2005 PASS Community Summit - Day 3
Using Execution Plans for Performance Optimizations in SQL Server 2005 (Alex Cheng)
This was a cool session with a lot of tips and tricks on the performance aspects. Alex showed us various scenarios of poorly performing queries and how to debug them using the execution plan and locate the bottleneck and how to get over the issues.
The 15 Need-to-know Points about XML (Kent Tegels)
This was an interesting session about the top 15 things that everyone needs to know about the new XML capabilities of SQL Server 2005. The session focus on what XML is and what XML is not and what to do for various usage scenarios. The session did not have demos, but packed a lot of useful tips. At the end of the session, I got some time with Kent to discuss his CLR code for validating XML using schemas that are not directly supported in SQL Server 2005. Really cool code...
XQuery Deep Dive (Michael Rys)
I really liked this session. Although I had listened to Michael Rys's webcast on a similar topic earlier, I did not fully grasp that webcast until I sat on this presentation. The session took us into the workings of XQuery and how the SQL Server optimizer works with XML data. Of particular interest to me was the Node table concept and how SQL Server really materializes the XML content into a relational structure that is them optimized by the same world-class optimizer. The demos were also very cool. Overall, a fantastic session.