Conferences and Classes

If you don’t get smarter soon, it’s your own damn fault. Oh sure, I’m running a Black Friday sale, but even if you’re as broke as SSMS’s live query plans, you can still afford this free stuff I’m doing: Weds-Thurs: Quest Empower 2021 – free conference, and I’ve got a session with Pinal Dave on…

At a conference in Belgium this week, Steve Jones posted a video: A real conference experience. Excellent crowd at @datamindsbe pic.twitter.com/TGZmw5PdmC — way0utwest ?? (He/Him/His) (@way0utwest) October 11, 2021 My first reaction was, “That’s an awful lot of people in really close proximity, talking loudly at each other, and none of them are wearing masks.”…

This fall, I’m going to teach you the fundamentals of Microsoft database performance tuning, live, for free. The first class is my How to Think Like the Engine class. It’s already free online in both video and blog post formats, but this fall I’m updating and expanding it to a 3-hour version. You could totally…

With PASS shutting down, it’s time to think about what the community builds in its place. There are a lot of efforts going towards building replacements for PASS, including Microsoft’s own efforts. Because these efforts are often led by active community volunteers, they’re very well in touch with what event organizers, sponsors, and speakers want…

I can smell your parameters from here You swear nothing has changed, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, queries that used to be fast are suddenly slow. Even weirder, you take the slow query from the application, run it in SSMS, and it’s totally fast! What’s going on? You restart SQL Server or…

You’ve been using Microsoft SQL Server for a few years, and it’s becoming increasingly important to your job. You can write a query, but… You feel like something’s missing. You attended a few local user groups or meetups before the quarantines hit, but you were disappointed at how scattered the sessions were. The material was…

The robots are really just people wearing metallic masks. You’ve been hearing about all these robots that are coming to take your job. They’re going to automate all the performance tuning and make your life way easier, right? Or harder, I guess…since you’ll be looking for a job. Thing is, most of that is just…

Lots of paid conferences are happening online these days, so some of you will be presenting an online session or pre-con for the first time. I’ve done a bunch of these and been burned in a bunch of ways, so lemme save you some time and heartache. Does the conference own the recordings? And if…

With my Live Class Season Pass, students have the ability to attend as many of my live online classes as they want for an entire year straight, plus they can view the instant replay recordings whenever they want. Doug Lowing, one of the students, shared with me how he gets the most out of his:…

If you’ve got a Recorded Class Season Pass or Live Class Season Pass, time to get your learn on: yesterday’s Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing class recordings are now available in your account here. As a reminder, here’s the class abstract: Sometimes the exact same query goes slow out of nowhere. Your current fix is to…