Mastering the Execution Plan to Tune SQL Server/Azure SQL/SQL in Fabric

You're a DBA or T-SQL developer, and you have a decent enough knowledge of T-SQL and getting SQL Server, Azure SQL Database or SQL Database in Fabric to do what you want. But some of your code runs slowly, and you run into issues like deadlocks and timeouts. Maybe you've already looked at some execution plans, but you really want to understand them at a deeper level, in order to make your queries run smoother.

In our full-day workshop, we’ll work hands-on with performance tuning your database, starting with the basics of indexing, understanding execution plans and their operators, and how to rewrite your indexes and queries to get just the right plan. These are patterns and practices I’ve collected over 25 years of performance tuning SQL Server.

We’ll cover

• How a SQL Server query runs
• Pages, heaps, indexes, and the transaction log
• Scans, seeks, lookups, sargability
• Optimizing joins, aggregations
• Window functions
• How to measure and monitor performance
• Useful optimization patterns
• Using columnstore indexes
• Parallelism
• Parameter sniffing
• What hints to use for development, test or production
• Locking, blocking, deadlocks and isolation levels

We won’t be looking at hardware or infrastructure - the idea is to set you up for success irrespectively of whatever underlying CPUs, disks, or PaaS tier you’re working on.

After this workshop, you’ll

• have a good understanding of how SQL Server runs queries
• be able to understand, redesign and leverage indexes
• rewrite your T-SQL code to get the best execution plan

Recommended, but not required: a laptop with a Remote Desktop client, if you want to follow along in the demos.

Also check out other Workshops in Oslo.