Kevin Kline
Expert at enterprise-scale database systems, in the cloud or on-premises. Besting author of "SQL in a Nutshell".
Nashville, Tennessee, United States
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Kevin Kline is a noted database expert and software industry veteran. A 20-year Microsoft Data Platform MVP and noted community leader in the IT industry, Kevin is a founder and former president of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS.ORG), as well as the author of popular IT books including the bestseller "SQL in a Nutshell". Kevin is a top-rated speaker at industry trade shows worldwide and has a monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine (DBTA.com). His product designs for database tools have won numerous awards at industry trade shows and from a variety of trade magazines. He is on social media as @kekline and blogs regularly.
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SQL Horror Stories
Join Kevin Kline as he takes you on a guided tour of some of the worst and most horrible SQL coding experiences. Some were intention and some were accidental. But all of them will make you wince and laugh! Learn new SQL coding tips and tricks from these cautionary tales.
Shift-Left: A DevOps and Database Story
Database code often works well in a test environment, but end up causing significant performance issues when rolled out to production. In turn, these performance issues lead to lost productivity, excess resource consumption, and lost time spent troubleshooting the issue. But what if we could catch those issues during development? Join Kevin Kline to learn how SolarWind's SQL Sentry can shift performance tuning left to the dev cycle so those issues never occur on production systems in the first place.
My Journey in Mental Health as an IT Pro
I grew up in a home where my father suffered from severe mental health. Both my brother and I are diagnosed with moderate to severe depression and I also suffer from ADHD. Despite these issues, I have enjoyed a successful career with a rich family and personal life. In this session, I will share how I’ve learned to live with my mental health challenges, sought out personal growth and deeper self-awareness, and how I learned to cope while living in the shadow of depression.
Some of the topics I’ll discuss include:
• The impact of religion and philosophy on my life path
• The importance of empathy and self-awareness
• The “10% better” concept
• Therapy and community
Four Habits of Highly Successful Database and Admin Teams
Does your database admin or systems admin team spend most of its time fighting fires and troubleshooting unexpected problems? What if you could implement a well-vetted and empirically tested set of processes that ensures your team ascends above constant firefighting and instead grows into a trusted advisor to the business, operates at peak performance, and focuses on the activities and behaviors which provide the greatest value to your organization.
This session teaches you the core tenets of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), showing you how you can rise above firefighting so that you have time to implement added-value technology and processes, like AIOps and Analytics, and shows you how tool vendors can greatly accelerate your journey to organizational excellence.
Effective Requirements Gathering For Successful Project Outcomes
You've spent many years writing code and building database for others according to requirements gathered by someone else. Now you want to start your own consultancy or lead a team where YOU will will gather the customer requirements and write the technical specifications that you and perhaps others will code against. But how do you go about collection these requirements and how do you turn those requirements into a set of clearly articulated specifications for your upcoming project? And what are the best practices employed by other project teams that help them ensure a successful outcome for their project? Join us to learn these aspects of software development and more!
How to Troubleshoot SQL Server CPU Problems
CPU is the workhorse of any SQL Server and Azure SQL. CPU handles not only core processing but also worker thread management and parallelism. And yet many of us don’t know the fundamentals beyond “SQL Server take cares of that for me”. So what happens to those CPUs when things go wrong? In this session, we’ll go deep into the internal behavior of SQL Server CPU, including the internal and external memory pressure, worker thread management, and how to troubleshoot CPU problems.
Winning Influence in IT Teams
How does a mild-mannered and often overlooked IT professional become the “go-to guru” for the IT organizations top managers and executives? The good news is that there is lots of research that teaches us how to be an influencer within our IT team. This session explores how to become a trusted adviser and informal leader within your IT organization. This session delves into a variety of important behaviors, including:
• How can you best build a solid foundation for lasting influence?
• What is the most effective way to persuade others to your way of thinking?
• What techniques will bring other IT professionals to your door for advice, assistance, and help with office politics?
IT professionals who ignore office politics and influence do so at the risk of their own career. Learn how to make winning influence a part of your regular interactions!
Ten Query Tuning Techniques Every SQL Developer Should Know
SELECT statements have a reputation for being very easy to write, but hard to write very well. This session will take you through ten of the most problematic patterns and anti-patterns when writing queries and how to deal with them all. Loaded with live demonstrations and useful techniques, this session will teach you how to take your SQL Server queries mundane to masterful.
SQL Server Internals & Architecture - 2025
Many great developers, DBAs, and architects get their day-to-day work completed on time and with reasonable quality while never fully understanding what’s happening behind the scenes of their database systems. But if you want to take your database skills to the next level, it’s critical to know SQL Server’s internal processes and architecture. This session will answer questions like:
- How are queries handled behind the scenes?
