Posts Tagged ‘DMV’

SQLBits 7 Training Day – SQLOS with Maciej Pilecki

As a SQL Server Professional I love SQLBits, I was there at the first one and I’ve attended most of them since but until now I’d not managed to attend one of the paid training days – mainly because of the cost.  It’s not that the cost is high, £250 for a day’s training from some of the best minds in the industry is quite frankly a bargain but it’s still a lot if you’re paying out of your own pocket and my previous employer had a bit of a weird training policy.  Thankfully now I’m in the situation that whilst having to be prudent with budget if I really think something is good value for money and worth spending the time on my employer is likely to support me so I finally managed to attend a Thursday pre-conf event.

Choosing one of the courses was quite an ordeal and I was very tempted by Brent Ozar‘s Virtualisation and SAN course, part because having seen him before I know he’s a great speaker and also because it’s going to be directly relevant to my work very soon.  In the end I chose Maciej Pilecki‘s course on the SQLOS because the more I understand about SQL Server’s internals the more I understand everything else I learn about SQL Server – I read Kalen Delaney’s Inside SQL Server 2000 cover-to-cover several years ago and it pushed my understanding of the field forward immensely.

I won’t regurgitate the content of Maciej’s course but he effectively covered a massive range of topics and introduced me to several new concepts as well as strengthening my knowledge of others, the rough outline was:

• SQL OS history, services and DMVs.
• Using Affinity Masks effectively.
• Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
• Software NUMA.
• Configuring TCP-NUMA affinity.
• Virtual Address Space on 32 & 64-bit
• AWE and Large Pages
• Buffer Pool architecture and memory allocation.
• eXtended Events

Over then next few weeks I may blog some more detail of what was covered in the course but I’ll only do so if I find the time to put into some of my own research and write my own examples – it’s OK to stand on the shoulders of giants but it’s not OK to copy work from over their shoulder!

Maciej was a great speaker, extremely enthusiastic and well-deserves his reputation as the Dr. House of SQL – out of the many hours of training I’ve received in my career this was definitely one of the most beneficial and ‘action packed’ – all killer, no filler.  If you ever get the chance to check-out one of his courses in future I’d recommend it, his next public session will be in Germany (click here for more info).

SQLBits V: Highlights from Friday Morning

Having attended the SQL Bits conference in Newport last month I decided to collate the little tips and tricks I learned at the event, here are my highlights from Friday morning’s talks.

Simon Sabin kicked off the talks with a session on SQL Server 2008 Development Features, I’ve not had a good chance to try them out myself since I’m not on 2008 yet but the real highlight is the addition of the DATE and TIME data types – see my other post DATE and TIME Data Types in SQL Server 2008.

Management Studio now includes Intellisense which as been available in Visual Studio for a long time, it will automatically offer suggested keywords as well as table/object names whilst you type and can dramatically speed up your SQL writing.  Also new in SSMS is the ability to debug your code and step through it line by line, the debugger will even step into and out of stored procedures and user-defined-functions – this will be a life saver for anyone working with a complex web of SPs.

Following Simon’s talk I headed into the intriguingly names T-SQL Tuning with Colin Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, and The Stig by Brent Ozar – with a title like that how could I not go?  The talk turned out to be a great one and Brent’s a very entertaining speaker but all the time you get the feeling that he really knows what it feels like to be a DBA with production issues.  Most of my notes from Brent’s talk don’t type-up well but he’s got some excellent resources on his site at http://brentozar.com/go/faster so please do check those out, my personal ‘take homes’ from his talk were to mine the DMVs for performance data, to use mirroring as a way to manage uptime during OS/SQL patch cycles, use a text-file to build a change log on servers and to read the Microsoft whitepaper on index defragmentation.