I’m so excited to see everybody again at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle on November 14-18.

Here’s the crazy part: I’m not going to attend a single session. Not one. (Well, except the ones I’m teaching, and the keynotes.)

Instead, I’m gonna spend every single conference hour hanging out in the Community Zone, talking to people in the hallways, and catching up with people that I haven’t seen for a couple of years. People like you.

Weird, right? Especially since this is a release year for SQL Server 2022, and there are probably gonna be a lot of good sessions from Microsoft. You know what? I don’t care. I don’t. I’ll watch the recordings and read the slide decks later. When I’m in Seattle, I’m gonna have the experience that I missed so much.

I wanna see y’all again, hear what you’ve been up to, take pictures with each other.

If you can’t come in person, it’s also a hybrid event: you can either attend in-person in Seattle, or online via live streaming. If you attend online, PASS is recording the live stream, and you’ll be able to re-watch it during the week of the conference. This is super helpful for folks who have an emergency at work, have to drop off the call, and want to be able to catch up on what they’ve missed.

Here are my sessions.

Pre-Conference Workshop: Mastering Parameter Sniffing – You’re a database developer or DBA with at least 5 years experience performance tuning queries and indexes. You already know you have parameter sniffing issues, and now you need to figure out how to fix it. In this one-day class, you’ll learn how to reduce the blast radius with index changes, query tuning, and database-level settings. You’ll also see firsthand how SQL Server 2017, 2019, and 2022 try to reduce it with adaptive joins, adaptive memory grants, automatic tuning, and caching multiple plans. Attendees will also get one year access to the full 3-day Mastering Parameter Sniffing recordings, too! That’s a $395 value, and it’s free with your workshop admission. (You’ll get the access in class.)

Everything You Know About Parallelism Is Wrong. Just because you see parallelism icons on execution plans doesn’t mean the query went parallel. SQL Server doesn’t load-balance work across CPU cores. CXPACKET isn’t a problem you fix by changing MAXDOP. Hell, even the term “MAXDOP” doesn’t mean what people think it means. It’s not that SQL Server’s parallelism is bad, it’s just not what you think it is.

Fragmentation Explained in 10 Minutes. Short, fast-paced lightning talks require difficult choices for presenters. If things go even the slightest bit off the rails, you are completely screwed. You have to viciously edit down your material to get the right points across, and no more than that. Then, you have to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse to get the timing right. The last lightning talk I did at PASS, I was wearing a Bob Dylan costume, a wig, and a harmonica. This year, no costumes – just aiming for ambitious delivery.

Register now. Let’s hang out. I miss you.

That just got weird, and I don’t even care.