PASS Summit 2020 Precon Announcement
I am thrilled to announce that I have been accepted to deliver a preconference boot camp called 'Amplify Your Virtual SQL Server Performance' at this year's PASS Summit conference, to be held the week of November 9th-13th. My precon is to be held on Monday, November 9th.
Description: Virtualization has been the norm in data centers for years. However, implemented incorrectly, your SQL Server performance can take a massive dive. Are you sure that your SQL Servers are running at optimal performance? This full-day boot camp covers all aspects of performance engineering for virtualized SQL Servers on all virtualized platforms, including VMware and Hyper-V.
We will review critical topics such as virtualization layers, VM construction, NUMA, resource scheduling, query parallelization and physical server alignment, “right-sizing,” and storage performance-oriented presentation. New features such as SQL Server containers and hybrid cloud architectures will be demonstrated. Backups, high availability, and disaster recovery guidelines will also be reviewed. Most importantly, this seminar informs you on methods and terminology to improve your collaboration with your infrastructure team in order to streamline your critical SQL Server performance.
PASS has commited to ensuring that the conference will take place, even with the pandemic still rampant at the time of this writing. They are going to make a decision on if the event will be held in-person or online hopefully by early June. So, register today for this outstanding event! Even if you decide that my precon is not for you, the precon offerings at this year's conference are stellar! I can't wait to see you all there, either virtually or in-person!
Tell Us About Your Worst Database Code Offenders
For years, I've done consulting around helping organizations tune their database platforms, both from within the database and underneath, to help boost performance and availability. Some database design or code is capable of being tuned, since the organization owns it, but they might lack the time or ability to tune beyond a lab environment. Other times, third-party software vendors ship some pretty troubling code that eats an extraordinary amount of CPU time or storage demand on the database servers. Throwing hardware at the problem only pushes the pain further out into the future but doesn't solve the problem.
We've made some significant improvements lately with our ability to work with ISVs to help them tune their code so that their customers benefit. Their willingness to help shows me that some software vendors do listen and care about their customer complaints. Given the gains we've made for some large ISVs, I'd love to hear your thoughts on specific applications and vendors that ship sub-optimal code. We want to use the list to approach these vendors directly to see if we can convince them to let us help tune their code, and in turn, make their software perform better and get happier customers. If you have a moment, please fill out the SurveyMonkey survey here and let me know your top offenders that you'd like to see corrected! I really appreciate your feedback!
PASS Performance VC Webinar Dec 2019
David Klee will be presenting a presentation for the PASS Performance Virtual Chapter at 2pm Eastern on December 19th entitled "Zen and the Art of Baselines".
Session Details: If your boss asked you for the list of the five most CPU-hungry databases in your environment six months from now for an upcoming licensing review, could you come up with an answer? Performance data can be overwhelming, but you can make sense of the mess. Twisting your brain and looking at the data in different ways can help you identify resource bottlenecks that are limiting your SQL Server performance today. Painting a clear picture of what your servers should be doing can help alert you when something is abnormal. Trending this data over time will help you project how much resource consumption you will have months away. Come learn how to extract meaning from your performance trends and how to use it to proactively manage the resource consumption from your SQL Servers.
SQL Saturday Atlanta 2019 Precon
We are proud to announce that David Klee will be presenting a SQL Saturday preconference training session called "Level Up Your SQL Server Cloud Infrastructure Skills" at this year's SQL Saturday in Atlanta on Friday, May 17th! More details are posted at the SQL Saturday event page here.
SQL Saturday Atlanta Precon May 17
I am very proud to announce that I have been selected to present an exciting preconference training session at this year’s SQL Saturday Atlanta on May 17th, 2019, called “Level Up Your Data Platform Cloud Infrastructure“. If you are in the cloud or even remotely considering it, I urge you to attend this session!
We also have a discount code for those interested. It's PAPERJAM, and enter it at the EventBrite checkout page.
Designed to help people that are starting to consider cloud for their data platforms ramp up quickly on all of the items that they need to hit the ground running and make the best choices while selecting and using the platform.
