SQL server conferences, European style

For passionate software engineers and developers, there are a series of firsts taking place in Europe this week. In London the first InsideSQL conference will be offering a deep-dive only conference on SQL Server, and will be followed by the first ever SQLSaturday to be hosted in Iceland.

In London, the first session I will be hosting is on wait statistics, looking at the SQL Server execution model and why we have waits at all. Then, looking at some common wait types, what they signify and what should and should not be done when encountering those waits.

The second session is a modification of the very popular indexing session, with more internals and more details to satisfy those people looking for advanced presentations. Here, there will be a lot more detail about the internal structure of SQL’s b-tree indexes, how seeks and scans work and what the internal structure means for index design.

After London, Iceland’s SQLSaturday conference is where I’ll be giving a precon on execution plans as well as a regular session on the Query Store. The precon is a full day dive into the query optimiser, plan caching, plan reuse, structure of a plan, query operators and how to use the plan to tune queries.

The Query Store presentation starts with the basics, since it’s a new feature. I’ll look at what the Query Store is, how to enable and configure it and how it works. After that I’ll show how the Query Store can be used to identify the worst performing queries and plan regressions and how its plan forcing feature can take the risk out of version upgrades.