Database Training Days: SQL Server Resources

Feel like you’re the Sherlock Holmes of IT, always working hard to solve SQL Server or Oracle performance mysteries? Well, every Sherlock needs a little help from Watson. In this session, you’ll see how to get the assistance you need to speed up your investigations and quickly take down your fiercest adversaries.

See how the Foglight® Performance Investigator solution can help you:

• Keep your database environment running efficiently, so you can spend less time on menial tasks and more time on strategic initiative.
• Piece together real-time and historical clues through an intelligent, scalable SQL workload analytics engine.
• Investigate data on baselines, lock analysis and change tracking.
• Hone your detective skills by sleuthing through multidimensional drilldowns and historical session data.

In this on-demand session, Oracle ACE Director Janis Griffin and Senior Data Architect Eric Blinn discuss how to use SQL Server indexes to make your queries run faster.

You’ll gain expert insights to understand how indexes can help. You’ll also learn about various methodologies to determine which SQL Server indexes improve performance the most -- as indexing every column is not the answer!

Janis and Eric will show you how to use SQL Server index options, such as filtering and compression, as well as different types of indexes, like rowstore and columnstore. These can be extremely beneficial in specific use cases. You’ll learn what those use cases are and how to index them for blazing-fast query execution.

At some point, you'll run into a query that’s written decently but it just doesn't perform well with the plan SQL Server generates. When that happens, you may have a bad day for what seems like no reason at all.

In this on demand session, you’ll see how to fix a problem by adding or removing a hint, without changing the statement, or by specifying a different query plan. It's not magic, you have to figure out what behavior would be better and know whether the Query Store or a plan guide is the better option for making it happen. Determining when to use Query Store versus a plan guide isn’t quite intuitive, but it's doable once you know how. We're going to start at the beginning and cover how to use both as we fix a couple queries gone bad!

Virtualization administrators and tools that don’t support the specialized needs of database servers can make your job challenging. If you’ve ever had a sysadmin ask why your server was using all of its RAM, you understand these challenges.

In this session, SQL Server MVP Joseph D'Antoni and Oracle ACE Director Janis Griffin will show you how to overcome these obstacles and improve performance in virtual SQL Server environments.

You’ll learn how to:

• Configure VMs for SQL Server and database workloads
• Troubleshoot and understand where performance bottlenecks can happen
• Follow best practices to quickly and proactively fix performance problems

DBAs are often asked to solve SQL Server performance issues that occurred in the past. And unless you’ve installed a SQL Server monitoring solution, you’re forced to rely on SQL Server’s data collection.

As you’ve probably discovered, SQL Server data collection has many limitations in terms of what it stores historically, what data exists and how data is not integrated together across the various areas of the product and its features.

In this on demand MSSQLTips webcast, you’ll learn SQL Server audit tips from the best expert possible – a Certified Information Systems Auditor. Brian Kelley has been an auditor for more than a decade and he’s also an accredited trainer for the CISA exam. Brian will show you how an auditor typically approaches auditing a system in general; then, he’ll apply that to an audit of a SQL Server environment.

You’ll learn what you should have ready beforehand to make the audit go as smoothly as possible and what types of information and evidence auditors look for. As part of that preparation, we’ll review and execute several scripts that will help you in your next SQL Server audit. Finally, we’ll talk about how to interact with the auditor during the engagement for maximum benefit to your organization.

Whether you’re a new or experienced SQL Server DBA, your responsibilities can get overwhelming. Proactive database administration is critical to keep SQL Server up and running, but sometimes best practices aren’t put in place or followed. In this MSSQLTips webcast, you’ll learn what you need to do to keep the lights on.

SQL Server MVP Joseph D'Antoni and Oracle ACE Janis Griffin will discuss:

• Best practices for configuration
• The importance of backup and restore
• Understanding maintenance
• What TempDB is
• Why you should never shrink a database

Beyond these topics, you will learn about changes between versions of SQL Server and how they may affect the way you maintain your systems. You’ll also learn about high availability and cloud options.

Microsoft Azure SQL (DB and Managed Instance) are “fully managed” SQL Server database services. If you’re used to working with SQL Server, you’ll find them familiar and easier to set up and use than SQL Server on-premises databases. Many traditional DBA tasks, including space allocation, backup and recovery, are handled automatically by the platform. And not having to worry about an operating system, hypervisor and thread count further simplifies performance management. But you can’t get complacent. Because the performance of any database as a service is inextricably linked to cost. 

A poorly optimized workload can cause the provisioning of extra resources. It’s great that it can scale automatically to stay within SLAs, but this costs money. If left unchecked, it can accumulate quickly and hit your company's bottom line hard. The performance challenge has evolved with the database as a service, but it has not gone away. In this session, we’ll discuss why managing performance is even more critical with Azure SQL DB and Azure Managed Instance. 

When it comes to SQL Server database performance, query tuning is critical. But pinpointing the root cause of performance issues is challenging, and you may be spending way too much time trying to identify and resolve problems. If you’re frustrated with your query tuning efforts, this webcast is for you.

In this session, Oracle ACE Director Janis Griffin demonstrates how Foglight® for Databases by Quest® makes it easy to find and fix problematic queries.

You’ll learn how to use the powerful functionality in this toolset, including the multi-dimensional Performance Investigator and Quest SQL Optimizer, to quickly rewrite a query or discover the best index to use. Regardless of the complexity of your database or your skill level, this systematic approach will lead you down the correct tuning path with no guessing, saving you countless hours on query tuning and SQL Server performance optimization.

