Speaking at European PASS 2009….

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I’m leaving this weekend to travel to Europe to speak at the European PASS 2009 Conference in Neuss, Germany. I spoke at this conference last year and was very impressed on how it was organized and run. From a speaker perspective, the setup of the conference was very excellent. One of the best I’ve seen. Having also been a speaker at the US Summit for the past several years, there is a distinct difference between the conferences, mostly in number of attendees. But this smaller size conference has some advantages and mostly it is a great way to connect with people in a more 1:1 fashion.

I have two talks to give this year:

1) A pre-conference seminar titled “SQL Server 2008 Engine Performance and Advanced Diagnostics”.

This is the same talk Keith Elmore and I delivered at the US Summit in a precon. This time I’m flying solo. Of course, the great advantage here is I’ve been able to tune it and make a few tweaks based on how the US talk went.  In this talk I’ll cover just about every tool and feature we have in the SQL Engine in SQL Server 2008 to diagnose performance and advanced problems (MDW, DMVs, XEvent, RML Utilities). But I’ll also share how I use tools that are for Windows Server (Resource Monitor, xperf, Process Explorer, Process Monitor,…) as part of this talk. It’s an entire day and it will be exhausting but if you come I guarantee it will be comprehensive.

2) A main talk called “Debugging the Memory of SQL Server 2008”

This is also a talk I delivered at the US conference last November. Again, a good chance for me to make a few changes based on feedback from the US audience. At the US conference, we “level” talks based on their complexity. I was one of two 500 talks (I guess the highest level) at the US conference. I think one of the highest compliments I received on my talk last year was that it was really a “600 level talk”. I like that. So I am tuning it a bit, but not to water it down. It may still be a 600 level talk but that is exactly what the folks at PASS said they liked and wanted from my talks.

I have a stop first in London to see our CSS team in the UK for a day and then I’ll be at the conference to speak for the precon. Very much looking forward to it again. I’ll post something after the conference as as follow-up to how the proceedings went.

 

Bob Ward
Microsoft