OMG, I was asked to speak at SQLteach.com - by Paul Neilsen

Mister/Master of SQL Server himself, author of many versions of the SQL Server Bible (SQLserverBible.com) was talking to us today at SQLteach here in Montreal. One of his top ten favorite new features in SQL 2008 are the Management Studio enhancements - which lead me to open my yap a little too much about Activity Monitor (right click on a server in object explorer to select AM), so much so that he invited me to come up and give an explanation of why I like it so much (I'll follow up on that in a future post). Basically, I explained how you can view real-time critical SQL Server performance details and even sort by worst-performing queries. Then, for the worst performing queries, right-clicking gives you the option to view the actual offending code - so that you can get to optimising right away! Furthermore, the Activity Monitor really takes advantage of all the dynamic management view data - to think only months ago in SQL 2005 production I had all this loaded on several sheets in Excel dynamically to understand what really was going on...now all built-in. I would suggest upgrading to SQL 2008 for just this practically.


Thanks again to Jean-René Roy for organising a great week-long event - never had a chance to meet so many MVPs, such as Brad McGehee and Paul Nielsen, in the photo to the right with local DBAs Paolo de Rosa and Pollus Brodeur. Also had lunch/dinner/beers with Adam Machanic, Scott Stauffer, Roman Rehak, Itzik Ben-Gan all in one week! Actually, to be honest, it felt like a DBA therapy session at times :)