PASS – Thursday

I decided to skip the keynote this morning and spend some time testing my presentation on the provided projector. Looks like it’ll be fine, we’ll see tomorrow.

The first session I attended was Bob’s level 500 session on debugging memory. He wasn’t joking that it was a level 500. It probably should have been more. It was absolutely excellent, as always.

The afternoon sessions started with another CAT presentation on performance troubleshooting, management data warehouse and extended events. Extended events were what I was most interested in. Bob briefly went over events in his usual high-speed style. the most intersting part was the system health check that’s included in 2008 and is on by default. Kinda an improvement over the default trace of 2005.

The events that caught my attention that the extende events can log are the deadlock (only in CU 1) that automatically logs the deadlock graph any time a deadlock occurs, the page split, which finally gives a way to see what pages are splitting and how often, and the checkpoint start and end events which will finally answer the question of how often checkpoints occur.

Lastly, I sat in on a session on spatical indexing. It’s interesting how the spatial indexing uses the underlying b-tree structure of SQL’s index architecture. The biggest problem seems to be that the optimiser doesn’t seem to cost spatical queries correctly in some cases, meaning hints are needed to get the queries running fast.