventually will; there is no avoiding the push toward bigger and more interesting databases. (And really, why would you want to avoid it?)
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
After attending the seminar you will have a solid understanding of how to read and interact with parallel query plans. You will understand why and how performance is impacted by parallelism and how to control it using both plan shape and server options. If you need to tune large queries on modern hardware (servers with 8 or more cores), you will return to the office with a number of tricks and tools that will help make your query performance both better and more deterministic.
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
It will certainly help if attendees have spent some time studying the basics how to read query plans. The parallel aspects will be covered in depth, but I won't take too much time to explain the underlying non-parallel aspects. A background in computer science fundamentals will help with some of the theory I'll be discussing, but I'll assume that most people in the audience haven't studied CS and will fill in the gaps as needed.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I have worked with SQL Server for 11 years, and for the past 8 my career has been focused entirely on SQL Server development. Most of that time has been spent working with large databases, and performance optimization is always at the top of my list. As a consultant I have seen dozens of environments and have been tasked with tuning a huge variety of queries, including many that work with billions of rows. Over time I have developed patterns and tools that have helped me achieve the best possible performance from these monster data consumers, and this set of techniques is what I will share in the seminar.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
We have another post this morning. This one is from Davide Mauri, who will be presenting Creating a BI solution from A to Z - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/BIA281P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
Sure. The session is especially targeted to everyone who’s making the first steps in the BI world and want to start with the right foot. The workshop is not only a description of how a BI solution can be built, but also aims to give a lot of advices and best practices to avoid common errors and problem, being able to create a BI solution that is both sound and flexible.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
Way more than three. They will be able to design and create a datawarehouse, load and process a cube and produce reports. In addition they will be the first to have access to a new tool that I’m developing that will reduce drastically (by a factor of more than 30) the time needed to handle dimension loading!
Some insight will also be previewed here:
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/davide_mauri/default.aspx
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Knowledge of T-SQL and SQL Server Engine is enough.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ll try to put all I’ve learned in the last seven years (since SQL Server 2005 was born) of developing BI solution on the SQL Server platform and all the best practices and the working methodology acquired at service of attendees.
I wouldn’t have missed such workshop if at the beginning of my career I would have a change to attend to it!
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
This morning's post is from Brian Knight, who will be presenting ETL with SSIS Bootcamp - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/BIA225P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
In the first hour of the presentation, we cover the basics of SSIS and then quickly jump into more hard core SSIS. If you’re a novice you’ll get a lot out of the session on building the best performing packages with lots of tips and tricks along the way that you won’t get elsewhere.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
The thing that excites me about this presentation is the surprise real world data (no, not AdventureWorks). We’re going to show how to performance tune SSIS, load a data warehouse and solve common business problems with SSIS, like data cleansing.
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Even though we show a little about the SSIS basics, we drive into the meat of the presentation fast. So ideally, the attendee should know the basics of the various components in SSIS and what they can do.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ve been using SSIS since the early beta stages of SQL Server 2005 and DTS prior to that. I’ve implemented it across hundreds of customers and trained thousands of students on how to use it. I’ll bring real world insight to how you can scale and use SSIS.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
Today's post is from Denny Cherry, who will be presenting Storage and Virtualization for the DBA - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/DBA491P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
All DBAs that work in companies where they don’t make the storage decisions.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
- DBAs will have a better understanding of the storage solutions that their companies have purchased.
- DBAs will be able to bridge the communications gap between storage/system admins and the DBA team.
- The attendees will have a better understanding of the advanced features which are present within their storage arrays to reduce costs and storage requirements for second and third level systems (dev, qa, stage, etc).
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
A general understanding of storage would be nice, but none is required.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ve been a product storage administrator for 5 years at three different companies and I can talk intelligently about various different storage solutions.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
Surprisingly enough, the PASS Summit is less than three months away. Many of you are in the process of deciding whether to sign up for the pre/post conference sessions and, if so, which ones to sign up for. The Program Committee is encouraging the speakers from the pre/post con sessions to present ‘preview’ webcast sessions through the virtual chapters. These, as always, are free webcasts and would give PASS members a glimpse of what would be covered during the pre/post con sessions. We hope that all of the speakers take this opportunity, but we wanted to let you know what is lined up so far.
Adam Mechanic presented “Parallelism and Performance: Are You Getting Full Return on Your CPU Investment” for the Performance VC on 8/3. This session is available in the Presentation Archive on the Performance VC site: http://performance.sqlpass.org/PresentationArchive.aspx.
