January Monthly CASSUG Meeting

Greetings, data enthusiasts, and welcome to 2023!

Our January meeting is scheduled for Monday, January 9, at 5:30 pm! We will meet in person at Datto, 33 Tech Valley Drive, East Greenbush, NY.

For more information and to RSVP, go to our Meetup event page at https://www.meetup.com/capital-area-sql-server-user-group/events/290677447/

Our meeting schedule is usually as follows:

• 5:30 PM: Food, soft drinks, and networking
• 6:15 PM: Chapter news and announcements
• 6:30 PM: Presentation

We usually wrap up between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM.

Thanks to Datto for sponsoring our event!

Our guest speaker for the month is Taiob Ali!

Topic: What the heck is a checkpoint, and why should I care?
An 8K page is the fundamental unit of data storage in SQL Server. SQL Server performs every data modification operation in memory (buffer pool) for performance reasons and does not immediately write it back to disk.

This is where checkpoint comes into play. The Database Engine periodically issues a checkpoint on each database. A checkpoint writes the current in-memory modified pages (known as dirty pages) and transaction log information from memory to disk. It also records this information in the transaction log.

This session will explain why you should care and know about the checkpoint process and the different checkpoints that SQL Server does. I will show you exactly what happens during a checkpoint, how you can influence the interval of checkpoints, and changes made with checkpoint settings in SQL 2014 and SQL 2016+.