A great day at PASS Summit today.

I started out the day with the keynote presentation with some great info on PASS and the PASS volunteers, followed by Microsoft presenting  on in memory tables, and native compilation for stored procedures, described and demonstrated as “Wicked Fast”.

Next I attended a fabulous presentation from Erin Stellato on Extended Events, an improved replacement for the SQL profiler. I learned a few things that I will use regularly to troubleshoot performance issues.

After that Glenn Berry presented on using DMVs to diagnose performance problems. This was one of my favorite sessions for the day. Glenn did a great job presenting about 60 queries that can be used to track different performance and configuration problems on SQL Server.

During break I then had a chance to talk to the Microsoft SQL Server team to get a better understanding of the execution plans associated with recursive CTEs.  I will have to blog about this one later, but after talking with 4 different people from Microsoft, I have a better understanding of exactly what the execution plan shows for the recursive CTE.

The next session was on using table and row compression to speed up SQL Server. Using compression you can reduce the number of logical reads because the data is compressed and less pages are hit when running a query. This does however increase CPU load, but it looks to me like the small increase in CPU load would be worth it.

At the end of the day during the Exhibitor Reception I had my first book signing on the CTE book at the Joes2Pros booth. We had 30 books to give away, and when the book signing started, there were already 30 people in line to get a book. It was great to talk with people about what they are using CTEs for.

I also had a chance to meet Pinal Dave and talk with him for a bit.

Another great day at PASS Summit 13.

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