I am proud to announce that I am presenting at this year’s PASS Summit conference, to be held in Seattle WA from November 5th to 8th at the Washington State Convention Center. The biggest session of this conference for me is presenting a full-day preconference training session called “Advanced Virtual SQL Server Performance“ as part of the Architecture stream.

Virtualization is the new norm in datacenters. Even the ubiquitous “cloud” is nothing more than virtualized servers in someone else’s datacenter with advanced automation on top of it. However, just because it’s everywhere doesn’t mean it is implemented and managed correctly. Done incorrectly, your SQL Server performance can take a massive dive. Are your SQL Servers running at their best possible performance? This full-day boot camp covers all aspects of performance engineering for virtualized SQL Servers. 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. Availability and disaster recovery guidelines will also be reviewed. Most importantly, this seminar informs you on methods and terminology to help you work better with your infrastructure team to streamline your critical SQL Server performance. You will understand how to review your critical SQL Servers for both their performance and availability as they relate to the virtualization and physical compute layers underneath, and work with your infrastructure team to implement and streamline any of your findings.

If you’ve never attended the PASS Summit before, I urge you to go. This conference is the best Microsoft data-platform-centric conference there is, and the information you will gain is second to none. Just look at this list of sessions! The friends you make last a lifetime. The sessions are certain to improve your career and your job. I know won’t miss it, and I hope to see you there!