MSSQLTIGER and April PASS Virtual Conferences

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Cross post from http://aka.ms/sqlserverteam

PASS Virtual Chapters (VC) are interest-based forums that unite the SQL Server community through live webcasts with top SQL Server experts, online forums and resources – including an archive of past presentations, and special training events. The MSSQL Tiger team will be presenting at PASS VC sessions on different topics in the coming months. We will keep announcing the upcoming sessions on this blog.

The two sessions that we will be presenting in April are mentioned below. If you are interested in in-memory technologies or leveraging PowerShell for your SQL Server instances, then the two sessions below would be of interest to you.

April 20th at 10am PST (In-memory VC): Real-Time Operational Analytics in SQL Server 2016 [Session Registration Link]

SQL Server 16 enables customers can run analytic queries on in-memory and disk-based OLTP tables with minimal impact on business critical OLTP workloads, requiring no application changes. This session covers various configurations and best practices for achieving significant performance gains with Operational Analytics.

April 20th at 9am PST (PowerShell VC): You, SQL Server and PowerShell [Session Registration Link]

In this session, Microsoft’s SQL Server Tiger Team will talk about how some best practice checks can be automated for SQL Server instances running on your on-premise data centers and on Azure Virtual Machines. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage the POWER of PowerShell to automate health checks, keep your systems healthy and run SQL Server efficiently! As an added bonus, this session will also cover some of the new enhancements available in SQL Server 2016 setup which will allow you to implement these best practices while installing SQL Server!

The PowerShell scripts can be downloaded from https://github.com/amitmsft/SqlOnAzureVM

The session slide deck is available below.

The session recording is available on YouTube.

SQL on Azure VM BPCheck

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After a long hiatus, I am back on the blogosphere and have decided to dedicate a series to running Best Practices checks using PowerShell on Azure virtual machines running in the new deployment model: ARM (Azure Resource Manager). If you have worked on the classic deployment model, then you will need to unlearn a few things and re-learn a little more. However, the learning curve ain’t that great. Think of Azure Resource Manager as a container for all the cloud components that make up your solution. If you had a SQL Server instance running on an Azure virtual machine, then you would be using compute, networking, storage components in Azure which would together be encapsulated in a Resource Manager group.

I had previously done a series of posts around running best practices checks on Azure Virtual Machines running SQL Server. Some of those checks are still valid today as they only dealt with the SQL Server instance. You will see components of those scripts reused. Some of the checks are way easier due to the way ARM deployments are managed in Azure and the endpoints that the Azure PowerShell 1.0 exposes.

The PowerShell scripts available on the GitHub repository are mentioned below. I will run a post on each of these scripts to explain what each of these do and what to expect as the output of each of these scripts.

  • Get-AllocationUnitCheck.ps1 – Checks if the allocation unit size for the disks attached to the VM is 64K
  • Get-DBProperties.ps1 – Checks if any database has AUTO CLOSE or AUTO SHRINK enabled
  • Get-FilesOnTemp.ps1 – Checks to see if any database files are hosted on the temporary drive
  • Get-IFI.ps1 – Checks to see if the SQL Server service account has instant file initialization security privileges
  • Get-LPIM.ps1 – Checks to see if Lock Pages in Memory privilege is granted to the SQL Server service account
  • Get-OSFilesDB.ps1 – Checks to see if database files are hosted on the OS drive
  • Get-StorageAccountBP.ps1 – Checks to see if the storage account has replication enabled
  • Get-VMSize.ps1 – Checks if the right virtual machine tier is being used
  • Temporary Drive.ps1 – Finds out the temporary drive on the virtual machine
  • Get-Backups.ps1 – Finds out if any backups are being taken to local disk

The PowerShell scripts are available on GitHub repository SqlOnAzureVM. Since these scripts are now on GitHub, please feel free to pull them and enhance them as per your needs.

SQL Saturday 511: Extended Events and more

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imageExtended Events have evolved a lot since they were first introduced in SQL Server 2008. And today, there are multiple extended events available in SQL Server which allow you to debug common scenarios without collecting having to collect memory dumps or diagnostic data which can be detrimental to your SQL Server instance’s performance.

On April 2nd, join me at Redmond to understand how to leverage the new extended events that are available in SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 3 and above in your environments. I will talk about common scenarios where the new extended events are available and provide canned scripts to help collect and analyze data for complex scenarios.

There are a host of SQL experts and as well as folks from the Microsoft SQL Server product group who will be at the event to present and answer questions that you have! Looking forward to meet the SQL Community at the event!

WHEN: April 2nd, 2016, 2.15 – 3.15 PM PST
SESSION: Troubleshooting made easier using Extended events

Details about the session are available here. The full schedule of the event is available here.

The slide deck that I used during the session is available below.

SQL Saturday 446–Slow Query, Bring It On

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The next two weeks is going to be a whirlwind and it all starts with the SQL Saturday at Portland. There is a plethora of Data Platform subject matter experts who will be descending on the city to mingle with the SQL Family. What’s more a number of them will be surfacing a week later at the SQL PASS Summit as well.