- What are the various areas of memory inside of SQL Server?
- How does SQL Server determine what important procedural code (like functions, procedures, and triggers) to keep in the plan cache and which to evict?
- How does SQL Server perform write operations to database files and transaction log files?
- What are the most important performance features we can leverage (like in-memory OLTP, delay durability, and page compression) and what is their impact on the internals of SQL Server?
This fast paced and highly-rated session takes you through the entire lifecycle of a SQL Server transaction, revealing overlooked aspects SQL Server internals and their inner workings, which in turn you can use to ensure your code performs at its best.
How to Design and Normalization a Relational Database
Designing a relational database isn’t hard work. But that doesn't mean it's a good design. Invest a little time and effort early on will yield big benefits by providing a database that is self-documenting, easy to maintain and change, and provides high-quality data to its users.
This session will use extensive examples and a real-world use-case to teach you:
• How to approach a new database design project
• How to normalize a relational database up to Third Normal Form (3NF)
• How to read an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) or create your own
• How to transform a design into a real database
This is a great session for developers who’ve never undertaken a database design project themselves, administrators who focus on operations, and for other IT professionals who are interested in databases.
Query Tuning Telemetry for the Advanced SQL Developer
You are a skilled SQL developers who knows how to make your SQL statements scream with speed. But now you want to advance that skill by analyzing instance-wide performance and overall workload analysis. As it turns out, SQL Server includes a variety of Extended Events, DMVs, and other telemetry to help us. It’s just that few people know these secrets. We will examine this seldom used instrumentation through a variety of everyday queries to reveal their overall resource consumption and internal behavior. Lots of examples and demos!
Presentations that Persuade
Many new presenters are happy just to create a presentation that is informative and formatted properly. But there is a comes a time when a presenter wants to achieve more than simply delivering information to an audience, they want to persuade the audience. How does a speaker move from being merely a speaker to an influencer?
In this session, you will learn at least three important new skills. First, you will learn how to create informative technical presentations that are also memorable, impactful, and personal. Second, you will learn aspects of presentation such as stage presence and speaking cadence that elevate presentations from good to great. And finally, you will learn the secret ingredient that turns a set of information into an inspiring call to action that motivates your audience to do more than simply absorb details.
Query Tuning Internals for the Advanced SQL Developer
Skilled SQL developers know that the SQL Server query optimizer uses a multi-step process to produce execution plans. But what about deeper components like the parser, the binder, the algebrizer, as well as the optimizer itself? This session will teach you advanced techniques for query tuning as well as surprising behaviors of the query optimization process that can have a dramatic impact on performance, with special attention paid to the processes controlled by the algebrizer, including associative, commutative, and transitive transformations. We will examine a variety of everyday queries whose performance can be greatly improved by apply a deeper understanding of these internal behaviors. Lots of examples and demos!
• Goal 1: Learn advanced and undocumented methods to see the steps of parsing, binding, algebrizing, and query optimization.
• Goal 2: Explore the SQL Server internal memo structure to see how SQL Server uses the heuristics of the algebrizer and query optimizer.
• Goal 3: Walk through several examples of SQL queries whose behavior can be greatly improved when you apply what you’ve learned about the algebrizer and query optimizer.
5 Critical Considerations When Moving Your Database to the Cloud
Migrating an existing on-premises SQL Server application to the cloud can be a daunting task that consists of many complicated steps. In this webinar, we will focus on what is perhaps the MOST important step of the process – those that lead up to the actual move to the cloud.
We will dive deep into the most critical considerations for moving your data and databases into the cloud, whether you use Microsoft Azure, Amazon, or another cloud provider.
We will cover:
• Forecasting how much migration will cost
• The importance of cleansing your data before a major migration
• Fully documenting your data sources and metadata
• Choosing from many different tools and techniques to actually move data
• How to test data for fidelity
• How to maintain parallel systems during transitional phases
Attend this session with one of the industry’s database top experts!
Architectural Choices That Affect Performance of SQL Server
This session takes you through ten common design choices made during the creation of a Microsoft SQL Server database / Azure SQL database application which actually hurts the performance of your application.
This session is great for Developers who have not had much training on database and for DBAs who are usually concerned with keeping servers up and running, but have not done much database design.
This session takes you through a variety of demos that show what sort of anti-patters are common in applications you buy on the open market, how to detect them and, when possible, how to refactor those problems. Don’t miss out!
