PASS | Convergence of Data and Infrastructure

PASS Summit Cosmos DB Demo Code

Cloud, Events, Performance, Personal, Professional Development, SQL Server, Technology, User Groups No Responses »

Nov 092018

As part of the PASS Summit conference session that Bob Pusateri and I are presenting right now called “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros“, we are demonstrating a number of Azure Cosmos DB features that we feel strongly about helping you leverage through code. As a result, all of the code that we’re demonstrating today is now available for you to download and explore.

This code demonstrates how to collect Windows Perfmon metrics with C#, package them up into a Cosmos DB document, insert the document into Cosmos DB, and then fetch and query individual and multiple documents based on a SQL-like interface demonstration.

As always, there’s no warranty with this code, please don’t distribute as your own, yada yada yada. I’m not the best programmer, so if anyone has improvements, I’d love to have you send me your updates to check out!

PASS Summit 2018 Activities

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Nov 062018

What a whirlwind year this has been! I’m thrilled to invite you to my sessions at this year’s PASS Summit, happening this week in Seattle WA.

Tuesday 11:30am to 1:00pm I’m part of the cloud availability panel over lunch at the SentryOne Data Day precon at the Summit. I hope you already registered for this exciting opportunity to learn more about performance and availability-related topics in this whole-day discussion.

Next, for those of you that still have your mission-critical workloads in your on-premises datacenter (or even for those who have them in the cloud, because almost all of the topics directly apply!), come to my session Wednesday morning at 10:45am entitled “On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance“. This deep-dive on virtual SQL Server performance will help you squeeze the most performance from your virtualized SQL Servers, and will help you communicate with your infrastructure team on things that matter the most to performance-oriented SQL Servers. You’ll be sure to have quite a bit of real-world tips and tricks to take back to the office as soon as you return from the conference.

Thursday morning I’m part of the SIOS PASS the Bacon breakfast panel, where we’ll get a good chuckle while we discuss a number of topics pertinent to today’s DBA, such as availability both on-prem and in the cloud, disaster mitigation and preparation, and other availability topics. Come register here, get a great breakfast on the house, and learn while you laugh!

Next, Bob Pusateri and I have a session Thursday afternoon called “SELECT STARS: A SQL DBA’s Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB”, where we discuss and present Microsoft’s new Cosmos DB offering on the Azure platform. This platform is a completely different model of databases than what most SQL Server professionals are accustomed to, and we’ll give you the details you need to expand your horizons and learn about this exciting platform. This session is more of the ‘what’ session to get you amped to learn more about the platform on Friday.

Friday my final session of the conference is entitled “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros”, designed to give you more of the ‘how’ when continuing your exploration of Cosmos DB. Bob Pusateri and I will share more of the use cases, scalability details, and live code demos of how to access and alter data in a Cosmos DB database.

I hope to see you at the show! If you want to sync up and talk geek, make sure to ping me to set up some time over your favorite form of caffeine.

PASS Summit Session – On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance

Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, User Groups, Virtualization No Responses »

May 092018

I’m very pleased to announce that one of my sessions submitted for this year’s PASS Summit in Seattle, held from November 6 to 9th, called On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance, has been selected and one of the first sessions to be announced for the conference. On-premises virtualization is still the principal location for your organization’s mission critical SQL Servers. Even during the journey to the cloud, improving the performance while on-prem improves your life and makes your databases more efficient.

Session Abstract: Your business-critical SQL Servers should not suffer from infrastructure-related bottlenecks. When properly architected and managed, the principal bottleneck to performance of these SQL Servers should be only limited by code. However, if not properly constructed, silent and seemingly random performance killers can strike and significantly hurt your database performance. Layers like virtualization, storage, and networking can all detract from database performance, and they are tough to identify. This session is packed with many live examples of tips and tricks gained from years of experience for getting the most performance from your physical and virtual SQL Servers. The major roadblocks to performance will be discussed and the knowledge gained will help you work with your infrastructure teams so that you can optimize the system stack for performance. Tools, techniques, and processes will be demonstrated to help you measure and validate the system performance of the key components underneath your data.