Session Abstract: While your on-premises infrastructure is likely maintained by another team, in the cloud this responsibility falls on you. Whether your organization is just planning for the cloud, all-in, or leveraging a hybrid architecture, this course is designed to ramp you up on maximizing your investment in the cloud components that you utilize.
Infrastructure skills are essential when managing your environment in the cloud. Knowledge is power; key items such as firewalls and connectivity, storage presentation and performance, baselining, and even platform selection are all necessary areas of concern. Capacity management is also crucial, as the old ways of “throwing hardware” at a performance problem will translate into a larger bill each month.
Attend this session to learn how to efficiently manage cloud resources, set yourself apart from your peers, improve the performance of your mission-critical workloads, and potentially save your employer money!
Foreword in HPE and ScaleArc Performance Whitepaper
Heraflux is proud to have contributed an industry perspective to a recent whitepaper highlighting scale-up architectures using HPE's Superdome X and ScaleArc. Sometimes database-specific workloads do not scale out well because of years of legacy design and engineering, and in those occasions you need to scale up. Scaling up a business-critical applications, just like scaling them outwards, is not a trivial task. Leveraging modern scale-up technologies such as the HPE Superdome X servers and ScaleArc's database acceleration and availability solution can help you scale your applications up without dramatic and costly modifications to your code.
Check out this reference architecture for Superdome X and ScaleArc here!
Q&A Session with SQL Server on VMware Experts at VMworld EMEA
Greetings everyone! We had so many people stay after our SQL Server on VMware sessions at VMworld USA to ask great questions, I thought I'd extend an offer to everyone at the European show coming up in a week! Let's talk SQL Server! We are going to crash the VMvillage hang space on Tuesday, September 12 at 3pm local time to hold an open-ended SQL Server on VMware Q&A session. This unscripted and unofficial session is for you, has no official agenda, and marketing is strictly off-limits.
Our illustrious experts include:
 Michael Corey, Founder - Corey and Associates |
 Thomas LaRock, Head Geek - Solarwinds |
 Argenis Fernandez, Principal Architect - Pure Storage |
 Niran Even Chen, Double VCDX, VMware Corp. |
 ... and me! |
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Mark your calendars, and bring your questions, specific challenges, or discussion points, and let's do this! Anything goes - performance, availability, setup and configuration, conflicts between best practices for SQL Server and VMware, anything!
SQL Server on VMware VMworld USA Videos Now On YouTube
We just saw that our two SQL Server on VMware sessions that David Klee co-presented on Tuesday at VMworld USA, both of which made the top 10 sessions of the day list at the conference, are now on YouTube! They are free to watch for everyone!
For those of you with virtualized SQL Servers, regardless of platform and cloud or on-premises, we urge you to watch these two sessions at your convenience.
Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) with vSphere 6.5: Doing IT Right (VIRT1309BU) (co-presented with Michael Corey)
Performance Tuning and Monitoring for Virtualized Database Servers (VIRT1430BU) (co-presented with Thomas LaRock)
New eBook with Pure Storage - Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges
Heraflux is proud to announce a new ebook as part of our joint partnership with Pure Storage! This ebook, entitled Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges, discusses the current state of infrastructure technologies and how it interacts and impacts the performance of Microsoft's flagship database engine SQL Server. Arguably, storage has historically been the slowest part of the infrastructure stack underneath the database, so much so that the core database engine makes some assumptions that it will always be the case. Modern CPUs, memory, and even the network are much less a bottleneck than administrators commonly realize. Even modern SQL Server in-memory features, such as in-memory OLTP and columnstore indexes, are heavily dependent on the performance of the storage underneath them.
Presenting #vBrownBag TechTalk Session at VMworld Europe
Heraflux is proud to announce that David Klee is presenting a session in this year's VMworld Europe #vBrownBag TechTalk lineup entitled "Performance Perspectives". Currently it is scheduled for Tuesday, October 18th, at 2:30 PM local time. The 15-minute session will discuss how the perspective on performance and resource consumption from the VM-layer is not the only perspective that should be weighed when evaluating large, mission-critical app VMs. Come check out this and the other sessions near the Hang Space at VMworld Europe!