The session list has been published, and we’re excited to say all of us have been selected to speak at the PASS Summit again this year. Here’s our sessions:

Are Your Indexes Hurting You or Helping You? – Jes Schultz Borland – Queries need your help! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make great decisions about what indexes are best for your workload. In this session, we’ll review the difference between clustered and nonclustered indexes, show when to use included columns, understand what sargability means, and introduce statistics. You’ll leave this session with the ability to confidently determine why, or why not, SQL Server uses your indexes when executing queries.

Developers: Who Needs a DBA? – Brent Ozar – You store data in SQL Server, but you don’t have enough work to keep a full-time DBA busy. In just one session, you’ll learn the basics of performance troubleshooting, backup, index tuning, and security. Brent Ozar, recovering developer, will teach you the basic care and feeding of a Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2012, or 2014 instance and give you scripts to keep you out of trouble.

Dynamic SQL: Build Fast, Flexible Queries – Jeremiah Peschka – Dynamic SQL is a misunderstood and much maligned part of a DBA’s tool kit – it can be used to solve difficult business problems, respond to diverse data needs, and alleviate performance problems. Many DBAs reject dynamic SQL outright as a potential source of SQL injections, being poorly performing, or just for being a hacky solution in general. Not so! Jeremiah Peschka has been making extensive use of dynamic SQL throughout his career to solve a variety of problems. In this session, we’ll be dispelling these misconceptions and demonstrating how dynamic SQL can become a part of every DBA’s tool kit.

From Minutes to Milliseconds: High-Performance SSRS Tuning – Doug Lane – Even though you’re an experienced report developer or administrator, performance tuning for SQL Server Reporting Services still feels as bewildering and hopeless as folding a fitted bed sheet. You’ve made your data sets smaller and timeouts longer, but it’s not enough to remove the slowness dragging down your reporting environment. In this session, you’ll learn how design and configuration choices put pressure on your report server and techniques to relieve that pressure. You’ll see how to configure your Reporting Services databases for speed, streamline your subscription schedules, and use caching for high-demand reports. You’ll also learn some design strategies to lighten your report processing load. If you want to maximize the speed of your Reporting Services environment and minimize the pain of performance tuning, this session is for you.

Lightning Talk: Conquer CXPACKET and Master MAXDOP – Brent Ozar – CXPACKET waits don’t mean you should set MAXDOP = 1. Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will boil it all down and simplify CXPACKET to show you the real problem – and what you should do about it – in one quick 10-minute Lightning Talk.

Why Does SQL Server Keep Asking For This Index? – Kendra Little – SQL Server says you’d really benefit from an index, but you’d like to know why. Kendra Little will give you scripts to find which queries are asking for a specific missing index. You’ll learn to predict how a new index will change read patterns on the table, whether you need to add the exact index SQL Server is requesting, and how to measure performance improvements from your index changes. If you’re comfortable querying SQL Server’s missing index DMVs and looking at an execution plan here and there, this session is for you.

World’s Worst Performance Tuning Techniques – Kendra Little – Could one of your tricks for making queries faster be way off base? Kendra Little is a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server and a performance tuning consultant, which means she’s learned lots of lessons from her mistakes. In this session, you will learn how to stop obsessively updating or creating statistics, find alternatives to forcing an index, and deal with an addiction to ‘recompile’ hints.

Pre-Conference Session: psych! We didn’t get picked for an official pre-con this year (I know, right?) so we’re building our own lunar lander. Stay tuned – we’ll get things ironed out in the next week or two so you can make your official plans.