26Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Rally: One Day on Query Performance Tuning

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The SQLRally, a new PASS initiative taking place in the spring, is going to be a community driven event. This includes selection of the pre-convention (precon) paid presentations through a voting process. I have a session called Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish. It's a one day session on everything about tuning queries. I won't republish the abstract and bore the heck out of you, but I will list the 5 skills I think you'll take away with you if you attend (after voting for me): The ability to collect performance metrics on your servers as part of an overall query tuning methodology The ability to generate, read, and understand execution plans from multiple sources in support of troubleshooting poorly performance queries An understanding of how the optimizer works in support…
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26Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

New Book on Query Optimizer

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Benjamin Nevarez (blog) has been working really hard on a book on the Query Optimizer. It just got finished in time so that there will be copies available at the PASS Summit. I strongly recommend you track it down. There's a lot to learn between the covers. How do I know since the book just got finished and isn't in anyone's hands yet? Because I've been watching it get built. I put in my small efforts as the technical editor. I feel bad about that because I've always learned from my technical editors and I'm fairly sure I learned more from Benjamin than he did from me. Get a copy of the book. You won't be disappointed.
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25Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Another Must See Session

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I can't believe I missed this one in all the posts and recommendations I've been making about great sessions coming up at the PASS Summit. I'm not sure where my head was. However, I'd be completely remiss if I didn't mention Jennifer McCown's (blog|twitter) session called T-SQL Brush Up. It was the most popular session at the last 24 Hours of PASS. It's going to be even better live, with an interactive audience. Holy cow, I thought I had put it on my Must See Sessions but I must have messed up. Sorry Jen.
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25Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Rally Voting

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I received word over the weekend that my precon application had made it past committee and was now subject to the community vote. They haven't posted it yet, but please watch this space. I'll be doing an all day session on how to tune sql queries, from monitoring to establish a baseline, to figuring out what's wrong with the query and how to fix it. If that sounds interesting, please vote for my session.
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03Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Recursive Hiearchies in Reporting Services

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I am not a Reporting Services guru and nor do I play one on TV. I am however forced to be all things Microsoft Data where I work. So I frequently find myself stretching way beyond my abilities. I just had to get a report running that feeds from a web service and has a recursive hiearchy with customized aggregation on multiple fields with drill down to a different set of details. Yeah, through the internet I can see the SSRS monsters rolling their eyes at the ease of this task. But for us mere mortals it was work. Since I spent so much time learning how to do it, I thought I'd share. XML as a Source First, because we have a very paranoid (and appropriately so) group of…
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01Aug 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

A Milestone

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I just passed 100,000 views on the blog. That's from 400 posts over a period of time starting in March of 2008. You guys have posted 1129 comments. The average views per week went from 39 in 2008 to 160 in 2010. I realize others out there are hitting 100,000 a week, but for some of us small time bloggers, this is a big deal. I just wanted to say thanks for stopping by and I hope my attempts at understanding SQL Server, PowerShell, SCOM, spatial data, Visual Studio, ORM and whatever else I've posted about has been helpful in some way.
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15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Sarasota SQL Server Users Group

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Tonight I'm presenting for the Sarasota SQL Server Users Group. If you're interested in attending, you can join in using this link. The topic will be "Query Performance Tuning 101." And in case you can't make that, Thursday, June 17th, I'll be on Quest's Pain of the Week. It should be fun too.
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15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Virtualizing Servers in Production

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The company where I work has been using virtualization in development, QA, testing, etc., for many years now. We have not even attempted virtualization in production. Things change. But, before we did it, I thought I'd bounce the question out to the people who know, What are some things to watch for in using virtual servers in a production environment. Introduction Flat out, I asked people over Twitter. The overall message was extremely positive. No one suggested it was a bad idea. A few thought that some high volume servers are better served by physical boxes. Volume in this case could be read as high amounts of reads or high amount of writes, both were suggested as reasons to avoid virtualization. The cause for this is clear, from each individual; the…
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