This next year could be a tremendous step forward for my SQL Server career as i'll finally have the opportunity to start putting my money where my mouth is in terms of capabilities and offerings i can bring to my company with my knowledge.
Now for a quick few top session reviews in no particular order:
- Paul Randall's - Waits, Latches, and Spinlocks: Internals and Analysis
- VERY well discussed topic, seeing a 500-level session offered by someone of his caliber i expected to be completely blown away. Instead, the discussion deftly blended 100-500 level material in a way that i was able to follow very well (to my surprise and excitement). While the session went nearly 30 minutes over, the room was still 98% full when we let out
- Jonathan Kehayias - SQL Server Archaeology: Dig into the Past with system_health
- Extended Events are one of thsoe areas that sound really cool, i just hadn't had an opportunity to dive into them. This session was a great intro into them by showing the utility of the default system_health session. I'm really excited to get back to the office to review the slide deck and improve some of my skills in more rapidly resolving deadlocks and other log related issues that this session shed some light on for me
- Paul Randall's - Index Fragmentation: Internals, Analysis, and Solutions
- This has always been one of those topics that i didn't really understand, i just did rebuilds as part of maintenance plans, in the rare event of a "small" table having query performance problems, i'd just recommend a rebuild...but sitting through this class i now have a much greater appreciation for just what the impact of index fragmentation is and how the different tools can apply to help fix the issues. I also took a great appreciation away on just how bad page splits can be and how/why i should try to opitmize my systems to remove/mitigate them.
- Paul White's - Parallel Query Execution
- another one of those topics that i understood enough to probably make terrible decisions in the past on! i'm hoping that a thorough review or 3 of this session will help me make better decisions both in tuning the performance on existing servers as well as helping me make better recommendations to my dev team to better leverage the capabilities available with the PROPER use of parallelism to the extent we can control
Obviously those aren't the only great sessions i attended, just the ones that are most notably in the forefront of my mind as i leave the conference. I want to give a big warm shout out to all the Pass HQ folks as well as all the speakers and sponsors for making this amazing learning and community event happen. Looking forward to Summit 2014 and the return to Seattle!
