Dmitry Frenkel

While the concepts of Continuous Integration have been used in the software development process for decades, the term itself and the formalization of the practices have been matured under the Rapid Development (RAD) and Extreme Programming (XP) movements and methodologies. In this presentation, my colleagues and I describe an innovative solution for versioning databases and applying those changes to a running database as part of the continuous integration philosophy. This approach, based on the simple idea of scripting database objects, allows product teams to mitigate complications during product deployments as well as to keep database schema in step with dependent code. All this is done with minimal human involvement, using automated processes.

Traditionally, it has been responsibility of database administrators to work with developers in order to make sure that SQL Server solutions they develop meet quality requirements in the performance area. However, ever increasing complexity of business solutions we are asked to deliver require developers to constantly acquire new skills and knowledge. Knowing about how to optimize SQL Server performance is, without a doubt, one of those skills. In this presentation, I introduce the audience to internals of the SQL Server architecture - optimization process, query execution plans, indices, statistics and their usage. During the course of the presentation, I demonstrate simple but effective techniques that can be used in most of the SQL based solutions and generally increase query performance.