For the second year in a row, I was asked to deliver a 500-level "Query Tuning Mastery" talk in room 6E of the Washington State Convention Center, for the PASS Summit. (Here's some information about last year's talk, on workspace memory.) And for the second year in a row, I had to deliver said talk at 10:15 in the morning, in a room used as overflow for the keynote, following a keynote speaker that didn't stop speaking on time. Frustrating!
Last Thursday, after very, very quickly setting up and getting sound and video checks, the rest of the talk went surprisingly smoothly. My deck--a brand new version created specifically for PASS--helped me get across the message I wanted to communicate, my demos ran without any failure, and my jokes didn't drive too many people out of the room before the end of the talk. I even received a round of applause when I managed to take a 26 minute query plan and, using a few query rewrites, deliver the same exact data in 9 seconds. That, I have to say, was pretty cool.
Here's the abstract for the session:
Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism
As a database developer, your job boils down to one word:
performance. In today's multi-core-driven world, query performance is
very much determined by how well you're taking advantage of the
processing power at your disposal. Are your big queries using every
clock tick, or are they lagging behind? And if your queries are already
parallel, can they be rewritten for even greater speed?
In this session, you'll learn to take full advantage of SQL Server
query parallelism. After a terminology review and technology refresher,
the session will go deep, covering T-SQL patterns that allow certain
queries to scale almost linearly across your multi-core CPUs. You'll see
when and why the optimizer makes a parallel plan choice and how to
impact the decision. Along the way, you’ll manipulate costs and row
goals, challenge generally accepted tuning practices, and take complete
control of your parallel queries.
Since the talk was being broadcast live on "PASS TV," I had Paul White join me at the front of the room to moderate questions delivered via Twitter. This worked out reasonably well and I hope to do something similar in the future. Huge thanks to Paul for helping out -- and for giving me a really ugly scowl when one of my jokes fell totally flat.
Demos for the talk are attached. Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks again to everyone who watched, either in person or at home. I had a blast. Hope you enjoyed it even half as much as I did!