I'm leaving this Saturday for the Europe PASS Conference in Neuss, Germany. I have the following two sessions to present while at the conference:

1) Performance Toolset Workshop

This is day long pre-conference seminar on SQL Server Engine Performance. This session is all about the tools used by CSS to work on customer problems related to SQL Engine performance. This includes tools like Performance Dashboard Report, SQLDiag, SQLNexus, RML Utilities, and some interesting new perf tools in Windows Server 2008/Vista such as Resource Monitor.

While these are the tools of SQL Server 2005, I'll spend the last part part of the day talking about SQL Server 2008 including:

  • A New Activity Monitor for Management Studio
  • The Management Data Warehouse and Reports
  • Engine "Goodies" including new query hints, plan guide enhancements, and something called "query and plan fingerprint"
  • T-SQL Object Search and Debugging
  • Extended Events

2) Debugging SQL Server 2005 Toughest Problems

This is a talk I gave at last year's PASS Conference in Denver which include topics such as latches, access violations, memory internals, crashes, and odd wait_types.

I'll add more this time on SQL Server 2008 given where we are with the release including:

  • Extended Events
  • Preemptive Waits
  • Tempdb Checksum
  • New Memory DMVs
  • Powershell

If you don't happen to be traveling to Europe for the conference, have no fear. I'll be doing a regular series when I return from the conference on this blog on new supportability features coming out for SQL Server 2008 including these topics I have listed above. Look for these posts starting in late April/early May.

Bob Ward
Microsoft