You are in a DBA, developer or consultant role, supporting SQL Server databases and often someone asks you to take a look at a badly performing database application, certain queries or even “the whole server”. And over and over again you find yourself in the situation of “how to find the root cause in the least amount of time”.
This full-day precon with Andreas Wolter, a former Program Manager for SQL Server at Microsoft, will teach you techniques for general troubleshooting and performance analysis from start-up to advanced techniques.
Among them are:
• SQL Server architecture & internals – the fundament to understanding correlations
• Monitoring methodology, tools & techniques
o Windows Performance Monitor
o Dynamic Management Views (DMVs)
o Wait statistics
o Extended Events for workload & query-analysis
o Query Store
o Azure SQL database watcher (intro)
The above techniques will be used to:
• Identify the most impactful problematic queries
• Detect I/O latency problems
• Investigate Tempdb performance
• Analyze indexes & statistics
• Analyze locking & blocking and concurrency problems
• Identify query plan regression

While no one has evolved into a performance-tuning-master in one single day, you can be sure to learn valuable techniques and concepts to build upon for day-to-day work. And of course, we will also discuss possible solutions or even implement them live. So, at your next phone call “Help, the server is slow!” you know will where to start.
Expect lots of demos and a deep dive into core concepts of SQL Server.
Hands-on! – Attendees who want to directly try out some of the techniques shown can connect to the demo-server which is under a constant workload simulation live with SQL Server management studio themselves! (All that is required is to bring a laptop with SSMS installed and ability to connect to a SQL Server on the internet on a given port.)