Presentations

Me, goofing off at Data Grillen 2022. Photo credit: Marc Lelijveld

These are most of my public presentations, including links to slide deck and demo scripts, and Youtube recordings (when available).

Download the presentation materials

Slides and demo scripts for most of my current presentation are available in my Github repository.

Upcoming events

Here are the events I’m planning to speak on:

I’m doing a precon in Oslo on SQL Server performance tuning using the execution plan! Registration link coming soon.

SQL Injection: The Old Dog of Data Security

Presented at Data Point Prague 2025.

IT vulnerabilities leading to data breaches have been getting a lot of attention in the news, ranging from elaborate supply-chain attacks to ransomware. You may even have read about things like advanced cryptographic timing attacks or buffer overruns. But there’s one vulnerability as old as SQL itself, and it still reigns supreme when it comes to compromising your confidential information:

The SQL Injection.

This is not just about your homepage. SQL injections can be found everywhere, including your ETL frameworks, your desktop apps, even your login prompts.

Window to Success: Mastering SQL Server Window Functions

You’re a SQL Server DBA or developer. You’ve inherited a mess of undecipherable self-joins and temp tables with identity columns, and you have this dream that you could simplify it all – using a simple, elegant one-liner.

In this session, we’ll dive into the amazing world of window functions in SQL Server. We’ll start with the basics, explaining what window functions are and why they’re so powerful. Then we’ll explore the different types of window functions – ranking, aggregate, and offset – and when to use each one.

We’ll cover practical examples on how window functions can simplify your queries, dramatically improve performance, and make your T-SQL code so much easier to read and maintain.

From Substitutions to Public Keys – an Introduction to Cryptography

Presented at SQL Bits 2024, Data Grillen 2024, Data Saturday Oslo 2024, PASS Summit 2024, Data Saturday Denmark 2025, and SQL Konferenz 2025.

Cryptography is everywhere. Most of what you do on the Internet and in the cloud is encrypted. If you’re working with data or cloud infrastructure, just checking the TLS checkbox is only half the job. You need to have a decent understanding of what goes on underneath the padlock icon in order to keep your company’s dirty secrets safe.

In this high-level introduction to cryptography, we’ll look at the origins and evolution of encryption, leading up to modern-day symmetric and asymmetric encryption, signatures and certificates. After the session, you’ll be able to use hand-wavy phrases like “certificate chain” and “public key infrastructure”, as if you know what they mean.

No PhD required.

ACID Compliance in SQL Server

Presented at Data Saturday Gothenburg 2023, Data Saturday Oslo 2023, European Fabric Community Conference 2024 and SQL Konferenz 2024.

“ACID has long been a core concept of transactional databases, but there are a number of ways we can manipulate or even disable some of these four properties in SQL Server. Sometimes intentionally, and sometimes perhaps unexpectedly.

In this session, we’ll look at the real-world effects of the settings and hints in SQL Server that affect ACID compliance: when to use them to improve your database workload, and when to avoid them. We’ll compare isolation levels, delayed durability, and distributed data patterns.”

SQL Server Partitioning from Zero to Hero

An introductory session on how to do partitioning on SQL Server, and why it may actually not be for you.

Presented at Data Grillen in June 2022, PASS Data Community Summit 2022, and Data Céilí 2023.

“Ever since the incident, you’ve been wanting to learn more about database partitioning in SQL Server. This session walks you through what partitioning really does, and what it doesn’t do. We’ll take a look at some of the quirks of partitioning, as well as how to use it to boost performance, enable high(er) availability, and even build lightning-fast data retention policies.”

SQL Server Privilege Escalation for Dummies

This was my first lightning talk ever, and a super fun session to put together and present.

Presented at the inaugural DataMinutes conference in June 2021.

“We’ve all been there. They didn’t provide you with access to Production, and the DBAs have stopped answering your texts. I’ll show you how to make your own roads, and possibly even cause a career-defining event.”

Getting your Ducks in a Row – Understanding Ordered Data Flows

Presented at SQL Saturday Gothenburg 2019, the Swedish SQL Server usergroup in October 2019, Group By in October 2021, Data Saturday Oslo 2022, and PASS Data Community Summit 2023.

There’s a lot of information out there to overwhelm you when it comes to performance tuning your queries. It’s very easy to feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose when you’re reading long blog posts or listening to technical conference sessions. Operators, metrics, wait statistics, page life expectancy, parallellism and fragmentation.

But let’s take a step back and understand the one fundamental principle of querying data – ordering. This session is all about interactively and visually explaining the flow of data in terms of ordering, and how that affects the performance of your queries and server.

Once you get these basics right, tuning will feel so much easier and execution plans may even start to appear quite intuitive.

Not just polish: how good code also runs faster

Presented at GroupBy.org in September 2018, SQL Saturday Holland in October 2018, SQL Saturday Finland in May 2019, and SQL Saturday Oslo in August 2019!

You’ve been writing T-SQL for a while, but you want some easy pointers on how to make it go faster.

I want to show you how just a little neater and tighter code can also run a lot faster. These are some of the instant performance improvements that won’t change a lot of code, won’t generate weeks of testing and validation for your colleagues and can be relatively quick to implement.

Management Studio level-up

Presented at the inaugural GroupBy.org conference in January 2017, SQLSaturday Gothenburg 207, and SQLSaturday Denmark.

Move up to Management Studio Superstar with these great productivity tips! We’ll explore stuff like keyboard shortcuts, configuration options, how to keep your SSMS settings synchronized across multiple environments and other really useful everyday tricks and hacks.

SQL Server Security Basics

Presented at SQLSaturday Oslo 2017.

The SQL Server security model spans across a number of layers all the way from the OS security down to individual column-level permissions and row-level security, with concepts like owners, inheritance, impersonation, ownership chaining. In this session, I’ll give you a good basic understanding of how to secure your data in SQL Server as well as a look at some common security risks.

Exploring common table expression

Presented at the Swedish SQL Usergroup in June 2016, and SQLSaturday Gothenburg 2016.

Join me for a twisting and turning session where we look at some interesting uses of common table expressions and recursive CTEs. We’ll look at nested CTEs, managing duplicate rows, string and XML parsing as well as dependency trees and other hierarchies. These are not just cool tricks – they’re powerful T-SQL patterns that can improve the stability and performance of your data cleansing and ETL code.