My SQLBits Attendee feedback

A few weeks ago, I got my SQLBits attendee feedback, and therefore I want to talk about it today. As you might know I have presented 2 sessions in Telford: one about Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures, and another one about the Dangerous Beauty of Bookmark Lookups.

Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures

Let’s have a look at the first session about Latches, Spinlocks, and Lock Free Data Structures. This will be – BTW – the same session that I will present at the SQLPASS Summit in Seattle in a few weeks. In this session I start by talking about thread synchronization mechanisms, and how SQL Server implements these mechanisms with Latches. To give you a more concrete idea about Latches, I also talk about the Last Page Insert Latch Contention that can occur on a Clustered Index. The following picture shows the feedback score of this session.

Session Feedback

Not that bad ☺. I delivered this session at SQLBits for the first time in public, so I’m really happy that it worked out very well, and that attendees liked it. It’s always a gamble whether people like a session, or not. I also want to share a few feedback comments from my attendees:

“For the sessions I attended, this was the stand out one. Delivered by Klaus who is a master at speaking/training. Good pace, subtle humour thoroughly loved the session.“

“Great really detailed session from Klaus. I was surprised it was a little bit quiet – I’m sure Klaus packed out a room double the size in Liverpool a few years ago / possibly too specialist for most, but I enjoyed it.“

I also thought the same about my session, when I was finished. I had quite a large room, but the room was only half full. It’s quite an in-depth session (around level 400 – 500), maybe this has scared away some people from attending it. But trust me: I don’t bite! Let’s see how this works in Seattle, because there I also have a large room for my session.

The Dangerous Beauty of Bookmark Lookups

I have lost count of how often I have already delivered this session. I know this session inside out, and I could almost deliver it if you woke me up in the middle of the night. In the first step of this session I will always give an introduction to Bookmark Lookups, why they are needed in SQL Server, and how you can resolve them by providing a Covering Non-Clustered Index for your problematic query. And based on that foundation I go afterwards into the nasty details of Bookmark Lookups, and show several scenarios where they can lead to serious performance problems. I talk here about the so-called Tipping Point in SQL Server, for quite a long time about Parameter Sniffing, and finally about Bookmark Lookup Deadlocks, which always scares people. The following picture shows again the feedback score of this session.

Session Feedback

It’s still quite a good result, but not as good as the previous session. Based on the feedback comments I have seen that some people thought that the session is DBA centric, but this isn’t the case. It’s a developer oriented session. Based on that great input I will rework my session abstract a little bit, so that people immediately know what they wil be getting when they attend this session. Here are some feedback comments:

”Great session, but not technical enough for DBAs; I guess this was more aimed at Developers.”

”Klaus you are a legend!!!! I loved this session!!!! The best of SQLBits!!!!”

The last comment really makes me feeling proud ☺. I always like it when I can share my passion around SQL Server with my attendees.

Thanks for your time,

-Klaus

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *