New Year – New SQL Server Skills

SQL Server running slow? That can affect everyone in your organization. But as the DBA, it’s on you to take ownership, start SQL Server troubleshooting and resolve the performance bottlenecks. We all know it’s best to be proactive. Using preventative measures will help you avoid SQL Server running slow. But most of the time, we reactively respond to issues. 

In this open panel discussion, we talked with SQL Server performance tuning expert Pinal Dave about best practices to keep your database running at optimal speed. We also discussed his business secrets to run faster databases. 

Performance tuning in SQL Server is not without its challenges, but understanding execution plans can help. Before it executes a query, SQL Server generates an execution plan. Some execution plans are trivial, such as returning all the rows from a single table. But when we go beyond simple cases, SQL Server generates a good enough execution plan to accomplish the work.

SQL Server will use the indexes you've created, the statistics on those indexes, as well as how you’re manipulating the data based on the query to determine that execution plan. The hardware and the amount of data determine how fast the query returns. If a query is performing poorly, there’s a lot within our control to improve performance. That’s why understanding the execution plan is so important for SQL Server query performance tuning.

In this on-demand webcast, you’ll learn how to:

• Use the tools in SQL Server to capture execution plans
• Read an execution plan and use that information to write better queries
• Understand the impact of outdated statistics, improper indexing and T-SQL anti-patterns that cause queries to run poorly
• Improve SQL Server query performance tuning

We’ll also work through remediation examples of performance killers, so you’ll gain the skills to attack poorly performing queries in your own environment. With the expert guidance in this session, you’ll master performance tuning in SQL Server.

Are you struggling with new open-source database platforms? Are you feeling pressure to work faster than ever as a result of DevOps? Pinal Dave has you covered in part two of his webcast series. In his signature conversational style that makes his webcasts feel as if you’re chatting with your favorite colleague, leading database expert Pinal Dave will discuss these issues and more. 

Pinal will cover the biggest pain points affecting DBAs who are dealing with open source and DevOps and offer invaluable guidance to help you overcome major obstacles with confidence. 

You’ll learn why you don’t need to be intimidated by open-source platforms, your heterogeneous database environment or even your ever-increasing workload.

Getting your database queries to perform well is critical for overall database application performance. But gathering and reading execution plans isn’t always easy when you’re new to SQL Server. Thankfully, SQL Server MVP Joseph D'Antoni has all the tips you need to know.

Watch this informative on-demand webcast and learn how to:

• Find poorly performing queries using a variety of methods
• Capture execution plans
• Read and interpret a query plan
• Analyze performance

Query store – what is it and why should you care? It’s an option in SQL Server that records query plans and wait states. And the cool thing is? It gives you a deeper understanding of historical performance data. With query store, you get an answer to the question, "Is this worse now than then?" Query store also provides an easy, effective way to force a plan to be used.

In this on-demand webcast, you’ll learn about:

• Performance impact and disk usage
• The simple per database configuration
• What query store can capture and the tables used
• Forcing and unforcing a plan
• Plan regression and how you find it using the built-in reporting

SQL queries aren’t performing well? Already know you’ve got enough hardware to handle the load? Then you’re probably wondering what to check next. One area is the indexing on the data and how those indexes are used. Not having indexes, or having incorrect indexes, forces SQL Server to work harder to return the same data. Or maybe you have the proper indexes, but the queries themselves aren’t making effective use of them. No worries! SQL Server expert Brian Kelley has you covered with everything you need to know about SQL Server indexes.

In this session, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the SQL Server parse process. You’ll learn how SQL Server parses a query and determines its execution plan for retrieving or updating data. We’ll also review the types of indexes and how SQL Server uses them to increase the efficiency of data access and how poorly written queries can result in not using indexes that would otherwise benefit us. Finally, we’ll talk about how to improve our indexing and queries together for increased SQL Server performance.