Full day PreCon Practical Performance Analysis in Melbourne at Asia & Australia Tour 2018

As it has almost become a habit by now for me, I will be touring Asia this summer. This year not only Asia, but for the first time also Australia. (There, however, is winter, which sometimes leads to funny confusion in agreements until you get used to this.) 1st stop: Singapore – Azure SQL Database […]

Optimal Cluster sizes for SQL Server on SSDs – are 64K still important?

Lately, with the advance of SSDs, more and more administrators are wondering: Is the old rule to use a 64K Cluster size (aka “File Allocation Unit size”) for SQL Server still applicable on today’s hard drives, especially SSDs or even Flash? And: Does it apply to all RAID-types equally? This summer I took some time […]

Optimizing workflows with In-Memory and Natively Compiled Objects – or how it does not work

During the course of optimizing data-access-code with the In-Memory-functionalities in Microsoft SQL Server (memory optimized tables + indexes, memory optimized table valued parameters and natively compiled stored procedures), you may often realize that sometimes you go one step forward and then another one backwards.

Where is that Preemptive Wait coming from?

In this article I will bring together several techniques for troubleshooting a performance- and security-related “phenomenon” I recently noticed when doing some tests with Natively Compiled Stored Procedures.

Sessions submitted for major conferences 2016. Topics: Security – Performance – In-Memory

After the great success of the German SQLKonferenz in February, where I had the honor of presenting the new security features of SQL Server 2016 together with Joachim Hammer, the Program Manager of the security teams of the relational SQL Engines at Microsoft in Redmond (more info), I finally found time to go about the […]

SQL Server in Microsoft Azure: How to gain performance by flexibility and save costs at the same time

This is the first time that I am tackling Microsoft Azure in an article. (Microsoft.com: What is Microsoft Azure?) A plethora of services is provided by Microsoft Azure by now, of which the hosting of virtual machines running on an SQL Server service is one. This is what we call IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

PreCon Performance Analysis & Tuning Techniques at SQLSaturday in Istanbul

What a year: after as many as 3 SQLSaturdays (Denmark, Netherlands, Germany) behind me, I will now also speak at SQSaturday #258 in Istanbul, Turkey. And after my first PreCon this year at the SQLSaturday in Germany, which I was co-presenting together with Mladen Prajdić, on the part “XEvents”, I will now be giving a […]

Performance overhead of tracing with Extended Event targets vs SQL Trace under CPU Load

Inspired by the Blog Post “Measuring Observer Overhead of SQL Trace vs. Extended Events” by Jonathan Kehayias, I was curious to do some more benchmarking. I have already presented the results in my SQL Server Master-Class workshops on XEvents as well as at the PreCon of the SQLSaturday #230. Now I am finally sharing them […]

Locking & READONLY Filegroups vs READONLY Databases

The Topic Locking and Read-Only for filegroups and databases is one of the ongoing myths around SQL Server in forums – and at least half of the information unfortunately wrong. Since I recently fell into the trap myself, I want to write down, how it really is. To have a definite picture, I made 3 […]