My performance tuning Precon and Git session at PASS Data Community Summit 2023

on July 10, 2023

I’m thrilled to be heading to Seattle in November for the PASS Data Community Summit. My favorite things about the PASS Summit are making connections, learning from folks, broading my horizons, helping build a vibrant community, and teaching.

Teaching is a great privilege, and I’m excited to be giving both a pre-conference session and a regular session. I chat about the sessions in this ~4 minute video:

Not in the mood for a video? Read on for the written version and a comic.

My precon - Performance Tuning Secrets: Learn from My Mistakes

I wanted to do something different for this day-long session, so I asked ChatGPT to generate an outline for a performance tuning session for SQL Server. The result was comprehensive, but it’s been done many times before. It felt… kinda boring. I’m flipping it upside down and building the session around my actual experiences, not from a list of concepts.

During this day, we’ll:

Delve into real-world stories and practical advice for tuning the SQL Server engine on-prem and in the cloud.
Cover essential concepts like wait stats and query plans, along with an array of free tools.
Approach these from a practical, real-world perspective, focusing on instances where I made mistakes or where alternative approaches might not have been apparent.

From years of perf tuning and teaching it, both in the classroom and in consulting situations, I’ve found that an emphasis on practicality is critical: it’s what will help you keep from getting lost in the weeds over and over again.

Database professionals need to adopt a strategic mindset, or we’ll end up constantly in reactive mode with a defensive mentality. While reactivity is important, we need to get ahead of potential issues and establish systems where risk is mitigated. Our goal is to create a safer and more stable environment, minimizing the need for constant reaction. While this is a straightforward concept, it’s very hard to understand what this means in reality without analyzing specific situations.

Moving out of a reactive mindset doesn’t mean limiting or compromising what we do. We’ll explore how to properly performance-tune and build robust solutions. It’s a challenging task, but a fun one, and we’re going to tackle it in this session.

My regular session: Git and GitHub for Database Folks

Version control is essential for automation and has become a fundamental skill in software development and IT. I use Git on a regular basis and, weirdly enough, I even find it fun.

In this session, we’ll cover the basics and build up the necessary skills. The good news is that learning these skills has never been easier. There are numerous helpful free and paid tools available to make using git more enjoyable and accessible than ever before.