This year, i was lucky enough to attend SQLBits 2019 in Manchester England.
This was my first time at SQL Bits and was keen to see what it had to offer, compared to other SQL events I have been to such as Data Relay.
Through work, I signed up for the Thursday training day. The session I chose to attend was the brilliant Erik Darling’s session called Total Server Performance Tuning. Erik has recently departed from his consulting services for Brent Ozar and has started his own consultancy company called Erik Darling Data. His blog posts are incredible, and you can find his work here and here.
After the trek up to Manchester (hello roadworks!), we finally got to the venue, the Manchester Central Convention Complex.
We were first greeted in order to pick up our name badges, once that was done, we were handed an awesome goodie bags, full of promotional treats.
The general area for the stands was quite impressive, with all the big SQL server names there to see, Microsoft (obviously), Redgate and Sentry One to name a few.
After a quick browse of the stands and a chat to a few guys at the Redgate stand, we continued onto the training rooms.
I initially met Eric at the entrance who was extremely welcoming and thankful that I had chosen his session to attend. For someone whose work I admire greatly, this was awesome.
The daily session worked out liked this:
Morning Sessions:
Hardware Considerations from a performance point of view
Resource Waits including parallelism, memory operators
Afternoon Sessions:
Query Tuning
More query tuning
Overall, the training session was an extremely high standard (duh) with relevant real work solutions, to real-world problems (there’s a tagline). Erik’s sense of humour also helped with the proceedings.
But seriously, the content was great and I’m looking forward to re-reviewing the slides and demo scripts which Eric kindly made available to everyone in the session. The query tuning sessions were the best, in my opinion. Some of the information presented gave me that ‘oh now I get it’ moment, countless times. Key principles concerned with executions plans were presented in a really simple, straight forward way. Not an easy feat, given the subject matter.
I will hopefully do a bit more of a technical post regarding the demo scripts which Erik provided. I intent to have a deep dive into the examples he presented, I think trying to understand these fully would make a great blog post.
Thanks for reading.
