Sessions at SQLNEXUS and SQLBITS

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I will be presenting at two different conferences in Europe: SQL Nexus and SQLBITS. Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group, will be delivering the keynotes at both these conferences. There are multiple sessions from Microsoft speakers from Data Group, SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (more famously known as SQLCAT) and other SQL Server community experts which would make this conference worth your time.

My team, MSSQLTIGER, will be presenting other sessions at these events. A full list can be found on the Tiger blog.

SQL Nexus – 2nd – 4th May, 2016

Session Name: Recent SQL Server Enhancements: We heard, We built, We shipped! (Session Link)

Length: Full Day

Date: 2nd May, 2016

Session Abstract:

  • Have you wondered if there was an enhancement which made your job easier in monitoring or troubleshooting a SQL Server issue?
  • Have you ever wished for a change in SQL Server which made your job easier?
  • Did you wonder what SQL Server can do for you in the cloud?

If your answer was YES to any of the questions above, then attend this session to know more about the improvements in SQL Server which would help your current workloads on SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2014 and SQL Server 2016.  We will discuss enhancements done for high availability and disaster recovery, monitoring, performance, scalability and much more along with demos and scripts that you can take home. We will talk about how we listened, understood and delivered on feedback that we received from customers using SQL Server.  We will also show you ways to leverage data movement capabilities between your on-premise datacenters and Azure which will help you expand your boundaries to Azure SQL DB and Azure Virtualizations.

This is a session for DBAs, Database Developers and anyone who runs a production SQL Server instance on the ground, up in the cloud or anywhere in between!

You can also catch us at SQL Clinic where we you can drop by to say Hi, ask your SQL Server question or provide feedback about the product!

SQL BITS – 4th May – 7th May, 2016

Session Name: Debugging made easier using Extended events (Session Link)

Level: 300

Date: 6th May, 2016

Time: 3:30pm – 4:45pm

Session Objectives:

  1. Understand the diagnostics enhancements available in SQL Server database engine in SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 3 and above
  2. Leverage the diagnostics to troubleshoot and mitigate issues quickly in mission-critical environments
  3. Simplify troubleshooting experience for common SQL Server scenarios

Session Name: Always On Availability Group Troubleshooting Ninja (Session Link)

Level: 400

Date: 6th May, 2016

Time: 12:15pm – 1:15pm

Session Objectives:

  1. Troubleshoot failovers in your Availability Group easily
  2. Determine the reason for connectivity loss and timeouts
  3. Understand which part of your topology is the reason for latency

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.