There's a lot of information out there to overwhelm you when it comes to performance tuning your queries. It's very easy to feel like you're drinking from a fire hose when you're reading long blog posts or listening to technical conference sessions. Operators, metrics, wait statistics, page life expectancy, parallellism and fragmentation.

But let's take a step back and understand the one fundamental principle of querying data - ordering. This session is all about interactively and visually explaining the flow of data in terms of ordering, and how that affects the performance of your queries and server.

Once you get these basics right, tuning will feel so much easier and execution plans may even start to appear quite intuitive.