03Aug 2011 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

All About Execution Plans

PASS
If you’re attending the PASS Summit this October, I’d like to make a suggestion. The Summit itself is only three days long, Wednesday to Friday. But, if you have to travel any distance to get there, you’re going to miss work on Tuesday as well. Why not take a whole week away and spend Monday with Gail Shaw (blog|twitter) and me? The reason I ask is because Gail and I are putting together 7 hours of information all about execution plans. We’re going to be presenting this information on Monday at the Summit as a pre-conference seminar. Yes, you’ll have to pay extra to attend this session. But if you register for the Summit now, there’s still a discount, which you can put towards to the seminar. And, seriously now,…
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05Jul 2011 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS SQL Rally 2011 Evaluations

PASS, SQL Server, T-SQL
  In keeping with the all my other major speaking engagements, I’m posting the results of my pre-con and session evals at the first-ever SQL Rally. I’m posting this really late and I apologize. The good news, I did a fill-in when someone cancelled and I was placed in the Grab Bag category where I had the highest rated session although it was a far cry from the actual highest rated sessions from the whole Rally. There is no bad news. Query Performance Tuning: Start to Finish I was pretty happy with this considering it’s my first, public, all day training class. I’m even happier with the feedback. I received some excellent constructive criticism that I will attempt to take into account when I present in the future (including at…
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10May 2011 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit 2011 Abstracts

PASS
I’ve put in several abstracts for the 2011 Summit. This year we’re voting for preferred sessions. If you’re interested in any of the ones I’ve listed below, please consider giving me a vote.I was very kindly invited to submit for a spotlight session (for which I am very grateful and humbled, again) so I put two in for that. I also put in for two regular sessions. This year, for the first time I put in not one, but two abstracts for all day pre/post-conference sessions. One of them was put together as a partnership between Gail Shaw (blog|twitter) and myself. I’m excited by that one. I love speaking and I really hope I make the cut. In the interest of sharing, these are the abstracts I’ve submitted: Spotlight: DMOs…
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14Apr 2011 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Performance Tuning: Start to Finish

PASS
The very first ever SQL Rally is taking place in a little less than four weeks in Orlando Florida. It’s going to be quite the event. There will be two full days of sessions on any number of topics. But before that all starts, there’s going to be a set of full day pre-conference seminars. These too are on a number of topics, but I’m hoping to draw your attention to just one, mine. I’ve put together a seven hour session on query performance tuning. I’ve tried to make it as complete as I possibly can. I’m going to cover the whole process from collecting data on your machines to identify where problems may be, to understanding the optimizer so you know how things work, to reading execution plans so…
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15Feb 2011 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Saturday #60, Cleveland Speaker Evals

PASS
I just received 35 speaker evaluations from SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. It was a great event (although I had a hard time getting there) and I really enjoyed giving my presentation on “Gathering and Interpreting Performance Metrics” (a warm-up presentation of part of my SQL Rally pre-con). Feedback is a wonderful gift. Thanks to everyone who filled out the eval and especially to those who commented. The evals have six questions and an area for comments. The questions are rated from Very Poor to Excellent. I’ve decided to assign them number values from 1-5. The overall average is 4.82. Here are the breakdowns per question: How would you rate the usefulness of the session information in your day-to-day environment: 4.79 How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills: 4.85…
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23Dec 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

PASS Summit 2010 Survey Results

PASS
As I have done in previous years, I’m going to post the results from my sessions at the PASS Summit. Feedback is a gift. I received a great many gifts this year and I’m extremely happy about all of them. There are a set of questions with ratings, the higher the rating, the better you did. One exception to this rule is the question on time for the session. I think there, somewhat lower scores are better. There were 183 technical sessions rated during the Summit. I’m very honored to have been included in that list. Identifying and Fixing Performance Problems using Execution Plans: 286 Attendees, 172 Responses, Avg Score of 4.23, Placed 136th How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 1 2…
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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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04Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

SQL Saturday in New England

PASS
Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) has put on a SQL Saturday/Data camp event in New England for the last two years. I've helped him both years. It's been very successful. In January we had over 300 attendees, making it one of the larger SQL Saturday events. But, with a single exception (thank you Tim Ford (blog|twitter)), we've only had local speakers. Mind you, we're somewhat lucky with speakers here in New England and have several MVPs and others who are truly excellent when presenting. I'm taking over from Adam to lead the effort for this year, and due to my schedule we're moving the event to the spring sometime. We were thinking about maybe making it the the weekend before SQL Rally. But, I've got a question for all of you who present at SQL Saturday events.…
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07Jul 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Words of Wisdom

PASS
Every week the Database Weekly Update comes out from SQL Server Central. There are always good things to read there. Links to interesting tid-bits of information posted by really smart people. One of them that jumped out at me this week, to the point that I read it out of order, was a blog entry by Andy Warren. If you ever get the opportunity to listen to Andy speak, jump on it. He's great. His writing is wonderful too. Anyway, he wrote an entry giving advice on how to break in to the national scene as a speaker. I know I dwell on this WAY too much, but I've been given the opportunity to speak at PASS this year. Notice I said "been given." I don't think I earned it…
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01Jul 2008 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Community Summit Program Details Published

PASS
I'm pretty jazzed to see that the PASS Community Summit has finally put up the list of sessions and the abstracts. However, I'm more than a bit nervous to see my name at the very top of that list. I couldn't have been buried somewhere in the middle? It'll probably change. I don't doubt I'll be delivering during the final session on Friday. This sure makes it more real. I'll have to get to work on the slides and demo's now.
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