I will be travelling to Copenhagen, Denmark to deliver a full day pre-con for SQLSaturday #275 on Friday, March 28, 2014. This is a revised and expanded version of the pre-con I delivered at the 2013 PASS Summit, with a lot of new content. It should be a lot of fun!

Here is the abstract:

Scaling SQL Server 2014

SQL Server implementations can quickly evolve and become more complex, forcing DBAs and developers to think about how they can scale their solution quickly and effectively. Scaling up is relatively easy (but can be expensive), while scaling out requires significant engineering time and effort. If you suggest hardware upgrades you may be accused of simply “throwing hardware at the problem”, and if you try to scale out, you may be thwarted by a lack of development resources or 3rd party software restrictions. As your database server nears its load capacity, what can you do? This session gives you concrete, practical advice on how to deal with this situation. Starting with your present workload, configuration and hardware, we will explore how to find and alleviate bottlenecks, whether they are workload related, configuration related, or hardware related. Next, we will cover how you can decide whether you should scale up or scale out your data tier. Once that decision is made, you will learn how to scale up properly, with nearly zero down-time. If you decide to scale out, you will learn about practical, production-ready techniques such as vertical partitioning, horizontal partitioning, and data dependent routing. We will also cover how to use middle-tier caching and other application techniques to increase your overall scalability.

You can register for this pre-con here.

I will also be presenting one session during the actual SQLSaturday event. Here is the abstract for that session: 

Analyzing I/O Subsystem Performance

SQL Server is often I/O bound – but why? Do you feel lost when talking to your storage administrator? Are your storage subsystems like a mysterious black box where your databases live but you can’t go visit? This session will get you up to speed with the fundamentals of storage subsystems for SQL Server. You will learn about the different types of storage that are available, and how to decide what type of storage to use for different workload types. You will also learn useful tips and techniques for configuring your storage for the best performance and reliability. We’ll cover methods to effectively measure and monitor your storage performance so that you will have valuable information and evidence available the next time you have to discuss IO performance with your storage administrator. Come to this session to learn how to analyze I/Os as well as options to reduce the bottlenecks.

I hope to see and meet a lot of new people during these two days!

Filed under: SQL Server 2014, SQLSaturday, Teaching Tagged: SQLSaturday #275