When I deliver my performance tuning recommendations to my clients, I want them to be able to go back to my findings again and again over time, learning more each time they read. One of my favorite tools to help their journey is a list of recommended reading material.
I rarely give out links to whitepapers because they’re, uh, boring. Really boring. I won’t ask my clients to read something I hate reading.
Instead, I put a slide like this in my presentation to the client’s DBAs and developers:
When this slide comes up, I say:
“During our performance tuning work, we came across a lot of issues with how to read execution plans and why your queries aren’t performing as fast as you’d like. The biggest challenge in your environment was SQL Server’s inability to use your indexes to satisfy your queries – a concept called SARGability. It’s a big topic, and you’re going to want to learn more about this over time. These are the blogs and speakers I’d recommend that you check out to learn more.”
I even recommend that my clients contact bloggers directly if they’ve got questions about a particular post. I explain to them that bloggers WANT to help the community, and that’s why they blog.
I hope I’m getting you more exposure to the right people – the kind of people who are willing to pay money to get access to what’s in your head. I do that because I want to reward bloggers for sharing, and because there’s plenty of work to go around. It shows my clients that I want to give them the best possible advice at the lowest cost, and that I want to open their eyes to the SQL Server community. This community is just fantastic, and it keeps getting better.
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Awesome post, Brent! I do believe that bloggers and specialists should share their knowledge any way they can. Also, it is great that you and other presenters always link to additional information provided by other bloggers. Props for that!
You wondered why SQL community wants to help. It’s interesting that I posted something with almost the exact same sentiment just a few minutes before this post. I’ll repeat it here:
“My guess is that knowing they’ve helped someone out is a great feeling. (Altruism FTW!)”
Funny timing on reading this. I was just doing some wrap up meetings during my last week at the job today. I was doing a down and dirty walk through of performance tuning techniques, performance counters, etc. for some performance testers on a team I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to interact with. They were all taking occasional notes but all pencils were moving when I spelled out brentozar.com and the title of a certain book that actually describes RML utilities as well as Perfmon counters and a ton more. 🙂
No worries – you can even give them my email address if you like!