Recent session at PASS HADR VC session

I recently delivered a session for High Availability and DBA Fundamentals on June 14th about the recent High Availability and Disaster Recovery enhancements that were delivered/to be delivered in recent Service Packs of SQL Server. The session recording is available on YouTube, the slide deck is available on Slide Share and the demo scripts along with the Power BI dashboards are available on GitHub

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 3 and the upcoming SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2 provide extended events which helps track down two of the most common issues that DBAs have to cope with during an outage situation related to Availability Groups: Latency and Lease Timeouts (which could result in failovers). These new extended events have been shipped based on customer feedback that we heard, acted up and shipped. If you have an Availability Group setup, then come learn about the new enhancements shipped with SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 3 and the upcoming SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2 and above which allows you to troubleshoot failovers more easily and pin point the latency in your environment more efficiently.

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MSSQLTIGER and April PASS Virtual Conferences

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 PASS Summit 2015: Pre-Con and more

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!

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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