MSSQLTIGER Team at the PASS Summit

It’s that time of the year again when data professionals across the world converge at Seattle for one of the largest gatherings of data professionals around the world. This is one week of deep technical sessions delivered by community experts, MVPs and Microsoft engineers. With such a high concentration of data professionals around the world, you cannot discount the phenomenal networking opportunities at the event.

PASS Summit is the must-attend conference for all data professionals. There is a wealth of learning, connections, and immediate solutions gained in 3+ jam-packed and inspiring days. And possibly one of the largest congregation of data professional in the world with over 4000 attendees. Our Corporate Vice President, Joseph Sirosh, will talk about Cloud Intelligence Innovations during his keynote session on Day 1. David DeWitt, a very familiar face at PASS summit and in the community, will talk about Data Warehousing in the Cloud during his keynote session on Day 2.

The SQL Server Tiger Team (@mssqltiger) will be delivering sessions, will be at the clinic and is eager to hear from SQL Server customers. Below is a summary of what the Tiger team will be upto at the PASS Summit.

SQL Server Clinic

And if you didn’t have enough reasons already to attend, there will be a number of Tigers at the SQL Server Clinic on all three days of the summit. If you have a problem with how SQL Server is behaving, mis-behaving or even how you wanted it to behave (read: design change requests), we will be more than willing to hear about it.

Look out for signs directing you to the Tiger at the clinic! So stop by to growl, roar or talk (we don’t bite) with us!

Sessions

Session: Inside SQL Server In-Memory OLTP
Speaker: Bob Ward
Session Code: DBA-500-HD
Session Date: October 26th
Session Time: 1:30PM – 4:30PM PST
Level: 500
Duration: 3 hours
Room: 606-609
What you can expect: Hekaton is the original project name for In-Memory OLTP and just sounds cooler for a title name. Keeping up the tradition of deep technical “Inside” sessions at PASS, this half-day talk will take you behind the scenes and under the covers on how the In-Memory OLTP functionality works with SQL Server. We will cover “everything Hekaton”, including how it is integrated with the SQL Server Engine Architecture. We will explore how data is stored in memory and on disk, how I/O works, how native complied procedures are built and executed. We will also look at how Hekaton integrates with the rest of the engine, including Backup, Restore, Recovery, High-Availability, Transaction Logging, and Troubleshooting. Demos are a must for a half-day session like this and what would an inside session be if we didn’t bring out the Windows Debugger. As with previous “Inside…” talks I’ve presented at PASS, this session is level 500 and not for the faint of heart. So read through the docs on In-Memory OLTP and bring some extra pain reliever as we move fast and go deep. This session will appear as two sessions in the program guide but is not a Part I and II. It is one complete session with a small break so you should plan to attend it all to get the maximum benefit. And YES… You read it.. It’s a Level 500 talk!!

Session: SQL Server 2016: It Just Runs Faster
Speaker: Bob Ward
Session Code: DBA-405-M
Session Date: October 27th
Session Time: 10:15AM – 11:30AM PST
Level: 400
Track: Enterprise Database Administration & Deployment
Duration: 75 minutes
Room: 6E

What you can expect: Based on the popular blog series, join Bob Ward in taking a deep dive and a behind the scenes look at how SQL Server 2016 "It Just Runs Faster", focused on scalability and performance enhancements. This talk will discuss the improvements, not only for awareness, but expose design and internal change details. The beauty behind ‘It Just Runs Faster’ is your ability to just upgrade, in place, and take advantage without lengthy and costly application or infrastructure changes. If you are looking at why SQL Server 2016 makes sense for your business you won't want to miss this session. If you have a workload that is critical to your business running on any version of SQL Server, then this is a must attend session!

Session: SQL Server Enhancements that Keep Your Environment Always On
Speaker: Parikshit Savjani, Amit Banerjee
Session Code: DBA-313-M
Session Date: October 27th
Session Time: 1:30PM – 2:15PM PST
Level: 300
Duration: 75 minutes
Room: TCC Tahoma 5

What you can expect: SQL Server Always On Availability Groups provides a number of out-of-the-box enhancements in SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 which helps analyze common issues with relative ease. Attend this session to find out more about how the new enhancements can be leveraged to improve reliability, reduce manual effort and increase uptime. This session will also do a deep dive using demos of the new visualizations available for common scenarios leveraging the new diagnostic and supportability improvements that were added. As a bonus, we will show you new visualizations and data analysis techniques for common issues that you face in your Always On environments.

Session: Tune Your SQL Server Engine to Turbocharge its Performance
Speaker: Ajay Jagannathan, Suresh Kandoth
Session Code: DBA-332-M
Session Date: October 28th
Session Time: 8:00AM – 9:15AM PST
Level: 300
Duration: 75 minutes
Room: TCC Tahoma 1-2

What you can expect: Do you want to turbocharge your SQL Server? If so, then come to this session to learn about various configuration settings and advanced tuning parameters available in SQL Server. As hardware capabilities increase rapidly, choosing the proper configuration settings is extremely important to scale SQL Server for the required application workload throughput rates. In the last couple of years, SQL Server Escalation Team and Product Group have worked closely with many customers running Tier-1 mission critical workloads to scale their SQL Server with several configuration parameters and application patterns. In this session you will hear directly from experienced members of the Microsoft SQL Server product group and escalation team, about these specific learnings, configurations, and approaches for scaling SQL Server on the largest hardware systems available on the planet. You will be amazed to find out how you can extract more performance from SQL Server without changing your application code or design! If you use SQL Server, then this is definitely a session to understand how recent improvements can help turbo charge your database!