26Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Rally: One Day on Query Performance Tuning

Uncategorized
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

Uncategorized
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

Uncategorized
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

Uncategorized
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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25Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Who You Learn From

PASS
Less than two weeks to go until the PASS Summit. I'm excited. I've managed to cram a ton of activities into this Summit, more than ever before. But, I'm still going to try to go to a few sessions. The question asked, which sessions are you going to? Who do you want to learn from. Who can you learn from? I've got a pretty simple answer. Everybody. There's not a single person that I work with on my current team that I haven't learned something from. Sure, there are those that teach you tons and tons, for example, we have a fantastic SSIS guy on our team, that has taught me quite a lot, faster than I could have picked it up on my own. So, you're going to the…
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20Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Kilt Day at the PASS Summit

PASS
Last year, with the infinite power at my disposal (read, zero), I declared Wednesday, Kilt Wednesday at the PASS Summit. It took off... a little ways. Three people wore kilts. Now, you'd think that three out of 3000 would almost not get noticed, but the three people wearing them... well, each for different reasons, we stand out in a crowd. Heck, I was even told one of us looked good in the kilt (wasn't me, of course). Anyway, where was I, oh yeah, we were noticed (and it might be because I jumped up on the bloggers table during one of the the key notes...) and now, this year, LOTS of people are planning on wearing kilts on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010. If you don't have a kilt, don't panic. You can always…
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19Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

PASS
I've got a couple of more sessions before the big two at the PASS Summit. Tomorrow night, October 20th, I'll be speaking at the Southern New England Network Users Group on SQL Server Best Practices. It's the first time I've talked on this topic, so it might be fun to watch. After that I'm previewing one of my two Summit presentations for Brian Knight (blog|twitter) and Pragmatic Works in a webinar on Identifying and Fixing Performance Problems Using Execution Plans. Go here to register. After that, it's off the PASS Summit.
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18Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 13 Comments

Powershell is Really Easy… If you know what you’re doing

PowerShell, SQL Server
Sigh... I just spent almost a full work day trying to come up with, what turned out to be a single line script. The requirements were simple. After patching of servers is completed, and everything is rebooted, sometimes, not often, but sometimes, SQL Server Agent doesn't restart correctly. I was asked to put together a script that will check a list of servers to see if Agent is running. Any PowerShell guru's reading this are either laughing or crying, already. So, I started exploring how to connect to the server using using some type of PS-Drive, but I quickly figured out that I'd have to loop through the servers that way. Plus, I don't think there's a way to check Agent status through the SQL drive. So that went out…
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