GroupBy – Free SQL Server Training

This isn't the dark ages anymore. You've learned that you need to put your database in source control and you're competent with source control systems like TFS or Git. You've also learned how to express your database in script form using a tool like SSDT, DbUp or Redgate.

However, you still haven't written as many automated tests as you know you should and you aren't convinced you're going about it the right way. You haven't looked at the build functionality in VSTS yet or gotten to grips with build servers like TeamCity or Jenkins, and even if you have you aren't sure how the process should work for SQL Server builds and tests.

In this session, I'll explain how to use tSQLt to build a suite of automated tests to give you confidence in the quality of your code. Then I'll talk through various ways to automate your database builds and run those tests on some schedule or trigger. I'll also discuss the pros and cons of various different approaches so that you can understand which approach would suit your teams and projects.

You know about the cloud but you're not there yet. Is it hard? Is it easy? How do you get started? Come to this session and see for yourself. We'll start with nothing and end up with a deployed Azure SQL Database. We'll even run a quick PowerBI report and enable Geo-Redundant Disaster Recovery with a couple clicks.

The goal is to take the mystery out, to show the capabilities and get you thinking about what going to the cloud could look like and what it can do for you and your company. I believe the future belongs to those who have this knowledge and know where to apply it.

This will be nearly PowerPoint free and we'll log into my Azure Portal and build out an environment from scratch and learn as we go. We'll migrate data from an "on-premises" database into our SQL DB and we'll query it. You'll leave with an understanding of the capabilities, some resource links outlining what we did and hopefully some curiosity to see what else is up there in the cloud as you start exploring with your own trial. Platform as a Service isn't the answer to every problem, but after you see how simple it is to get started, maybe you'll get some ideas of where it is.

DevOps is a hot topic in today's software development world, however, most of the knowledge and experience with DevOps is based around application software and ignores the database. We will examine how the concepts and principles of DevOps can be applied to database development by explaining the core concepts of managing scripts, automated building, testing, and deployment of database changes. Once you understand the principles of a DevOps database development process, you can generate scripts used for direct deployment on your instances or sent to customers for them to execute.

In this session, we will cover tracking the changes made to your database and capturing them in version control. We will show automated building and testing of your code on a separate environment and the generation of an upgrade script that a DBA and developer can review and deploy to QA, test, staging, production, or any other environment.

This session will use Redgate Software tools to accomplish specific actions, with explanations on how the same actions can be alternatively built by anyone.

When storage doesn't perform and scale it causes issues for SQL Server and can make DBA life extremely challenging.  In many cases, SQL Server storage is provisioned on a SAN.  However, very few DBAs even get to see a SAN or understand how it works.  Even though the SAN is someone else's responsibility, as a DBA you feel the pain and you're typically a first responder when there is a problem.  Understanding the "magic" behind it will make you a better DBA and help you have productive conversations with your storage administrator.  After all, pointing fingers has a negative impact on your superhero status!

In this session, you will learn what a SAN is, how it works, and why it's typically used vs. direct attached storage.  These 'black boxes" have a lot of capabilities, so you will also learn about some of the common features today that they offer and how they can help you.  You will also learn about what can go wrong, some basic troubleshooting when you're not getting what you expected, and how to communicate with your SAN administrator if you're not getting what you need.

It's a work day, and you're in front of your monitor battling a vicious query. You've already tuned a query or two in your life and have some tricks up your sleeve, but nothing seems to get this query down to a reasonable time and allow you to drink that cup of coffee you want so bad.

SQL Server 2016 adds a few impressive new features that might help you with that.

During the session, we will look at the different performance tuning aspects the new features enhance: Execution plan history and enforcement using the Query Store, live query execution visualization, DMV enhancements, new query hints, and more.

Join this session to see how SQL Server 2016 makes performance tuning easier and more efficient.

Query Store in SQL Server 2016 is one of the most relevant improvements for production DBAs. It introduces the concept of click-once mitigation approach to query performance regression.

But that's not the sum of all enhancements in the query performance analysis and troubleshooting space introduced in SQL Server recently.

In this session, we will learn about other enhancements that can help you troubleshoot query performance.

Ranging from new xEvents to Showplan improvements, from LQS (and underlying infrastructure) to the revised Plan Comparison tool, learn how these can help you streamline the process of troubleshooting query performance and gain faster insights.

Have you ever considered a situation where Columnstore Index can be quite the opposite of what one would expect from it? A slow, wasteful source of painfully slow queries, lagging the performance, consuming irresponsible amount of resources ...

Setting the wrong expectations (it won't run 100 times faster on EVERY query), selecting the wrong architecture (partition by 100s of rows instead of millions), using and aggregating by the large Strings in the fact tables - this list is actually quite large.

What about some of the less known limitations for building Columnstore Indexes? The ones that will bite you suddenly in the middle of the project - when you do not expect it at all?

Let me show you how to achieve those painful mistakes and you will surely know how to avoid them :)

With the release of SQL Server 2016, we were finally able to play with, in my opinion, one of the most exciting new features in SQL Server 2016, the Query Store!

The Query Store serves as a flight recorder for your query workload and provides valuable insights into the performance of your queries. It doesn't stop there, however, using the performance metrics the Query Store records, we can decide which Execution Plan SQL Server should use when executing a specific query. If those two features aren't enough, the Query Store provides all this information inside easy-to-use reports and Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) removing a great deal of the complexity of query performance analysis.

During this session, we will take a thorough look at the Query Store, its architecture, the performance impact of enabling the Query Store, DMVs, the built-in reporting and the custom Query Store Dashboard.

No matter if you are a DBA or developer, the Query Store has all the data you need to make your time analyzing query performance a whole lot more fun!

Parameters are a fundamental part of T-SQL programming, whether they are used in stored procedures, in dynamic statements or in ad-hoc queries. Although widely used, most people aren't aware of the crucial influence they have on query performance. In fact, wrong use of parameters is one of the common reasons for poor application performance.

Does your query sometimes run fast and sometimes slow – even when nothing's changed? Did it happen to you that a stored procedure, which had always been running for less than a second, suddenly started to run for more than 5 seconds consistently – even when nothing had changed?

In this session, we will learn about plan caching and how the query optimizer handles parameters. We will talk about the pros and cons of parameter sniffing (don't worry if you don't know what that means) as well as about simple vs. forced parameterization. But most important – we will learn how to identify performance problems caused by poor parameter handling, and we will also learn many techniques for solving these problems and boosting your application performance.

Move up to Management Studio Superstar with these great productivity tips! We'll explore stuff like keyboard shortcuts, configuration options, how to keep your SSMS settings synchronized across multiple environments and other really useful everyday tricks and hacks. Think "hey, wait, how'd you do that!?"

Did you, for instance, know that you can hold down the Alt key while selecting text? The "Alt trick" works for copying, pasting, moving, even typing. Handy if you want to re-use text horizontally instead of just vertically. Like comparing the contents of columns in two tables

Some of the other things I'll cover:

- Previewing and quick-reference stuff you can do with keyboard shortcuts - Quickly navigating your code to find errors or bookmarks

No undocumented stuff, no registry editor, and nothing you wouldn't put into production. Just really clever productivity tips that will take some of the burden off your everyday work.

But I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Your code may still run slow, and you'll probably write just as many bugs – but you'll write them quicker and with so much more style and panache.