T-SQL That Doesn’t Suck: My #PassDataSummit 2026 Precon in Seattle
I’m teaching a full-day pre-conference workshop at PASS Data Community Summit West 2026 in Seattle this November. If you’re already coming to the Summit, come spend the day before it with me and we’ll fix some terrible T-SQL together.
The Details
- Precon: T-SQL That Doesn’t Suck: Solving Performance and Concurrency Problems
- Event: PASS Data Community Summit West 2026
- When: Precon: Monday, November 9, 2026. Full Summit runs November 9–11, 2026.
- Where: Hyatt Regency Seattle, 808 Howell St, Seattle, WA 98101
- Register for the Summit and add the precon here
T-SQL That Doesn’t Suck: Solving Performance and Concurrency Problems
You know how to write T-SQL that works. It compiles, it returns rows, nobody’s filed an incident yet. But “works” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and production has a way of finding out what you got away with in dev.
In this full-day, demo-packed session, Erik Darling walks you through the T-SQL that silently bleeds your servers dry and shows you how to fix it without rewriting the whole app. You’ll tackle the performance killers that don’t show up until scale does: implicit conversions, non-sargable predicates, parameter sniffing traps, and joins that look fine in an execution plan until they absolutely aren’t. You’ll learn when temp tables beat table variables, when CTEs help versus when they just make you feel organized, and how to write window functions that don’t spill to tempdb.
But performance is only half the fight. We’ll dig into concurrency problems that turn a Tuesday into a war room: blocking chains, isolation level surprises, and data modifications that hold locks like they’re paying rent. You’ll learn DML patterns that play well with others.
Along the way, we’ll put AI-generated T-SQL on the table. Not to dunk on it, but because it’s showing up in pull requests and you need to know where it falls apart and where it saves you time.
If you’ve ever inherited a stored procedure that made you question your career choices, this is your day. Come write T-SQL you’d be proud to put your name on.
Pre-conference seats are limited and get added on during Summit registration, so grab yours early. Register here and come say hi in Seattle.