I will be one of the presenters for the 3rd installment of the 24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview, which will be held on September 15-16, 2010. This free event will be held in two twelve hour blocks on two consecutive days (instead of 24 hours straight for the previous events). This should make it easier for people in the United States and Europe to attend sessions without staying up into the wee hours.

I will be talking about hardware selection and sizing, with a session at 1500 GMT called “Hardware 201: Selecting and Sizing Database Hardware for OLTP Performance”. Here is the abstract:

The foundation of database performance is the underlying server hardware and storage subsystem. Even the best designed and optimized database application can be crippled by an inadequate hardware and storage infrastructure. Recent advances in new processors and chipsets, along with improvements in magnetic and SSD storage, have dramatically changed the evaluation and selection process compared to the past. Many database professionals struggle to keep up with new technology and often simply let someone else make their hardware selection and sizing decisions. Unfortunately, the DBA usually gets the blame for any performance issues that crop up later. Don't let this happen to you! This session covers current and upcoming hardware from both Intel and AMD and gives you the tools and resources to make better hardware selection decisions to support SQL Server OLTP workloads.

I am really looking forward to this session, since I am so passionate about hardware (which you probably already know if you read my blog or follow me on Twitter). I firmly believe that a database professional needs to stay abreast of what is happening on the hardware front, so I want to do my little part to help spread some knowledge.

We have a great slate of presenters for this event, with many well-known names in the SQL Server Community.

Adam Jorgensen, Alberto Ferrari, Allen White, Andy Leonard, Brad McGehee, Brian Knight, Craig Utley, Chris Shaw,  Denny Cherry, Douglas McDowell, Glenn Berry, Grant Fritchey, Jen McCown, Kalen Delaney, Ken Simmons, Kevin Goode, Kevin Kline, Klaus Aschenbrenner, Louis Davidson, Marco Russo, Paul Nielsen, Peter Myers, Peter Ward, Rob Farley, Stacia Misner