I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this years SQL PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Having submitted several times before, unsuccessfully, I’m really happy to have made the cut this year. Looking at the lineup of speakers, I take great pride in being given the opportunity.
My Sessions
That’s right, not just one session, but two! And as if that wasn’t enough, the two selected sessions are my absolute favorite ones to perform! I’ve presented both several times before and thanks to great feedback from the audiences I’ve slowly fine tuned the format and content.
Top Tricks and Best Practices for .NET SQL Server Developers
This is a session chock-full of easy-to-use tips, tricks and gotchas that can be implemented immediately. If you’re either a .NET developer yourself, or if you have .NET developers on your team, using SQL Server, this session is sure to be an eye opener with valuable lessons.
Being the acting DBA while doing development and managing a team of .NET developers, I’ve learned a trick or two through the years. For this session, I’ve gathered my list of top tricks any .NET developer should know and use when dealing with SQL Server. We’ll cover how to use TransactionScopes without locking up the database, avoiding MSDTC escalation, using internal batching functions in the BCL through reflection, avoiding unnecessary round trips, and much more. These are tips, tricks, and best practices that I ensure all my developers are taught before they have a chance of committing code to our production systems.
Understanding Data Files at the Byte Level
The best part about this session, for me, is watching heads explode only 15 minutes in when I make a live demonstration of how to reverse engineer SQL Server, to persuade it into describing its own data file format. In just 75 minutes I will give you not only a thorough tour of the MDF file format, but also a plethora of techniques on how to analyze your own databases internal storage as well. Using these techniques you’ll be well armed when it comes to schema discussions, column type choice and for those rare events where you need to dive just a bit below the surface to discover what’s really happening.
This session won’t explain when to use a heap instead of an index, but you will learn how they work – and differ – behind the scenes. Demonstrations will show how data files are organized on the disk and how that organization allows SQL Server to effectively query the data. Knowing how data files are organized will in turn help immensely when it comes to optimizing databases for both performance and storage efficiency.