OPASS May Meeting Recap

OPASS had it’s May meeting on Thursday the 6th sponsored by Confio with Dean Richards presenting Tuna Helper for the SQL DBA, an overview of a performance tuning methodology.

We had a good turnout with 25 attendees, it seems performance tuning is a popular topic among the Orlando area SQL community.

We started the meeting with announcements which included SQLSaturday #38 – Jacksonville (May 8th), 24 Hours of PASS: Celebrating SQL Server R2 (OPASS is hosting the 10AM EDT Session), upcoming Virtual Chapter Events, and our upcoming schedule.

Next up was Andy Warren (@sqlandy) with an update on SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando and showing some changes to the SQLSaturday site including the Twitter feed on the home page of each event and the new networking page for those who have Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts.  He also asked about having all the attendees do this at lunch:

Cha Cha Slide

Then David Waugh of Confio took a few minutes to talk a bit about Confio and their performance monitoring product Ignite8.  Then we broke for pizza and some chat before the main presentation.

Dean did a good job going over the basics of his perfomance tuning methods which involve three steps:

1. Identify – make sure you know why the process is running because sometimes the best way to tune is to eliminate an unnecessary process.
2. Gather – metrics on the identified processes.  You can’t know if you’ve improved anything if you don’t have something to compare it to.
3. Tune – make and test changes.  Dean recommended SQL Diagramming as a technique.  See www.singingsql.com for more information.

We then did our raffle with Confio providing some thumb drives and a single instance license for their Ignite8 monitoring product (an $1800 value).  Then we raffled the rest of our stuff, an Azure hat and T-shirt, Office 2007 Standard, an XBOX racing game, and a copy of the Windows 7 Pocket Administrator’s Consultant.

As usual we had some good discussion afterwards.  I spoke with Tim McAlily about TFS 2010 and then Dan, Kendal, and Andy about OPASS, starting a south Orlando user group, and PASS, especially about how PASS can become more relevant to the everyday lives of SQL Server professionals.

I know I say this every month, but I am always energized and recharged by the OPASS meeting.  This is why I recommend user group meetings to everyone I meet.