SQL 2008 R2 LoadFest – Session Notes

I spoke today at the SQL Server 2008 R2 Load Fest put on by Andy Novick of Novick Software. Great turnout, and it is always fun to see so many folks working together on the task of figuring out the nuances of SQL Server installations together. Also good to see that you were able to learn that one of the myths I enjoy crushing was pretty easy to crush (SQL Server is not “Set it and Forget it”). Now, if we could only convince employers, companies and vendors of that fact.

Thanks!

Thank you for attending and interacting with us all during the presentation. We had some good questions, good sidebars and good discussions. I really appreciate you all being there to install SQL on your own devices, be there for the presentation and for interacting. I hope you were able to leave with some questions to ask of your own environment and working on a plan on how you can position yourself as the “data advocate” at your company. If you want to take the time, I’d really appreciate feedback (I believe they finally enabled anonymous feedback, too) on the presentation. You can do that at SpeakerRate through this link right to my session today.

I wanted to recap a few notes and share a few links that aren’t on the main presentation site for that talk. You can see the post about the session here along with some references to other blog posts I have written, a link to the Tom LaRock book I mentioned and the downloadable slides. Some links are there to some of the tools we talked about but there are more here on things we talked about specifically today.

Seacoast NH SQL Server Users Group

I talked about the user group I run up in Portsmouth. You can see more about our schedule and meetings at the official Seacoast SQL Server Users Group website. Our current schedule for upcoming meetings is looking like this:

• October – Andy Leonard speaking about SSIS
• November – No speaker but we’ll have Paul Nielsen up again but this time to help us tackle a real business problem at Great Bay College (they donate space for our meetings) that will involve us creating a database and perhaps a simple front end for the college’s business office (more on that in an upcoming blog post).
• December – Andy Novick (topic TBD –> will either be about SQL Azure or Database Deployments)

Some Blogs and Bloggers I mentioned

• Brent Ozar (@BrentO on twitter) – It was his script I referenced you check out for finding out everything you ever wanted to know about your instances. From his “60 minute SQL Server takeover presentation”. That script can be found on SQLServerPedia.
• Grant Fritchey (@GFritchey on twitter) – I mentioned his book on SQL Server Query Performance Tuning. He also has a free book on Execution Plans available as a download from Red Gate/SQL Server Central. His blog has some great info about Query Plans as well.
• Brian Kelley (@KBrianKelley on twitter) – His blog has lots of great information on the nuances of SQL Server Security.

Performance Information – What Am I looking for?

• PAL Tool – I mentioned the PAL tool and I have a blog post about it that explains the tool with a link to where you can download it. This is a great tool because it will graph your performance data. It will also explain what each of the counters means.
• SQL Server Perfmon Counters – I talked about this poster put out by Quest Software
• SQL Server Wait Stats – I talked about this whitepaper from Joe Sack about analyzing your wait stats. Great information on what most of them mean, how to troubleshoot and where else to look.

What Did I Forget?

The other links to my own blog I mentioned (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, The Vendor Interrogation Interview checklist, etc.) are all on the main page for the talk. If you have any other questions or follow-ups, drop me a comment below and I’ll update this post for others. You can also e-mail me for more. Mike at the same domain of this blog.