2005 PASS Community Summit - Day 1
Day 1 at the PASS Summit went off quite well. I initally wanted to attend a set of sessions based on my earlier browsings of the list, but in the end, I ended up attending a slightly different set. Here is a quick gist of what each session was all about.
Unlocking the Understanding of Locks in SQL Server 2005 and .NET (Aaron and Sukhdev)
Frankly, this session title was slightly misleading. When I read it the first time, I thought it was something to do with locking behavior with the new CLR integration of SQL Server, but when I went in, the session was about the new snapshot isolation mechansim of SQL Server 2005! However, the overall session was good and the demos were excellent (although they were shown a bit fast). The basic crux of the session was to explain the rationale behind the various types of locking in SQL Server and then providing scenarios of when to use what.
Future Directions in Data Language Integration (Alan Griver)
This was a very good session. It was an introduction to the new LINQ project of Microsoft. I had earlier blogged about LINQ and you can read more about this project from the link in that blog. Basically, LINQ is a mechanism for providing a standard query language over any enumerable object and this includes objects, data and XML. The session showed demos on each of these features and was very good.
Fine Tuning Performance with Plan Guides (Keith Elmore)
This was the best session that I liked in the day. I had heard about this feature, but never understood them nor played around with them. Put simply, plan guides are a mechanism whereby you can influence the behavior of the query optimizer by asking it to consider a different optimization plan based on "guides". There are new T-SQL procedures that allow you to create, control and drop plan guides. By creating a plan guide, you can then tell the optimizer to use the guide whenever it sees a particular type of query. There are different types of plan guides: SQL, OBJECT and TEMPLATE. Overall, it was very interesting to know about this feature and is a remainder for me to look for more.
Index Enhancements in SQL Server 2005 (Kalen Delaney)
This session was a whirlwind tour of the new enhancements in SQL Server 2005 for indexing. Some features that were demonstrated were the new DMVs for analyzing and understanding index usage, the concept of "included" indexes and also statistics for substrings (cool concept). Can't wait for Kalen's book on SQL Server 2005!