Denny Cherry is going to be presenting a preview webcast for his “Storage and Virtualization for the DBA” session for the Performance VC on September 23rd at 12:00PST.
Adam Mechanic is tentatively scheduled to present a preview webcast for his “A Day of Doing Many Things at Once: Multitasking, Parallelism, and Process Distribution” session for the Application Development VC on September 28th.
Allen White is scheduled to present a session for the DBA VC in October.
We’ll be sure to post other preview sessions as they’re scheduled.
Another opportunity to see some of the pre/post-con speakers in action is the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS on September 15. Allen White, Kalen Delaney, Peter Myers, Brian Knight and Denny Cherry will all be participating. You can find more information and register here: http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/fall2010/.
I’ve never had the opportunity to be on the abstract selection committee, so it was interesting to see the process in action. To be clear, I was not on one of the selection committees, but I am on the Program Committee so I was still involved in the process.
The abstract selection committees are chosen out of the group of people that apply to volunteer for the Program Committee. We work to ensure that each team includes at least one person that has been on an abstract selection team in the past. Our hope is that they can provide some additional guidance. We also provide at least one training session to go over the tools and answer any initial questions.
Prior to the call to speakers, the number of allocated sessions are set. They are allocated in total to fit the number of rooms that we have available. That total number is then split between the tracks (Application and Database Development, BI Architecture, Development and Administration, BI Client Reporting and Delivery Topics, Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment and Professional Development) to help make certain that we provide a balanced Summit selection.
Once the call to speakers closed, we knew that the abstract review committees were going to be in for a lot of work. Here are the numbers that we were looking at:
Total # of regular session abstracts submitted: 513
# of regular session community slots allocated: 72
Doing the math, that means that only 14% of the abstracts submitted were going to be selected. Within the tracks, that percentage ranged from 11% to 18%.
During the review process, the individuals on each team go through the abstracts in their track and rate them on 4 different areas – Abstract, Topic, Speaker and Subjective. Each of these areas are rated using a 1-10 scale and there is an area for comments. The abstract section has to do with, among other things, whether the abstract was complete (were session goals identified?), clear (was it easy to understand what the session would be about?) and interesting. The topic referred to the interest in and relevancy of the chosen topic. As far as the speaker – the abstract review teams had access to a report that provided previous Summit evaluation data for previous Summit speakers. They could also draw on personal knowledge or other information that they had access to. All of the individual scores added up to a total rating per abstract for the team.
Once the individual team members were finished with the evaluations, they came together as a team to rank the sessions. Along with looking at the total rating, they also looked at the different topics that were covered to ensure that the sessions covered a broad range of topics. Once the abstracts were ranked, the teams updated the session status to Approved, Alternate or Considered (Not accepted). If the status was Considered, the teams provided a reason as to why the abstract was not selected.
At that point the list of sessions came back to the Program Committee managers. We made certain the correct number of sessions per track were chosen and that no speakers had more than two sessions. There were a couple of cases where speakers had more than two sessions – for these cases, we went back to the teams for additional selections.
That’s it. Well, I guess I mean, those are all of the steps – it’s a ton of work and I’m grateful to everyone involved for all of their hard work. We recognize that there are probably ways to improve the process and we’re in the process of setting up meetings with all of the teams to get their input. I hope this provides clarification to some of the questions that people might have about the abstract selection process.
The SQL Server community never ceases to amaze me. The number of people that are willing to take time out from their jobs and families to volunteer is especially impressive.
I’ve had the good fortune to be able to volunteer for the Program Committe this year. My job is to pull together special projects and whatever other slave work Allen thinks up for me. I’ve had a number of volunteers that have put great work into our current project. This project has multiple steps and has required a ton of coordination between the volunteers – but it is all coming together. It’s something that’s been needed for awhile and now it’s going to be a reality. I’d name names, but I know that I’d forget someone. So thank you to everyone that’s helped out.
It’s not just me, though. My husband, Tim Edwards, in the process of re-starting the Performance VC. He had mentioned the need for volunteers through our blog, Twitter and Blythe (Blog/Twitter) put out a call for volunteers on the PASS blog. He’s been overwhelmed at the number of people that have asked to help out.
For all of you that volunteer for PASS – kudos to you! For those of you that are thinking of volunteering, but haven’t yet, get ahold of Tim or me or go here for additional volunteer opportunities.
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