22-25 April 2026

SentryOne Performance Bootcamp 2017

2017

TL; DR

Join the most knowledgeable and passionate people in the SQL Server vendor community for a day of in-depth performance tuning education.

Session Details

The SentryOne Performance Bootcamp features presentations from the SentryOne Solutions Engineering and Product Management teams. You will see how to maximize your investment in SentryOne with deep-dives into product configurations, customizations for your environment, and advanced analysis techniques to streamline your operations.

Discussion topics include:

  • Plan Explorer and Index Analysis
  • Retro Features
  • Setup and Configuration
  • Advanced Alerting
  • Performance Tuning
  • Data Mining the SentryOne repository database.

Now is your chance to interact with the entire team to get answers to all your SentryOne questions. The day will conclude with an open Q&A session with feedback opportunities and additional chances to learn anything not covered in the sessions.

Be the best DBA you can be.

Plan of Attack

0730 to 0830
Registration and Breakfast
0830 to 0900
Keynote PresentationJohn Q. Martin and Steve Wright

John will talk about all the recent and upcoming exciting events happening at SentryOne. Get an inside look at what's happening with the company as well as our entire product line.

0900 to 0930
Plan Explorer Index AnalysisJohn Q. Martin

SentryOne Plan Explorer has become the tool of choice for tens of thousands of SQL Server professionals working to improve query performance through execution plan analysis. The upcoming release of Plan Explorer brings more of what we love, and marks the evolution of Plan Explorer into a comprehensive platform that will help us address even more performance problems, as well as prevent them in the future.

0930 to 1030
Reveille! - SentryOne Advanced Alerting - Richard Douglas

In this session, we will take a deep dive into the advanced features and options available in SentryOne’s alerting system. We will cover how to have your alerts follow a call schedule, filtering alerts to allow automated response to very specific situations, making the most of response rulesets, and crafting our own alerts with Custom Conditions. For those that already have alerting in place, we will discuss tips and tricks for reducing alert noise. We’ll conclude with a discussion of alerting best practices, and Q&A.

1030 to 1045
Break
1045 to 1200
Fix Bayonets! - Retro Features – Scott Fallen and John Q. Martin

While SentryOne software continues to evolve with more complete and complex features, the core functionality still provides countless opportunities for monitoring, diagnosing and optimizing SQL Server. This session will be a deep dive into many of the features you may know, but aren’t using as completely as possible.

1200 to 1300
Lunch
1300 to 1400
Drop and Give me 20! - Get Your SQL Server in Shape - Richard Douglas

Every SQL Server instance has its own performance profile based on available resources, workload, and other factors. Yet many performance issues share root cause and performance metric patterns. In this session, we will demonstrate how to recognize these patterns and identify the root cause for 5 common performance issues using SentryOne Performance Advisor.

1400 to 1500
Performance Data Surveillance - Data Mining the SentryOne Repository - Steve Wright

The SentryOne platform provides a lot of capability to monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot server performance issues. But there is a lot more that you can do to gain deeper insight on how your environment is performing. In this session, we will discuss mining additional data directly from the SentryOne repository database. Looking at how and where data is held in the repository database. Using this to then build Advisory Conditions within the SentryOne solution, or creating your own custom reports.

1500 to 1515
Break
1515 to 1600
Configuration Personal Training - SentryOne Configuration - Scott Fallen

Get your SentryOne environment configured and organized for the best results. We will focus on installation, retention thresholds, site configuration, SentryOne Client preferences, and integration with other tools (SCOM and ticketing).

1600 to 1730
Operation Debrief - Q&A - SentryOne Panel

Ask us anything! Due to the interest level at past Bootcamps, we have expanded this session. Interact with the entire team to find out answers to all your questions about anything SentryOne related. This will be an open Q&A session, feedback opportunity, and chance to learn anything we don't cover in the sessions.

3 things you'll get out of this session

Speakers

Richard Douglas

Richard Douglas's previous sessions

Improving SQL Server Performance with Indexing
Indexing presents daunting challenges for even the most seasoned professionals, it offers countless options to choose from. With a little help you’ll see how to simplify indexing in your environment & improve the overall performance of your apps
 
Investigate TempDB like Sherlock Holmes
Learn how to investigate the mysterious case of SQL Server performance problems in TempDB.
 
Alerting; Beyond the Basics
We'll look at events that you should be monitoring, how you can use various services & IoT enabled devices to alert you in ways that were never possible. You'll leave with a new outlook of how teams can be notified to fix problems faster than ever.
 
The Big Backup Theory
In this session, you'll gain invaluable guidance for optimizing your backup strategies. Using trace flags the session will cover how SQL Server manages its own backup options and how you can tune them to meet your SLAs.
 
Wait watchers-Gain Performance Increases Fast!
In this session you'll learn all about SQL Server wait statistics. These are statistics the database engine stores about the resources it is waiting on. Armed with this information you as a SQL Server professional can make better informed decisions.
 
The Day After Tomorrow; Why You Need to Baseline
Ensuring top performance is never easy. To maintain performance you need to make sure you’re monitoring the right things. How do you know if the figures you’re seeing are good or bad? Baseline comparisons can help.