The SQLRally, a new PASS initiative taking place in the spring, is going to be a community driven event. This includes selection of the pre-convention (precon) paid presentations through a voting process. I have a session called Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish. It’s a one day session on everything about tuning queries.

I won’t republish the abstract and bore the heck out of you, but I will list the 5 skills I think you’ll take away with you if you attend (after voting for me):

1. The ability to collect performance metrics on your servers as part of an overall query tuning methodology
2. The ability to generate, read, and understand execution plans from multiple sources in support of troubleshooting poorly performance queries
3. An understanding of how the optimizer works in support of writing better TSQL code as well as troubleshooting poorly performing queries
4. A working knoweldge of DMOs that will help you identify and fix performance issues on your servers
5. The ability to address common query performance problems

The thing is, query performance frequently comes down to just a handful of common problems.If you learn how to identify which queries are running slowly, and how to discern which of the common problems you’re running into, you’ll almost always know how to fix the query, whether it’s restructuring it, rewriting it, or simply adding or modifying indexes in support of the badly performing query.

Please, if this sounds interesting, go and vote for it. If not, please go and vote anyway so that the community’s voice is heard.