I have always been a big proponent of sharing the knowledge with the community and SQL Saturday is prime way to do that.

The day will get kick started with a keynote session from James Phillips, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Business Analytics Product Group. He will present an overview of Microsoft’s Data Platform and Cloud Strategy.

There are multiple tracks which will be running on the same day. It’s going to a be a difficult pick building your schedule but it will also give you a taste of what schedule building for PASS would be like.

  • Admin
  • Architecture
  • Business Intelligence
  • Development
  • Features
  • PowerShell
  • Professional Development
  • Reporting Services
  • Tuning

There are a number of sessions from various known community subject matter experts on various subjects on the tracks listed above. I am really looking forward to this event! This will be an awesome prelude to PASS!

I will be presenting a session on query performance troubleshooting under the Tuning tracks this Saturday which will feature Live Query Statistics and Query Data Store along with a guest appearance from the Query Plan Comparison feature in the latest SQL Server Management Studio.

There is also a SQL Server Clinic at the event. So if you want to chat about questions about SQL Server in your environment or anything data related, then bring them to the experts at the Clinic.

Session name: Slow Query: Bring It On

Duration: 60 minutes

Date: 24th Oct, 2015

Venue Mittleman Community Center

Timing: 10.30am – 11.30am

Session Abstract

Troubleshooting slow performance issues is hindered by lack of available repro or even at times lack of available statistics. This puts the chief troubleshooter in a Catch-22 situation. Without identifying the problem, the issue could resurface again and create another critical business problem. SQL Server 2016 introduces two new features to troubleshoot query performance issues in a reactive and proactive manner namely, Live Query Statistics and Query Data Store. In this session, you will learn about:

1. Using Live Query Statistics to perform live troubleshooting while it is running

2. Using Query Data Store and becoming a SQL superhero by answering questions about query performance with a click of a few buttons

As always, I will update this post with the session deck and any Q&A that comes my way during the event.

The slide deck that I used at the event is available below.

SQL PASS Summit 2015: Pre-Con and more

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Sourabh and I completed our 24HOP session in the morning (or at least my morning… night, afternoon or evening, depending on which part of the world) you live in. A big THANK YOU to everyone that attended the session and we had a ball presenting the session. We have a little over 200 people attending the session and we hope see a good number of these during our pre-conference session at PASS.

The Summit gives you an opportunity to attend sessions from technical experts across the world and is the largest gathering of Data Platform Professionals in the world. To me SQL PASS Summit is a great way to connect with the SQL Family with whom I only have virtual conversations throughout the year. If you want to do deep-dive of sessions on various things in the SQL Server space, then you have a line-up of pre-con sessions.

There will be a contingent of engineers, program managers and Microsoft Services folks at the SQL Server Clinic to help answer your queries regarding SQL Server. So, don’t forget to stop by the SQL Clinic in case you have a question that you have been meaning to ask for a while!

Apart from all the nerdy and geeky overdose, you have the option of painting the town red during the week that you are in town and attend social gatherings after the sessions. There is always more than one happening and you get to take your pick! It was definitely fun when I attended it last time and it’s going to be fun this time as well. If you are attending for the first time, then brace yourself for an action-packed, geeky overdose and fun-filled SQL adventure! And don’t forget to check out the first-timers page on the Summit website. If you are returning attendee, then you know what I am talking about! J

Sourabh Agarwal [b|t] and I are going to be presenting on How to be a Ninja: Troubleshooting SQL performance on Azure Virtual Machines [DBA-399-PM]. This is a demo packed full day session which will cover a plethora of stuff related to SQL Server. To name a few:
1. Automation deployment on Azure Virtual Machines for SQL Server instances
2. Best practices for using SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and some of these apply to on-premise SQL Server instances as well. We will document the differences between the two based on our vast experience working on issues with Microsoft customers. We have gathered working for different teams within Microsoft specializing in SQL Server.
3. Troubleshooting performance issues. This is where you will gain your Ninja status! We have made a career within Microsoft on troubleshooting complex SQL issues. We will show you how to troubleshoot performance problems on SQL Server instances which applies to Azure VMs, on-premise SQL Server instances and virtualized environments.
4. We will also give you a preview of some of the enhancements done for SQL Server deployments on Azure by the SQL Server product group at Microsoft.
5. And it is about having fun…. We will definitely give you a thing or two to laugh about as well.

A screenshot of our agenda slide for the pre-con is available below. We also have a bunch of Easter eggs that we will crack open in the session. Psssst.. Some of the stuff is still under works and should be out of the door when we present!

image

When: 27th October

Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm PST

Where: Washington State Convention Center

Session URL: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2015/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=38085

Lastly, we loved the notes that Matt Penny [t] took during our session. A screenshot of that is shown below. Thank you Matt! J The 24HOP session presentation is attached on the session page.

Notes