My First Course is now Available

I am proud to announce that my first course: Tuning – Diagnosing and Fixing Hard Problems is now available. This is the first in what I expect to be a series of 5 courses that I am developing to share my knowledge with the field (for a price this time).

You can find details of the course on my Courses Page.

Implementing Message Queues in Relational Databases

At the last SQL Bits X I held the FusionIO fireside chat during the launch party. During this presentation, I demonstrated how it is possible to build a table structure inside a relational engine that will act is a message queue and deliver nearly 100K messages/second.

Thread Synchronization in SQL Server

Any code optimized for highly concurrent workloads must worry about thread synchronization. SQL Server is no exception, because in a database system, synchronization is one of the core functionalities you rely on the engine to provide (the noSQL crowd may ponder that a bit). In this blog post, I will describe the synchronization primitives, like locks, latches and spinlocks, used by SQL Server to coordinate access to memory regions between threads.

Latch and Spinlock Papers Published on Microsoft

I am happy to announce that my team mates, Ewan Fairweather and Mike Ruthruff have published two excellent whitepapers on latch and spinlock diagnosis. You can find them here:

• SQL Server latch Contention
• SQL Server Spinlock Contention

Pay special attention to the spinlock scripts, you will find an interesting trace flag in there that sheds more light on my intentionally vague dodging of the call stack subject in my blog entry here. I am sorry that I did not provide more details in the blog, but I did not want to give the plot away

I am very proud to have Ewan take over the OLTP tuning on the SQLCAT  team here in EMEA. Buy this guy a drink next time you meet him at a conference and have a chat with him about scalability.