SSWUG Spring ’10 Ultimate Virtual Conference

The SSWUG Spring 2010 Virtual Conference is coming up.  On April 7, 8, and 9, attend a conference from the comforts of your living room, office, or couch.  And while you are at it you’ll get to sit on on some incredible presentations, interaction with speakers, chat with other attendees, make new contacts, lots of fun and surprises.

• More than 80 technical sessions
• These are NOT sales presentations.
• Live keynote presentations and interaction
• On-Demand access to sessions for 45 days – miss a session? No problem.
• Chat, Twitter Integration, SKYPE integration for Q&A
• Experience-based learning – find out what you need to know from people that are using the technology every day
• 6-Month SSWUG.ORG Membership (or membership extension), included!
• ALL-ACCESS Pass: SQL Server and Business Intelligence… SharePoint and .NET technologies – all included, one low price
• Great vendor hall – learn about the best tools, technologies, publications and partners out there for your shop
• Learning, learning and more learning

If this sounds as awesome as it is, register for the event here.  Among the presenters will be myself with the following topics:

Using XML to Query Execution Plans

SQL Server stores its execution plans as XML in dynamic management views. The execution plans are a gold mine of information. From the whether or not the execution plan will rely on parallelism to what columns are requiring a key lookup after a non-clustered index seek. Through a the use of XML this information can be available at your finger tips to help determine the value and impact of an index and guide you in improving the performance of your SQL Server databases.

Prerequisites

• Understanding of basic T-SQL coding
• Understanding of basic XQuery statements

Goals:

1. Discuss information available in an execution plan
2. Demonstrate use of XQuery to query execution cache
3. Demonstrate methods to performance tune

Getting To Know Your Indexes

Without proper indexing SQL Server can be hard pressed to create efficient and performant execution plans. Dynamic Management Views (DMV) and system views provide a slew of information about indexes that can be used to analyze indexes within SQL Server. In this session we’ll go under the hood of SQL Server to look at DMVs and system views to know what indexes you have, should have, and how they feel about the way applications are treating them.

Prerequisites

• Understanding of performance tuning needs
• Experience with Database design

Goals:

1. Identify methods to analyze current and potential indexes
2. Learn how to alleviate stress found on indexes
3. Demonstrate methods for tuning indexes

A Function By Any Other Name Is A Function, Right? Right?!?

User defined functions provide a means to encapsulate business logic in the database tier. Often the purpose of the encapsulation is to provide standard method access segments of data within the database. Unfortunately, not all methods of creating user defined functions are equal. In this session we’ll review the types of user defined functions and investigate the performance impact in selecting the different types

Prerequisites

• Understanding of basic T-SQL

Goals:

1. Identify purposes for creating user defined functions
2. Discuss the types of user-defined functions
3. Demonstrate performance impact in selecting different types of functions

Stop in an check it out, there will be a lot of great sessions and great conversation.