See you in Charlotte!

Well it is that time of year again where the results of the PASS Summit 2013 session selections become public. This year was of course a very difficult one to get selected since (I believe) a record number of submissions were received -but thankfully I still managed to knock one session (out of four) into the back of the net. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the other selected Speakers (especially if this is your first time at the Summit) and commiserations to all those who were not successful on this occasion. I know the usual inquests and finger pointing will naturally ensue by a small handful of people who feel personally aggrieved that they weren’t successful, but believe me when I say that the process is as fair as I could expect, but not without room for improvement (more on this very soon in a follow up post).

Essentially you should take heart in the fact that whilst the selected schedule *might* have been better by your inclusion (yes we know you are awesome and have written a gazillion books and are a respected MVP/ MCM and Certified Guru), but at least someone else will get the opportunity to shine (and hopefully be awesome too). Ultimately (in my opinion) the Summit is about a team effort so we should be nothing but pleased for them and take our failures in good grace.

The Summit 2013 marks my third year at the biggest SQL Server Conference in the World as a speaker in any capacity, my second appearance giving a regular session and is the third regular session in total that I will have presented there (I gave two last year). It will also be my fourth as an attendee. I have been very grateful to have presented two lightning talks in total at the last two Conferences and I am always very humbled to get chosen in any capacity and grateful to the people who make this happen. I would also like to give a very quick shout out to my good friend Niko Neugebauer who I was hoping to co-present a Personal Development session with. Unfortunately this session was not chosen which is a big loss for the Summit in my humble opinion since (for me at least) Niko oozes #awesomesauce and I think our session would have ROCKED! Still perhaps another time and I keep my fingers eternally crossed that Niko (blog|twitter) is successful at next years Summit if not sooner. If anyone deserves payback for all his HARD community efforts and major recognition for his abilities, he is your man!

I shall be presenting on one of my favorite subjects -SQL Server Concurrency. Those of you who follow me a little closer than is healthy will already be aware, last year I presented a session titled “READPAST & Furious: Transactions, Locking, and Isolation (DBA-309)” which focussed on some of SQL Server’s crazy behaviors and concurrency basics. My session this year is called “Lock, Block and Two Smoking Barrels – SQL Server Concurrency” and will follow along similar lines looking at even more SQL Server crazy behaviors but focus in a little bit more depth on transactional processing theory and contrast SQL Server’s Pessimistic and Optimistic isolation levels and how they may help/ hinder/ make no difference to the concurrency of your environment. The “Two Smoking Barrels” referred to in the title is of course a direct reference to SNAPSHOT Isolation Level and READ COMMITTED Snapshot Isolation -the optimistic implementation of READ COMMITTED Isolation Level. Yes we are sure to focus more on these two optimistic bad boys. I hope you can manage to come to my session, I think we will have a blast!

If you are interested, the following is the session abstract:-

SQL Server is a high performance relational engine and provides a highly scalable database platform but due to its complexity and bad programming practices can be prone to serious concurrency problems, unexpected behaviors, lost updates and much more!
In SQL Server 2005, two optimistic concurrency mechanisms were introduced and touted as the solution to all our problems. Now in SQL Server 2012 (and beyond) even more have followed, but many challenges and problems still remain.

Let’s take a long look into the world of SQL Server concurrency and investigate Pessimistic and Optimistic isolation understanding how they work, when you should use them, and more importantly when they can go very wrong.

Don’t be staring down the wrong end of SQL Server’s two Smoking Barrels and join me for this revealing and thought provoking presentation.