Janis will show you how to:

• Use wait types to quickly identify bottlenecks and get clues on the best tuning approach
• Identify inefficient operations by reviewing query execution plans
• Rewrite queries to get the best execution plans

Whether you're a developer, IT manager or an accidental DBA, at some point, you'll run into query performance problems. Beyond adding an index, you may not know how to make it work better. Microsoft SQL Server MVP Andy Warren and Oracle ACE Director Janis Griffin are here to help. In this session, you’ll learn tricks and tips to quickly improve query performance.

We'll go over a simple list of triage steps that will help you understand the problem. Then, we’ll see which of our solution patterns is most likely to work. For example, when we say query performance is slow, it's useful to understand if it's always slow, only slow at certain times or only slow for certain customers.

We'll also show you how to:

• Ensure query performance easily
• Know if blocking was involved
• Identify missing indexes
• Understand why plans sometimes "go bad"
• Fix some queries and improve SQL Server performance

You’ll learn how patience and thinking of query tuning in the same way that you think of debugging any problem, will help you solve your query performance issues.

Ready to improve SQL Server performance? Get SQL Server performance tuning tips from Microsoft MVP Denny Cherry and Oracle ACE Director Janis Griffin!

In this on demand session, we’ll look at ways we can make queries run faster in SQL Server. We'll see when to add indexes and what types of indexes you should add. We’ll also look at the different kinds of database engines that are available in SQL Server like Row-Store, ColumnStore and In-Memory OLTP. You’ll learn when each of these engines should be used and when they shouldn't. At the end of this SQL query tuning webcast, we’ll look at how Foglight® for Databases improves SQL Server database monitoring as well as performance across all your database platforms

See how to use native tools in SQL Server and scripts based on Dynamic Management Views to quickly identify and resolve SQL Server performance bottlenecks. 

Do you need to fix slow queries, blocking or deadlocks? Are you dealing with a slow server? When you don’t have a lot of experience in Microsoft SQL Server query tuning, this can be extremely frustrating. There’s so much you have to consider: locking, disk IO, statistics, caching, query plans, indexes and more. But you don't have to know everything to make a query go faster!

In this on-demand query tuning webcast, you’ll learn a set of steps to detect and fix the most common Microsoft SQL Server performance issues. We'll discuss figuring out where to start, deciding what is worth more effort and what isn't, some common patterns and anti-patterns and what to measure. You’ll also learn a few advanced strategies that go beyond pure query tuning, such as offloading queries to a replica and getting the developers to cache more. With these expert tips, you’ll simplify your work – and take SQL Server performance to the next level. 

There’s always room for tuning and improvement when it comes to database performance. And as more databases are deployed in the cloud, there are additional considerations for database tuning.

Whether you’re running SQL Server in a virtualized environment or running SQL Server as a service, such as Azure SQL Database or Amazon RDS, there is more to think about and some things you can no longer control.

In this session, SQL Server MVP Joseph D’Antoni and Oracle ACE Janis Griffin discuss key considerations and best practices for tuning databases in the cloud.

Speaker : Pinal Dave

Every query has a cost and it is usually measured via three important resources: CPU, IO and memory. When we deploy queries that are not optimized for the cloud, they usually lead us to either upgrade the cloud subscription model with expensive resources or extremely slow performing queries. In this session, we will focus on how we can tune our queries so when they are deployed to the cloud, they run extremely efficiently with limited resources. Developers and DBAs will receive knowledge and scripts, which they can use to immediately gain performance from their slow running queries. 

In this MSSQLTips and Quest on-demand webcast, Microsoft MVP Joseph D'Antoni discuss the new set of performance challenges you may be facing as your databases move to the cloud. Joseph explores the complexities of your new environment and ways to overcome common issues.

You’ll learn about:

• SQL Server cloud platform offerings
• Monitoring tools available in the cloud
• How you can save money by tuning your databases

Speaker: Brent Ozar

You've moved to the cloud, and now management is asking questions about your monthly bills. They've asked you to cut costs. Now what? In this webcast, Brent Ozar will examine the top expense-causing configurations and workloads for Azure SQL DB and Microsoft SQL Server. You'll learn how to tell when you've got too much hardware, and where you can safely cut costs without sacrificing end user performance experiences.

Speaker: Janis Griffin

Are you under pressure from your business to build, test and release software changes faster? Is it unclear how to bring database processes into your DevOps infrastructure? Are you concerned about the risks of making compromises while shortening your release cycles? Are you wondering how to effectively monitor the performance impacts of your database changes?  Are you required to replicate fast-moving changes to your hybrid database environments? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then this presentation is for you. Future proof your databases and achieve continuous database operations.

If you've managed database performance, you've come across the wait types CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER. You've seen a lot of conflicting instructions on how to go about fixing them, and you know that setting MAXDOP to 1 isn't the right thing to do.

Learn what happens when SQL Server parallelizes queries correctly, what causes parallelism to go awry, and what you can do about it.

Speaker: Pinal Dave

Execution plans are the first-place database professionals go to tune their query, but they often provide misleading information. The science behind query optimization is knowing what to believe and what to ignore from the execution plan. You’ll learn the 3 biggest issues with the execution plan and tips and tricks to overcome them easily and efficiently to ensure better performance.

Speaker: Brent Ozar 

Learn Brent’s tips to fix deadlocks. He’ll discuss tables in long transactions and why you need to work through them in a consistent order and touch them as few times as possible; then, he'll rewrite a stored procedure that's having deadlocking problems.