This week I’m on vacation with my family in sunny Orlando. As luck would have it, the SQLSaturday powers-that-be scheduled SQLSaturday #85 here in Orlando this weekend. I submitted a few sessions and had one selected! If you want to learn about statistics, I would love to see you at my session, “You’re My Density: Making Sense of Statistics.” It’s in the first time slot at 8:30 AM, and I’m really looking forward to speaking. I gave this presentation last week at SQLSaturday #84 in Kalamazoo and had great feedback. I love SQL Server statistics and have really found my groove with this session. If you’re new to SQL Server, or haven’t worked with statistics very much, this is a good session that explains the basics of statistics: how to view them, how to make sense of the stats blob, how they’re updated and so on.
If you don’t attend, feel free to stop by before or after to say hi if we haven’t met! I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of new people; this is my first SQLSaturday south of the Mason-Dixon line. And if you can’t make this event, I’m presenting this same topic in Portland, Oregon on October 8 at SQLSaturday #92 (my first SQLSaturday west of the Continental Divide). See you soon!
Erin’s session was indeed awesome at SQL Saturday #84, as we got to watch her troubleshoot an issue with statistics live!! Turns out it was an interesting artifact of having auto update stats off. I won’t spoil it in case she wants to do a blog post on it, but it was neat.
I mentioned, incorrectly, at the session about a change in the way Auto Update stats will work in Denali. Turns out it’s actually a new feature of R2 SP1, a trace flag you can turn on to change when SQL will decide to update stats on larger tables. You can read about it here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saponsqlserver/archive/2011/09/07/changes-to-automatic-update-statistics-in-sql-server-traceflag-2371.aspx
Many thanks to BrentOzarPLF for pointing me to this article, and a big round of applause for Erin for her awesome presentation on this topic!
Thank you for the feedback Joe! I am glad you attended and really appreciate your follow up. Very interesting article, I will make sure to mention that tomorrow. So much good stuff out there on statistics 🙂
Erin
p.s. I couldn’t get the plan to drop from cache after turning auto update stats on. Something weird going on, haven’t had time to try and figure it out due to vacation, but I will and then I will write that post!