22-25 April 2026 
Better Performance Through Parallelism
2015TL; DR
This full-day seminar will teach you the ins and outs of Windows scheduler internals, SQLOS, intra-query parallelism, and patterns that can make your parallel queries many times faster. After attending you will be in full control of your CPUs.
Session Details
Today's server hardware ships with a truly massive amount of CPU power. And while SQL Server is designed to automatically and seamlessly take advantage of available processing resources, there are a number of options, settings, and patterns that can be exploited to optimize parallel processing of your data.
This full-day seminar starts with an overview of CPU scheduler internals from the perspective of both Windows and the SQL Server Operating System (SQLOS). Next, you will learn about intra-query parallelism, the method that SQL Server uses to break up large tasks into many smaller pieces, so that each piece can be processed simultaneously. You will come to understand how to read parallel query plans and how to interpret parallel wait statistics, as well as best practices for the various parallelism settings within SQL Server. Finally, you will be introduced to techniques for exploiting parallelism at the query level: patterns that can help the optimizer do a better job of parallelizing your query.
After attending this seminar, you will be in full control of your CPUs, able to compel your server to use every clock tick to your end users' advantage.
This full-day seminar starts with an overview of CPU scheduler internals from the perspective of both Windows and the SQL Server Operating System (SQLOS). Next, you will learn about intra-query parallelism, the method that SQL Server uses to break up large tasks into many smaller pieces, so that each piece can be processed simultaneously. You will come to understand how to read parallel query plans and how to interpret parallel wait statistics, as well as best practices for the various parallelism settings within SQL Server. Finally, you will be introduced to techniques for exploiting parallelism at the query level: patterns that can help the optimizer do a better job of parallelizing your query.
After attending this seminar, you will be in full control of your CPUs, able to compel your server to use every clock tick to your end users' advantage.
3 things you'll get out of this session
Speakers
Adam Machanic's previous sessions
Query Tuning Mastery: Clash of the Row Goals
Attend this session to learn how to take charge of optimization, expertly mold your query plans, and gain a new set of tools for eliminating bottlenecks in even your most complex problem queries.
Query Tuning Mastery: The Art of Manhandling Parallelism
Are your big queries using every available clock tick, or are they lagging behind? And if your queries are already going parallel, can they be rewritten for even greater speed? In this session you will learn how to take full advantage of parallelism.
Query Tuning Mastery: Workspace Memory Internals
Large, complex queries need memory in which to work--workspace memory--and understanding the how's, when's, and why's of this memory can help you create queries that run in seconds rather than minutes.