Register for this amazing conference today and take advantage of the lower conference fees now before they raise the price!

PASS Virtualization Webinar – April 11

Cloud, Events, Professional Development, SQL Server No Responses »

Mar 292018

I am proud to present a free webinar for the PASS Virtualization virtual chapter entitled “Level Up Your Cloud Infrastructure Skills” on Wednesday, April 11, at 1pm Eastern.

Abstract: Think infrastructure in the cloud is still just for sysadmins? Think again! As your organization moves into the cloud, infrastructure skills are more important than ever for DBAs to master. Expert knowledge of cloud-related infrastructure will help you maintain performance and availability for databases in the cloud. For example, know what an IOP is? How many does your database consume during a given day? Properly sizing a cloud database depends on your knowledge of this metric. Failure to properly configure storage performance at the time of deployment will slow down your SQL Server considerably. Come learn many of the key cloud infrastructure points that you should master as the DBA role continues to evolve!

RSVP for this webinar here! Bring your questions!

PASS Summit 2017 Precon – Virtual SQL Servers: Right to Ludicrous Speed

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, User Groups, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 152017

PASS has continues to ramp up the plans for the PASS Summit in Seattle this October, and my precon session, “Virtual SQL Servers – Right to Ludicrous Speed” has a few open slots for this Tuesday session. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’m thrilled to be able to present to the group advanced SQL Server VM tuning techniques learned from over 17 years of performance tuning.

If any of you want to excel your DBA skills, not only for your on-premises SQL Server VMs but also your VMs in the cloud, I hope all of you can join me in what I consider the best SQL Server ecosystem conference in the world.

Session Details:

Join this full-day introduction session focused on managing and boosting the performance of a virtualized SQL Server environment. The focus of the course is to help those new to virtualization, infrastructure, and cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service concepts to become familiar with the concept and purposes of virtualization and how it can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of virtualization underneath SQL Server, from storage to hypervisor to the SQL Server instance, no matter if on-premises or in the cloud, and will learn how to construct the entire stack with a strong emphasis on SQL Server performance.

Intended Audience
The intended audience of this course is information workers (both business and IT-centric) involved with architecting a virtualization strategy for SQL Server, or managing business-critical SQL Servers that have already been virtualized.

Course Topics
The following topics will be addressed during the course:
• The Physical Infrastructure Underneath the VM
• Storage and SAN Concepts and Design
• Virtualization and Infrastructure Fundamentals
• The SQL Server Virtual Machine
• Networking, Support, and Licensing
• SQL Server Infrastructure in the Cloud
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery and SQL Server
• Performance Investigation and Tuning of the Entire Stack

A working set of the screens and configuration settings referenced in the session, together with the reference slides and documentation, will be provided to attendees, for strategic reference in working with virtualized SQL Server in their own environments.

Register today! Seats are sure to fill up for these precons!

SQL Saturday Minnesota Preconference Training Session

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, User Groups, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 072017

This is just a quick reminder to encourage you to attend my next round of all-day precon training session at the upcoming SQL Saturday in Minnesota on Friday, October 6 called ‘The Complete Primer to SQL Server Infrastructure and Cloud‘.

The focus of the course is to help those new to the enterprise server infrastructure concepts become familiar with the concept and purposes of each layer of the architecture around their databases, and how this knowledge can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud underneath SQL Server, from storage all the way through to the SQL Server instance, and will learn how to review and engineer the entire stack with a strong emphasis on SQL Server performance.

The following topics will be addressed during the course:

Datacenter Fundamentals
Cloud versus On-Premises
Infrastructure Stack Fundamentals
Storage and SAN Concepts and Design
Networking and Interconnect Topologies
Physical Server Technologies
The SQL Server Virtual Machine
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Performance Investigation and Tuning of the Entire Stack

I am really happy to be delivering this precon, and look forward to seeing you all there! Reserve your seat at this exciting event here. Tickets are available at just $110!

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