Today was another good day, full of good content as well as lots of networking opportunities. After the keynote session, I headed over to a talk about execution plan cache analysis. There was lots of good information presented regarding the new dynamic management views in SS2K5. Some cool tricks were shown as well, including how to get the execution plan out of a view in XML format, save it as a file with a .sqlplan extension, which will then open as a graphical plan. Another tip was that the minimum server memory should be set on the server in order to avoid having the server flush the cache too frequently.
After that talk, I headed over to the Women in Technology luncheon. It was a panel discussion that I found to be quite informative. For example, women love shoes. Good to know.
The next session was about DMV’s. I thought it would be wise to have a second opinion regarding DMV’s, and it was. Additional tips and tricks were shown, including the Dashboard reports as well as how to decipher the information returned from the DMV’s.
The next session I attended was with Peter Ward regarding the engineering skills that every DBA should have. Again, some good tips came from this, such as insert statements result in not just write activity, but read activity. That is something I know I had learned previously, but seemed to have forgotten. Perhaps it is because we have very little control over how the database servers are built in our shop.
