Facility9

A special thanks to Grant Fritchey and Kevin Kline for their recent presentations.

Understanding Execution Plans

Grant Fritchey gave a phenomenal presentation covering more than just the plain basics about execution plans. Rather than focus on the wealth of potential operators that SQL Server can show in an execution plan, Grant focused on reading actual execution plans and showing the most common operations and what they mean. In addition to covering some ideal scenarios, Grant also discussed potential performance bottlenecks, how to investigate these potential bottlenecks, and what to do when they become an actual problem.

Unfortunately, due to technical mishaps (Grant and I both forgetting to start the presentation recording) there is no recording.

FEAR NOT! There will be a repeat of this presentation in October when Grant will be presenting virtually for the CBusPASS group.

End to End Performance Tuning

Kevin Kline happily donated his evening, skipped part of the DevLink keynote and drove me back to my hotel in order to present remotely for CBusPASS. Kevin outlined a performance tuning methodology that works universally across SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Kevin’s presentation, despite some technical hiccups, covered some great ground and reminded me that it’s alwasy best to start at the most basic level (error logs in both Windows and SQL Server) and move through the general layers of the OS, database, and then application while slowly narrowing down towards the specific problem and a working solution.

Bonus Fact: Kevin is red-green color blind.