Are you mystified by SQL Server performance? Do you wonder why sometimes your SQL statements runs fast but other times, they run painfully slow? Do you wish there was a pragmatic set of steps you could go through to troubleshoot performance problems that didn't require you to have a PhD in database internals? If so, this talk is for you.

In this talk, I'll describe database performance from a developer's point of view. I'll show how you can accurately measure the performance of any SQL statement, how to understand what the statement is doing when it runs and what you can do to improve this performance. I'll show how the right database indexes help SQL Server locate the data your application needs very efficiently and what you need to know to create effective indexes for your application. Finally, I'll discuss how you can use built in capabilities in SQL Server to find your worst performing statements and tables that are missing indexes so you can quickly find and solve your biggest performance bottlenecks. At the end of this talk, you will no longer regard database performance as black magic, but instead be able to confidently analyze and solve any performance problems you encounter.

We all use SQL Server every day in our jobs, so it pays to know what SQL Server can do for us that will make our jobs easier. This talk will introduce you to some key features of SQL Server that you might not know about but will definitely want to use once you learn about them. First, we’ll discuss temporal tables, which provide a convenient way to track all of the changes made to data in a table. Second, we’ll talk about the JSON support built into SQL Server 2016 and what capabilities it provides us. Third, we’ll cover some advanced SQL constructs like the MERGE statement and Common Table Expressions that can make the SQL you write simpler. And finally, we’ll wrap up by talking about the windowing functions in SQL Server, which provide powerful analytic capabilities to our SQL Statements.

After this talk, you will better appreciate some of the rich functionality built into SQL Server and understand how to use these capabilities to make your job easier.