GroupBy – Free SQL Server Training

No one wants slow performance of their application.

In this session, you will learn about three mistakes which DBA often do which kills SQL Server's performance. We will understand what are those errors, why those particular errors are prevailing in the industry and how we can fix it.

We will explore various settings as well as code which will kill SQL Server Performance. At the end of this session, every attendee will receive scripts which will help them improve their SQL Server's performance. This session is of intermediate level – you just have to know a little bit about SQL Server and a lot more you will learn in this session. The session is carefully crafted from the real world experience for DBA so they can learn tricks which can help them to improve their server's performance.

We will discuss various SQL Server Settings, File Placements as well as ignored details related to SQL Server Performance.

In 2009 John Allspaw and Paul Hammond delivered the session "10 deploys per day – Dev & ops cooperation at Flickr." In forty-six minutes they changed the way millions of people would think about the software delivery process for years to come. It didn't have a name yet, but DevOps was born. DevOps folk preached about the cloud, automation, rapid delivery and any database technology that wasn't relational…

In 2013 Kenny Gorman declared "The DBA is Dead".

For the record, I don't believe that, but a lot of people do. What is certain is that the world of IT is changing, and the traditional DBA role, and most other data roles, are changing with it.

I'm going to explain what DevOps is, where it came from, and its implications for SQL Server. We'll cover the human and technical basics of database DevOps – and I'm going to discuss some changes that data folk need to make.

User-defined functions in SQL Server are very much like custom methods and properties in .Net languages. At first sight, they seem to be the perfect tool to introduce code encapsulation and reuse in T-SQL. So why is this feature mostly avoided by all T-SQL gurus?

The reason is performance. In this session, you will learn how user-defined functions feed the optimizer with misleading and insufficient information, how the optimizer fails to use even what little information it has, and how this can lead to shocking query performance.

However, you will also see that there is a way to avoid the problems. One type of user-defined function, the inline table-valued type, may not be the easiest to use, but it is the only type of user-defined function that doesn't impact performance. I will show how, with just a little extra effort, you can reap the benefits of code encapsulation and reuse without sacrificing performance.

Whether you are a developer, DBA, or anything in between, chances are you are not always following best practices when you write T-SQL. Unfortunately, many so-called "bad habits" aren't always obvious, but can lead to poor performance, maintainability issues, and compatibility problems.

In this session, you will learn about several bad habits, how they develop, and how you can avoid them. While we will briefly discuss advice you've probably heard before, like avoid SELECT * and don't use NOLOCK, you will also learn some subtleties in SQL Server that might surprise you, how some shorthand can bite you in the long run, and a very easy way to improve cursor performance.

By changing your techniques and ditching some of these bad habits for best practices, you will take new techniques back to your environment that will lead to more efficient code, a more productive workflow, or both.

Get more information, resources, and more here: https://groupby.org/go/session9

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is an easy-to-use tool for automating reports and creating highly visual dashboards. Although SSRS is easy to learn there are many tips and tricks that can improve your report building experience, not to mention make your reports run blazing fast!

This rapid-fire session goes over my learnings from the past six years of developing high-performance SSRS reports, including topics like multivalue parameter efficiencies, how to best utilize subreports, and performing SQL CRUD operations with SSRS.

Each rapid-fire topic includes sample data and an SSRS reporting example that users will be able to try out for themselves.

By far the most important SQL Server release since the heady days of 2005, SQL Server 2016 represents a huge leap forward in a number of key areas. You've no doubt heard plenty about such features as Query Store, JSON support, Polybase, and the other big-ticket items. But there are also a number of very cool features that don't usually make the top 10 lists. In this talk, you'll learn about enhancements to indexing (including both Columnstore and traditional b-tree indexes), DMVs, compression, string handling, encryption, configuration, and even time zone support. These smaller features may not be highlighted in the latest glossy ads from Microsoft's marketing department, but they're the kinds of things that add up to make your life easier. Attend this session to learn all sorts of new and different reasons to upgrade as quickly as possible.

Stack Overflow is the largest online community of developers, and the performance and reliability of our SQL Server databases are crucial to serving over 1.3 Billion page views each month with each rendered in ~10-20 milliseconds. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team is responsible for designing and maintaining our infrastructure (SQL Server, Redis, IIS, Haproxy, ElasticSearch, Fastly CDN) and finding ways of getting the most performance from a minimal amount of physical hardware. We try and design all of our solutions to be as simple as possible, and we believe that troubleshooting should be a first class feature of any critical system.

This high-level session will show how we use Availability Groups (AGs) to scale out the SQL workload and meet our current HA/DR needs, as well as future plans to use Distributed AGs to solve a pesky issue called "the speed of light". It also will show the monitoring systems we use, namely OpServer and Bosun (both Open Source!), to quickly identify production SQL issues and ensure that performance is a top-priority feature.

I will also outline some of our key development principles, such as collecting exceptions in a central location, the benefits of using a Micro-ORM like Dapper, and the pros and cons of using the new JSON T-SQL functions. I will describe our experience finding the best tool for the job (like database migrations), where single purpose tools often beat all-encompassing frameworks. Keep in mind this information is heavily weighted toward the needs of a large .NET based web property, so YMMV. But my hope is you will leave with a few new tricks and a better understanding of how far you can go with a simple SQL Server architecture.

Whether you've dabbled in PowerShell or wondered what all the fuss is about, make no mistake: PowerShell isn't going away and it is definitely something worth learning to make your life as a SQL Server professional easier.

In this session, you'll see practical, real-world examples of how you can blend SQL Server and PowerShell together. You'll also get a look at the SQL Server PowerShell provider and how you can incorporate it into your automation scripts. Instead of focusing on syntax, the session will plunge straight into examples and highlight various snippets of code and how they work. You can expect to see code examples on how PowerShell can do anything from comparing tables across servers, automating and centralizing your backups, and even doing in-depth security audits.

Based on the popular blog series, join me in taking a deep dive and a behind the scenes look at how SQL Server 2016 "It Just Runs Faster", focused on scalability and performance enhancements. This talk will discuss the improvements, not only for awareness, but expose design and internal change details. The beauty behind 'It Just Runs Faster' is your ability to just upgrade, in place, and take advantage without lengthy and costly application or infrastructure changes. If you are looking at why SQL Server 2016 makes sense for your business you won't want to miss this session.