Past seminars

Miloš Radivojević - Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server - Lessons Learned from Production

Introduced with SQL Server 2017, further developed and significantly extended in both SQL Server 2019 and 2022, the Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) is one of the most important investments Microsoft has made in SQL Server. It contains new functionalities and enhancements that can improve the performance of existing workloads (both OLTP and OLAP) without changing the code.

Course will take place on June 2th 2023 at Hotel International, Miramarska 24, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia.

Session abstract

Introduced with SQL Server 2017, further developed and significantly extended in both SQL Server 2019 and 2022, the Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) is one of the most important investments Microsoft has made in SQL Server. It contains new functionalities and enhancements that can improve the performance of existing workloads (both OLTP and OLAP) without changing the code.

Meanwhile, the IQP package contains 11 independent features and some of them can be very beneficial for your workload. However, depending on your workload, the way your team develops SQL projects, or even your knowledge, an IQP feature can also lead to significant performance degradation. Therefore, it is important to understand how each of them works, to identify cases where a feature contributes to performance improvement, but, especially in critical systems, it is even more important to recognize situations, where IQP can slow down your existing queries.

In this one-day seminar, you will learn about each IQP feature, you’ll see all pros and cons in my real-life demonstrations. Of course, you will learn how to mitigate the issues caused by IQP features. Since the author uses all IQP features in the production system on critical and less critical servers, you will get an exclusive and real-life feedback of IQP usage and lessons learned in the production system.

It will be also discussed about IQP features in SQL Server 2022, but this might be more based on the testing experience and expectations.

Here is the list of modules:

Part I (Adaptive features)

  1. Intelligent Query Processing – Intro
  2. Interleaved Execution
  3. Adaptive Join
  4. Memory Grant Feedback (including SQL Server 2022 extensions)

Part II (Intelligent and other adaptive features)

  1. Batch Mode on Rowstore
  2. Scalar UDF Inlining
  3. Table Variable Deferred Compilation
  4. Approximate Processing
  5. IQP Features in SQL Server 2022

Miloš Radivojević

Miloš Radivojević has been developing and maintaining SQL Server databases for more than 20 years.

During that time, he gave more than 200 lectures at various IT events and wrote (as a co-author) three books about SQL Server (Mastering SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide and SQL Server 2017 Developer's Guide). At the time of this seminar, the fourth one (Transact-SQL tips for programmers) may be published.

He is employed at Entain as Head of MSSQL Database Engineering.