Dec-2010 ~ Gathering and Interpreting Server Metrics ~ Grant Fritchey

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Presenter: Grant Fritchey – SQL Server MVP
Topic: Gathering and Interpreting Server Metrics

 

Before you can start tuning SQL queries, it’s vital that you know how your server itself is behaving. You need to know what the memory, IO and CPU on the machine look like while the system is at rest and under load. You need to establish this baseline in order to better interpret the results of your later query tuning efforts.

There are a number of inherent methods built into SQL Server and the Windows operating system that can supply you with this vital information. There are even third party tools that can take a lot of guess work and manual labor out of the process of establishing these vital measures. This session will cover all the tools necessary to generate a baseline measurement for performance of your SQL Server system. The session is a small part of and serves as an introduction to the one day pre-conference seminar on query performance tuning being offered at SQLRally in May.

Biography:

Grant Fritchey has twenty years experience in IT. That time was spent in technical support, development and database administration. For the last seven years he has been working at a major insurance company as a DBA. He writes articles for publication at SQL Server Central, Simple-Talk, PASS Book Reviews and SQL Server Standard. He also published two books, ”Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans” and “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.” He is one of the founding officers of the this Users Group and currently serving as the president. In April 2009 he was awarded as a Microsoft SQL Server MVP. You can also find him tweeting as @GFritchey and blogging at Home of the Scary DBA.

Oct-2010 ~ DMV’s as a Shortcut to Procedure Tuning ~ Grant Fritchney

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Presenter: Grant Fritchey – SQL Server MVP
Topic: DMV’s as a Shortcut to Procedure Tuning

 

Dynamic Management Views (DMV) expose a wealth of information to the database administrator. However, they also expose information that is vital to the database developer. More often than not people gather performance metrics through server side traces. This session will show how to gather information from the DMVs for currently executing, and recently executed queries.

The session will demonstrate combining this information with other DMVs to get more intersting information such as the query plan and query text. I’ll show where you can get aggregate information for the queries in cache to determine which queries are being frequently accessed or using the most resources. I’ll show how to determine which indexes are being used in your system and which are not. All of this will be focused, not on the DBA, but on the query writer, the developer or database developer that needs information to tune and troubleshoot data access.

Biography:

Grant Fritchey has twenty years experience in IT. That time was spent in technical support, development and database administration. For the last seven years he has been working at a major insurance company as a DBA. He writes articles for publication at SQL Server Central, Simple-Talk, PASS Book Reviews and SQL Server Standard. He also published two books, ”Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans” and “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.” He is one of the founding officers of the this Users Group and currently serving as the president. In April 2009 he was awarded as a Microsoft SQL Server MVP. You can also find him tweeting as @GFritchey and blogging at Home of the Scary DBA.

Oct-2009 ~ Dynamic Management Views ~ Raghuram Dharmapuri

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Presenter: Raghuram (AJ) Dharmapuri – FM Global
Topic: SQL Server’s Panoramic Ensemble
          DMV’s (Dynamic Management Views)

 

We know that DMV’s have the answers, but do we know which DMV to look at and what to look for?

This session gives a brief overview of some of the frequently used Dynamic Management Views in SQL Server.

Biography:

AJ has over seven years of experience in the IT industry. He is currently a Sr. Development Database Administrator with FM Global.

Before joining FM Global, he worked for over 5 years for diverse range of organizations, including Oracle and SAP Labs in the CRM space with main focus on databases. In his current role he designs, develops, tunes & manages all versions of SQL Server databases along with working with developers on SSIS & SSRS tools.