Next week is the wonderful IT/Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas, and I’m proud to announce that I’m presenting two sessions! The conference is being held at the ARIA Resort and Casino from September 14-17.

The first session is Benchmarking Your SQL Server Environment, located in Bluethorn 4 on September 15 from 11a-12:15p. I’m co-presenting this session with Ben DeBow from Fortified Data.

What do you do when a user reports that “the database is slow again”? Do you run the user’s queries to see how the database is working? How do you try to track down the issues your users report? Wouldn’t you like to quickly whip out some performance numbers and review the platform to see if anything is amiss? This informative session will show you how to eliminate the subjectivity in the performance of your mission-critical SQL Server systems and replace it with objective performance metrics. Benchmarks and baselines can help you quickly find any performance anomalies in the environment, plus help you project performance and capacity into the future. Tools, techniques, and scripts will be shared and demonstrated.

The second session is called Handle with Care: Virtual SQL Servers, and is located in Bluethorn 5 and 6 on September 16th from 1:15-2:30p.

Maintaining the performance of a mission-critical SQL Server system during the virtualization process is different from less resource-intensive applications. Practices and processes that have worked for years for less-complex applications can detract from the performance of a large database server; but why? This hypervisor-agnostic session will explore the reasons why SQL Server is so hard to successfully virtualize and give you many strategies for working through each challenge to get the most performance out of your virtualized SQL Server systems. We’ll present tips and tricks for solving performance problems at each layer: storage, interconnects, hypervisor, VM, OS, and SQL Server. If you manage at least one virtualized SQL Server system in your environment, this session is for you!

I hope to see all of you at the conference, and if you have a SQL Server virtualization, performance tuning, or infrastructure question that you want to talk one-on-one with at the conference to discuss any challenges you’re experiencing, drop me a line and let’s meet up!