Tag Archives: SQL Pass

SQL PASS Summit 2017

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It is that time of the year when I get to meet the SQL Family. It is always wonderful to put a face to that Twitter handle that I exchanged #sqlchats with or connected with on LinkedIn. SQL PASS Summit is probably one of the largest gathering of data professionals under a single roof.

This year, I will be presenting a session on “Building One Million Predictions Per Second Using SQL-R”.

Date: Nov 3rd, 2017
Time: 11am
Room: Tahoma 5 (TCC Level 3)
Abstract:
Using the power of OLTP and data transformation in SQL 2016 and advanced analytics in Microsoft R Server, various industries that really push the boundary of processing higher number of transaction per second (tps) for different use cases. In this talk, we will walk through the use case of predicting loan charge off (loan default) rate, architecture configuration that enable this use case, and rich visual dashboard that allow customer to do what-if analysis. Attend this session to find out how SQL + R allows you to build an “intelligent data warehouse”.

There will be a number of sessions delivered at PASS from the Tiger team this year and you will find a lot of the folks at the SQL Server Clinic.

If you have a technical question, a troubleshooting challenge, give product feedback, or want to find out about best practices running your SQL Server? Then the SQL Clinic is the place you want to go to. SQL Clinic is the hub of technical experts from SQL Product Group (including Tiger team), SQL CAT, SQL Customer Support Services (CSS), SQL Premier Field Engineering (PFE) and others.

SQL PASS Summit gives me an unique opportunity to meet the #SQLFamily during an annual event, gather feedback from customers and get to see some old friends from across the globe!

Hope to see you at the event!

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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 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.

24HOP Session: How to be a Ninja – Troubleshooting SQL PERF on Azure VMs

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I have been a bit quiet on this blog but that is partly due to the fact that I have moved into a new role and a new country. I am now a part of the SQL Server Product Group [b|t] and based out of Redmond.

I am actually really excited about this. Sourabh Agarwal [b|t] and I are going to be presenting a preview to our SQL PASS Summit 2015 pre-con session "How to be a Ninja: Troubleshooting SQL performance on Azure Virtual Machines". Yes, we are starting the initiation program of becoming a SQL performance troubleshooting NINJA on SQL Server!

Troubleshooting is an art but the tricks of the trade changed with the advent of Azure Virtual Machines. Performance troubleshooting is different and at the same time very similar to what you have been used to for SQL Server. SQL Server performance on Azure VMs can be a sore point for many as the host troubleshooting entry points are limited and the knowledge of the internal workings scarce.

In this session, we will show you what best practices should be known for SQL Server instances running on Azure Virtual Machines! We will talk about tips on automating the implementation of all these best practices during deployment making this a single one-click deployment. This session will be a pre-cursor to our pre-con where we will go the whole nine yards and detail how to automate deployments from scratch, implement best practices automatically and analyze performance issues magically!

We hope you can join us for this session online and we do hope to see you during our pre-con! The 24Hop sessions are full of great sessions from great speakers in the SQL Family. See the full list here. I would recommend looking through the list and signing up for the ones that you are interested in. This will also give you a preview of what you can expect in the SQL PASS Summit this year.

This 24 Hours of PASS: Summit 2015 Preview event takes place over 24 hours, beginning September 17, 2015, 12:00 UTC. Featuring 24 webcasts delivered over 24 hours, this event provides a glimpse into the unparalleled content on offer at PASS Summit 2015, October 27-30, in Seattle, WA.

WHEN: September 17th at 8AM PST (3PM GMT)
WHERE: ONLINE
Facebook Event for our session: https://www.facebook.com/events/938656286172663/
Registration link for the event: http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2015/summitpreview/Registration.aspx

[UPDATE] September 29th, 2015

Thank you for the feedback that you shared after the session. It is always great to know what people liked in the session and even better to know where we need to improve. This helps ensure that our next iteration has the necessary tweaks. We received an overall 90% positive feedback and we thank everyone who attended for that!

The replies to the questions from the session are available below.

Q. Regarding the performance fixes as best practices(hotfixes/CU), do we have separate hotfixes(.msi/msp) for azure environment when compared to on premises environment?
A. The SQL Server installation bits that you would run on Azure VMs and on virtualized/physical on-premises environment are the same. So there aren’t any different set of fixes that need to run on Azure VMs.

Q. Are these Cheat Sheets available online?
A. The cheat sheets are available in the presentation PDF on the 24HOP site.

Q. Is using "Lock Pages in Memory" lead to that total allocated memory amount of SQL Server process is not seen in Windows Task Manager?
A. Task manager is not a good place to look for allocated memory when you want to find out allocations made after enabling Lock Pages in Memory privilege for the SQL Server service account. You could either look at Total Server Memory perfmon counter or the memory DMVs to track SQL Server memory usage. Additional reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176018.aspx 

Q. Why are you disabling caching on the log file drive?
A. This is due to the IO patterns that the SQL Server transaction log file receives and how Azure storage is structured. We have seen in tests that the performance for SQL Server transaction log is best when write caching is disabled for disks which hosts transaction log files. We will talk about this in detail during our pre-con session.

Q. For Datawarehousing workloads, do you recommend lock pages in memory setting on on-premise/azure VM hosting SQL Server?
A. For on-premise workloads, we recommend you test and ascertain the needs before enabling Lock Pages in Memory (LPIM) privilege. For Azure VM workloads, the first important task is to pick the machine with the right SKU. We recommend enabling LPIM to prevent paging to the local disk on the rack which can negatively affect performance.

Q. Why are there different storage options based on Windows version? Is there any dependency on SQL versions?
A. There aren’t different storage options based on Windows version. The different storage options are based on the performance tier that you want to be on. It is Windows and SQL version and release agnostic.

Q. Can you let me know the resources on Azure Storage?
A. The Azure storage documentation is a good place to start for this. We will talk about this in detail in the IaaS introduction part of our pre-con.

If we have missed any question, please leave your question in the comment section of this post and we will answer it.

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