Richard Douglas
I am paid in Starbucks Caramel Macchiato's since Brexit
Coventry, United Kingdom
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Richard Douglas is a Solutions Engineer at Redgate Software. He spent over 20 years working with SQL Server, Couchbase, and other database platforms. Notably at Quest, SentryOne, and Couchbase where he presented sessions at conferences around the world.
These days he helps companies scale to higher levels of performance with Redgate Software.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Visualising issues in Execution Plans
In this session Richard shares his query plan viewer, QPI, which highlights issues hiding inside SQL Server Management Studio.
We'll walk through a query tuning exercise where you can witness just how much you can't actually see!
Understand the Transaction Log, Unlock Greater Throughput
Does your application suffer from performance problems even though you followed best practices on schema design? Have you looked at your transaction log?
There's no doubt about it, the transaction log is treated like a poor cousin. The poor thing does not receive much love. The transaction log, however, is a very essential and misunderstood part of your database. There will be a team of developers creating an absolutely awesome elegant design the likes of which have never been seen before, but the leave the transaction log using default settings. It's as if it doesn't matter, an afterthought, a relic of the platform architecture.
In this session, you will learn to appreciate how the transaction log works and how you can improve the performance of your applications by making the right architectural choices.
The Lifecycles of Queries: How SQL Server Really Executes Your Code
SQL Server performance problems are often diagnosed by looking at one part of the system in isolation. Execution plans, waits, and metrics all provide useful signals, but rarely explain how a problem started or why it persists.
In this full day training session, we will follow multiple queries through their lifecycles, starting with the client request and security context, moving through parsing and optimisation, crossing into the storage engine, and continuing through execution and resource usage.
We will examine how SQL Server builds and transforms query trees, including parsing, binding, constant folding, logical and physical operators, statistics, and cardinality estimation. From there, we will follow execution into the storage engine, covering access methods, locking and the transaction manager, write-ahead logging, and how data is read from and written to memory and disk through the buffer pool and extended buffer pool.
The session continues beyond query execution to look at what happens over time. We will cover TempDB usage, memory pressure, checkpoints, page eviction, and how SQL Server monitors and reacts to workload behaviour using features such as Query Store, automatic tuning, missing index feedback, and trace flags. We will also look at instance-level controls such as security and Resource Governor, and how they influence workload behaviour in consolidated environments.
Throughout the day, theory will be demonstrated wherever possible, with practical examples used to connect internal behaviour to real world performance, monitoring, and diagnostic scenarios. The goal is to give attendees a clear mental model of how SQL Server executes work end to end, so performance problems can be understood and solved rather than guessed at.
Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes
The system database TempDB has often been called a dumping ground, even the public toilet of SQL Server. (There has to be a joke about spills in there somewhere). In this session, you will learn to find those criminal activities that are going on deep in the depths of SQL Server that are causing performance issues, not just for one session, but that affects everybody on that instance.
You will leave this session prepared to create better architecture decisions and better code to improve the performance for all of your users.
Investigate Memory Like Sherlock Holmes
Memory is one part of the holy trinity of resources consumed by SQL Server, the others being CPU and disk. Most people know how to look at disk latency and throughput and then take remedial measures to fix those issues. But what about memory issues?
In this session, you will learn how SQL Server uses memory and various caches, how to gauge memory pressure, and how to address the significant problems it can cause.
You will leave with a much clearer understanding of how to monitor and manage memory consumption within SQL Server using native Dynamic Management Objects.
Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes
The system database TempDB has often been called a dumping ground, even the public toilet of SQL Server. (There has to be a joke about spills in there somewhere). In this session, you will learn to find those criminal activities that are going on deep in the depths of SQL Server that are causing performance issues. Not just for one session, but those that affect everybody on that instance.
After this session, you will have learned how to architect TempDB for better performance, how to create code more efficiently for TempDB, understand how space is utilised within TempDB, and have learned about queries and counters that will help diagnose where your bottlenecks are coming from.
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