The annual SQLBits conference is April 22-25, and they just announced the session and speaker lineup.

This year’s theme is Cartoon – something I love deeply to begin with – and I decided to lean into that theme, big time. Here are my sessions:

Training Day: Dev-Prod Demon Hunters: Finding the Real Cause of Production Slowness – I work with a lot of development teams who really struggle with queries that work just fine in development, but then fall apart in production scenarios. We’ll cover how to quickly identify server & database differences that really matter (and which ones don’t), what kinds of execution plan icons won’t scale well as data size increases. I themed it with K-Pop Demon Hunters because I can’t stop singing Golden.

Regular Session: Pokémon Battle, Choose Your Index: You Can’t Have Them All – An all-demo session where you’ll have cards that have index definitions on them, and you’ll get a query onscreen. You have to decide which cards to play against each query, and find out which ones SQL Server chooses to play, to learn which indexes are super-effective.

Panel Discussion: 20 Years of the Cloud: What Changed, What Didn’t, and What’s Next – It’s hard to believe it’s been so long, and it’s a good point in time to stop and discuss. I’ll build a panel of your peers to share their thoughts and take your questions.

Regular Session: Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2025 – Ever wonder how someone else does it? In this all-demo session, I share a slow query (new each time that I give this popular session), and we talk through fix ideas and gauge their effectiveness.

Sound like fun? Register now for SQLBits before prices go up Feb 9. See you there!