Communication Skills for the Technology Pro
What sets apart the most credible, trusted, and influential members of an IT team from the rest? What habits and behaviors do they exhibit that result in being treated with respect, while other team members of equal technical skill on the same team are virtually ignored? While technologists are often analytical and data-driven in our work, we are rarely systematic about interpersonal communication and soft skills. This session will teach you how to bridge those gaps.
One of the most fundamental practices among successful data professionals is self-awareness. We will help, through personality profiles like DISC, MTBI, and StrengthFinder, to help reveal your own preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. With that foundation, we move to best practices in communication, such as listening and questioning skills. Finally, we cover a variety of difficult conversations and common conflicts and the communication techniques that help navigate those situations successfully.
These lessons, in turn, build your confidence and influence in interpersonal situations, while enabling you to personally achieve new heights of productivity and greater personal effectiveness.
How DBAs Can Launch a Data Governance Program
When organizations are small and simple, information technology is often thought of as just a means to support their their business. But as organizations grow in complexity and sophistication, they begin to realize that their data is a real asset with enormous value requiring proactive management. Enter data governance, a set of concepts and processes centered on ensuring that an organization has secure and high-quality data throughout its life cycle.
In this session, we begin with an overview of the problems and lost productivity faced by organizations without data governance but aren’t using it. We then discuss the basics of data governance as it applies to the Microsoft Data Platform, as well as important related concepts, like master data management, metadata management, and data stewardship.
From there, we dive into best practices for DBAs to start a database governance program and ensure its success.
De-Risk Your Database Move to Azure: Overcoming Business and Technical Roadblocks
Migrating an existing on-premises application to the cloud can be a daunting task that consists of many complicated steps. In this full day session, we will cover critical considerations around migrating your workloads and discuss both the technical and business roadblocks that commonly challenge this process and how you can overcome them. We will go from beginning to end starting with the pre-planning that must occur and move into discussing the actual migration and post-migration elements of the project looking at the challenges along the way. While we will review the technical aspect, this is more then just a step-by-step session. Its a practical look at real world issues companies are being challenged with today and what you can do to resolve them. Topics such as budgets and costing, architectural decision making, security, team success factors, performance considerations and so much more. Join us to gain the skills you need to de-risk migrating your data workloads to the cloud!
How to Conduct a Database Design Review on SQL Server and Azure SQL
Most database administrators don’t have enough time in the day to review every database put into product by their employers. And that’s big probable because the average database design put into product, whether built in-house or bough, are not high quality. But what if we could automate the review of our database for quality?
In this session we will teach you how to conduct a database design review that yields improved storage behavior, consistent table designs, good data types choices, best practices for keys and constraints, and strong indexing. The design review is scripted and does not require that the developers explain their code to you. Instead, you can run a set of scripts on a database that is actively testing workloads to see if any anti-patterns are in play. We will also show examples of anti-patterns that are the direct result of poor database design choices.
Join us to learn this tips and techniques that improve not only your personal skillset, but also have the potential to vastly improve your SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance.
How to Conduct a SQL Server Configuration Review
Installing an on-premises SQL Server is easy. But configuring SQL Server to make performance the top priority of all configurable aspects of service usually takes years of study and experience to do well. In this webinar, we’ll take you through the important server settings and configuration options, show you which to change and which to ensure are not changed, and share a toolkit of T-SQL scripts to automate the process. We’ll also spend a few minutes detailing the differences between installations on Windows OS, Linux OS, and in the Azure cloud. We’ll cover important details like:
• How to properly configure CPU settings, memory, and file arrangements for databases and transaction log files
• How to properly configure SQL Server settings for parallelism and other internal configuration options
• Automated jobs to take care of preventative maintenance, backup and recovery, and more
How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review
Modern database administrators have many responsibilities, including perhaps their most important responsibility of performance tuning. Performance tuning takes many forms. It might include tuning server settings, improving database designs, or even extensively tuning queries and query code. This becomes even more important when database workloads moved to the cloud because poor performance increases consumption of resources like CPU, memory, and IOPS.
In this session, we’ll teach you how to conduct a Transact-SQL code review that avoids a variety of common anti-patterns frequently used by junior developers who don’t know much about SQL Server. We’ll also share a collection of scripted checks to run against your SQL Server/Azure SQL database to reveal issues lurking within your application’s stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers. The design review is scripted and doesn’t require developers to explain their code. A portion of the scripted checks are best when run against a database at rest. But other scripts within the library are best run in an active database to see if the workloads expose any anti-patterns in flight.
Join us to learn these tips and techniques to improve not only your personal skillset and that of the teams you support, but also gain the potential to vastly improve your SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance.
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