Event Type 2: IT Tage

SQL Server can execute queries in parallel which can sometimes improve the performance of your queries. However, parallelism has its own challenges; therefore, we will look at the concept of parallel executions to understand when it makes sense to run a query on more than one thread. We deal with topics such as CXPacket, threads, workers, execution context, branches, MAXDOP, Cost threshold for parallelism, NUMA nodes and the iterators that SQL Server can implement in the execution plan to enable parallelism.

In this session you will learn how SQL Server physically stores data in pages and how they are managed by the IAM, PFS, GAM, SGAM pages and extents. We look into partitions and allocation units and compare the various page types, such as in-row, row overflow and LOB pages. We will also dump a data page to analyze the page header and translate the payload with the FixedVarFormat.