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Friday 2/26 – SQL Server Performance Tuning for Race Car Drivers
Nashville, TN and LiveMeeting

Times are tough even for the best drivers: Helio Castroneves is dancing for money and Danica Patrick is doing ads for what appears to be an adult services company.  Maybe it’s time to switch careers, and Brent has just the thing.  Use your hard-earned knowledge of high speeds, million-dollar hardware and surviving disastrous crashes to become a SQL Server performance tuner!

In this session, Brent will show you:

• Why Colin Chapman would check for indexes before adding new ones
• The importance of well-tested safety gear to performance tuning
• Why not monitoring your servers is like overdriving your headlights
• Just like races are lost in the pits, uptime records are lost during maintenance windows

Click here to launch the LiveMeeting at noon Central.  Audio will come through your computer speakers.

March 3rd: All-Day Free Virtual Event
Performance Tuning & Troubleshooting with DMVs

We’re doing an all-day live virtual conference on how to use dynamic management views (DMVs) to do SQL Server performance tuning and troubleshooting. The whole thing will be broadcast live in 720p, and we’ll be taking questions via chat and Twitter. We’re going to have sessions at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels taught by:

• Kevin Kline (Blog – Twitter) – Microsoft MVP since 2004, author of SQL in a Nutshell, founding board member of the Professional Association for SQL Server, and all around good guy.
• Ari Weil (Blog – Twitter) – Product Manager for Quest’s performance products, and knows way more about waits, performance tuning, and SQL Server architecture than anybody should.
• Brent Ozar (Blog – Twitter) – your humble author. Okay, well, author anyway.

Register now and just for registering, you’ll be entered into a contest for free goodies!

April 17 – SQLSaturday Chicago

SQLSaturday is a free day-long event with all kinds of community speakers. I’m excited to say I’ve applied to be one of the speakers! Kevin Kline and I will be doing the keynote, and I’m doing two other sessions:

BLITZ! 60 Minute Server Takeovers

You’re minding your own business in your corner office – well, no, you’re a DBA, so it’s just your cubicle – when somebody says, “Did you know about this SQL Server over here?” Suddenly, you have to find out what the server’s doing, how it was set up, and whether things are working correctly.

In this all-demo session, Brent will take over a SQL Server and show you:

• How to quickly assess a server’s health using a set of scripts
• How to catch dangerous development issues that will haunt you later
• How to quickly put some basic measures into place to minimize your risk

Perfmon and Profiler 101

These two tools are the key to successful performance tuning. I’ll show you how to get started with these tools, how to slice and dice the results, and even how to data mine the results to look for interesting trends. Whether you like to monitor performance with native tools or third party utilities, knowing how the native tools work will help you get better results out of your tools.

Attendees will learn:

• Why Perfmon is like a Nissan GT-R’s dashboard
• What Perfmon counters to measure, and what they mean
• Four common performance symptoms and how to cure the problems