This is a series I’m writing as I prepare for SQL Saturday Chicago 2019. My session is called Performance tuning with SQL Server memory grants.

In my last post, I laid out three ideas for the flow

Now it’s time to pick. I’ll move the ideas from post 1 into slides, then I’ll write the final wrap-up slide. Each idea will get its own slide, then I’ll work on developing some content on the slides that come to mind.

The idea I liked the most was idea #3. I’ve decided to introduce the idea of memory grants by talking about their most common operator, the Sort.

Then, I’ll describe how to monitor the memory grants in an execution plan, demonstrate the issues when memory grants conflict, and show ways to performance tune those pains away.

Let’s take a look at what this looks like:

Next steps

So I’ve got the general flow laid out here in the outline but I don’t have clear thoughts on what I want to say for each section, and I don’t have any demos yet.

The next step for me is to flesh out the ideas with some thoughts on each slide, then identify which concepts are best displayed in demos, creating those demos or borrowing them from previous blog posts.

I might add more slides between completing these steps, it just depends on what the presentation needs.

Stay tuned!