Below is a current list of the sessions I have prepared for conference talks. If you’re looking for anything in particular that’s not on this list please do let me know.
Choose your own adventure – performance edition
Remember those “choose your own adventure” books from when we were little? Yep, that’s what we’re doing in this session.
We’re going to start with a poorly performing query and choose which route we’re going to take to see if we can make it better.
You don’t need any previous experience in performance tuning for this session, we’ll briefly cover each topic as it’s chosen.
Potential topics include;
– Indexes
– Query Design
– Settings that might affect performance
– Scalar Functions
– SARGability
– Temp Tables
We’ll be voting to see where we go at each step and see what happens!
Creating test data with SQL 2019 and Python
SQL Server 2019 comes with Python as an installation option. Let’s use this to gather data from various sources to create your test and development data.
We’ll pull data via the Reddit API, we’ll scrape web pages and we’ll also generate data out of nowhere!
You don’t need any Python experience, we’ll step through it and all of the scripts will be available after the session.
Building your first C# app to export SQL Script results into Excel anywhere
Are you a DBA or consultant that regularly runs .sql scripts against servers you only visit rarely or only over RDP?
Do you save the results into Excel so you can have the data locally?
Why not write a little console app in C# to do this automatically for you? You don’t even need to install anything on the server, it’s all contained in a zip file.
You don’t need any C# experience here, we’ll go through creating this console app from scratch.
You can make a folder of scripts that you want to run against a data, export the results to Excel (yes, even if the server doesn’t have it installed) and then use that data anywhere else.
I’ll give you the tools and code so you can do this for yourself and make the tool exactly how you want it.
Introducing Azure Data Studio (SQL Operations Studio)
In this presentation we’ll go through Microsoft’s new tool, Azure Data Studio (formerly SQL Operations Studio), what it can do, and whether it can help in your environment;
- Inbuilt T-SQL Editor (with IntelliSense) – Could you replace SSMS?
- Smart T-SQL Code Snippets – This is new and a massive time saver
- Customizable Dashboards for your server estate – great if you don’t have a monitoring solution currently
- Connection Management – Group your servers to help you organise what’s important.
- Integrated Terminal (run your PowerShell, sqlcmd, bcp etc directly in Ops Studio)
We’ll show real life uses for this tool and leave you with the ability to see if it’s something you want to jump into and start using (to make your life easier).
Making Your Emergency Toolkit
You’ve just been given a server that is having problems and you need to diagnose it quickly. This session will take you through designing your own toolkit to help you quickly diagnose a wide array of problems.
We will walk through scripts that will help you pinpoint various issues quickly and efficiently.
This session will take you through;
What’s on fire? – These scripts will help you diagnose what’s happening right now
Specs – What hardware are you dealing with here (you’ll need to know this to make the appropriate decisions)?
Settings – are the most important settings correct for your workload?
Bottlenecks – We’ll see if there are any areas of the system that are throttling us.
By the end of this session, you should have the knowledge of what you need to do in order to start on your own kit. This kit is designed to be your lifeline to fix servers quickly and get them working. All code we’ll go through is either provided as part of this presentation or are open source/community tools.