Tampa Bay SQL Server User Group Recap 10/13

I know this is a bit late but you know what they say, better late than never! This month’s meeting was quite exciting as we had a big-name speaker come in. This month we had Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter) of Quest Software come in and speak to us about Disk I/O Tuning on SQL Server.

Typically our meetings kick off with announcements and general discussion but because we had Kevin this month (he was in town for SQLSaturday #21) we let Kevin have as much time as possible so we skipped our normal routine and got right to it! First off Kevin is a fantastic speaker and has a real easy-going presentation style which I really enjoyed. Many times during the presentation felt more like a dialogue as he engaged the audience on many topics. One of the great things about a speaker engaging the audience as such is that more nuggets of information can come out that sometimes even the presenter wasn’t aware of. For instance during one exchange between Kevin and Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter) something came up (pardon me for taking horrible notes and not remembering exactly what it was!) but it was something new to Kevin. The meat of the presentation (Slide deck can be found here) was geared much towards explaining the different RAID types and their respective benefits within a SQL Server implementation. Other great disk information such as partition alignment (which you DEFINITELY want to do as it nets you up to 30-40% performance gain!), which perfmon counters you should focus on to baseline/monitor your disk performance, SQL file configurations (i.e. multiple data files), SAN tips/tricks/gotchas, and more. One really cool tidbit that Kevin shared with us, in regards to seeing real-world performance examples, is the online MMORPG EVE Online is actually back-ended with SQL Servers all on solid state drives (SSD)! How cool is that? Here’s an article on it and how they benefitted from using this technology.

Overall it was a great meeting and a huge “thank you” to Kevin for speaking at our group this month! If you ever get the chance to catch a Kevin Kline presentation I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re going to PASS Summit this year Kevin will be presenting The Ultimate Free SQL Server Toolkit (Database Administration) as well as Team Management Crash Course (Professional Development). If the Team Management one is the same presentation as the one he gave during the 24 Hours of SQL PASS event I HIGHLY recommend you attend that one as there are some great bits of information in there!

Next month on November 17th our presenter will be Jonathan Kehayias presenting Understanding SQL Server Memory Management. Visit the user group website and register to attend.