Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 340-341

Advanced Data Protection Strategies with SQL Server: A Hands-on Workshop

This workshop equips developers and database professionals with the practical skills needed to implement robust data protection in their SQL Server environments. It creates systems where sensitive information remains secure even from privileged users like database administrators.

Through structured, hands-on exercises, participants will:

Discover and Classify sensitive data using SQL Server's built-in tools—establishing the foundation for a comprehensive security strategy

Implement Column-Level Protection through Dynamic Data Masking and Always Encrypted, including advanced scenarios with secure enclaves that maintain query performance while protecting data confidentiality

Deploy Row-Level Security to enforce granular access controls based on user context, ensuring proper data isolation and visibility

Establish Audit Trails to monitor and track all interactions with classified data, supporting compliance requirements and enabling security incident investigations

Throughout the day, participants will progressively build a secured database and a .NET web application, integrating each security feature into a cohesive solution. By the session's end, attendees will have developed a proof-of-concept that demonstrates enterprise-grade data protection techniques that satisfy security requirements while maintaining application functionality.

Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 347

PowerShell DBA Dream dbatools Workshop

Unlock the power of automation and enhance your database management skills in this full-day PowerShell workshop designed for DBAs. This session will equip you with essential skills and streamline your daily operations and reduce manual errors through scripting and automation.

We will start with PowerShell fundamentals before moving into advanced scripting best practices tailored to the needs of SQL Server management. A key highlight of the workshop is our in-depth exploration of the dbatools module—a powerful, community-built toolkit that simplifies SQL Server management tasks. With over 700 cmdlets/functions it is a treasure trove of greatness (in my opinion). This mostly demo session with many real-world examples, you’ll learn how to leverage dbatools to automate tasks such as backups, restores, performance monitoring, and migrations, dramatically enhancing your operational efficiency.

Whether you’re looking to learn PowerShell and dbatools or to explore automation strategies, this workshop offers a rich blend of theoretical insights and interactive scenarios. Join me for a day of learning, collaboration, and fun that will allow you to take full control of your database operations with the combined power of PowerShell and dbatools.

Wednesday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 343

The Ultimate Guide to Ola Hallengren's Maintenance Solution

When it comes to Database Maintenance, you just cannot ignore it. Did you know that traditional Maintenance Plans have been deprecated? Did you know that they often perform duplicate actions? It is time to take your maintenance to a different level and mentality.

You must have heard about Ola Hallengren by now. There are many environments that have default values running the show. This session is meant to take you through the maintenance solution from top to bottom and present some insights into how to get the most out of this solution.

When you leave this session, you will have a new understanding of what is possible beyond the defaults. Not only that I will show you the easy way to install this solution and preset the values in the jobs with very little effort. Join me for a power packed session that will give you all you need to know about this solution. See you there.

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 343

Indexing Internals for Developers & DBAs

What are the secrets to making your queries run faster? Why does SQL Server use an index for some queries and not for others? What makes a good index? How many indexes should I have? Have you ever asked these questions? When you want to understand an application you look at its core architecture. Underneath the covers SQL Server is just a C++ application. Together we will discuss how the application architecture of SQL Server works, and how to apply this logic to building the best indexes for your queries.

Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 320-321

TSQL Best Practices Through Behavior Analysis

Ever wonder why your query behaves a certain way? Looking at the behavior of your query can lead you down a path to tuning. As with all queries, different servers will behave differently. With all those permutations (CPU, Memory, disk type, etc.) you can easily give up. But with these best practices you learn here, you have a shot at getting more consistent behavior by following them. I will show you what to look for and how to affect the behavior through better TSQL. Join me in a quest to write and tune queries by looking at how they behave.

Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 340-341

Real Time Monitoring with Real-life Use Cases using Database Watcher

In this session, we are going to show you how easy it is to use Database Watcher, a cloud-native and cross-platform solution that supports multiple database types, versions, and platforms, to set up proactive database monitoring and collect deep and rich data. You will see how Database Watcher provides easy to understand visualizations, with near real time monitoring, which can help you optimize your database performance, availability, and health.

During this session we will cover the following with you:

• Brief overview of Database Watcher architecture
• Delve into real scenarios with Database Watcher dashboards
• Create custom dashboards for custom scenarios
• Using the power of KQL to query the raw monitoring data

Join us in this session and discover how Database Watcher can help you take your DBA career to the next level by enabling you to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and improve your database operations.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 347

Hold my beer; I know how to fix this with Copilot!

Many proof-of-concept AI applications fail to reach production because industries do not find value in copilot-like applications. Companies seek clarity and focus, not an overwhelming barrage of chat applications bombarding decision-makers with countless suggestions or summarizations. This session will help you connect the dots in the AI puzzle using Microsoft technologies, including the new open-source database, DocumentDB. We will examine vector stores, the RAG pattern, and multi-agent frameworks and learn how to implement these technologies in applications. By the end of this session, you will have all the practical information necessary to integrate AI features into your projects.

Thursday 12:40 PM - 1:50 PM · Room 343

A Query Runs Through It: An Introduction to the SQL Server Engine

Have you ever wondered what happens inside SQL Server when you execute that query you wrote? This session will serve as an introduction to what is going on under the hood, commonly called SQL Server Internals. Whether writing queries or tuning them, SQL Server internals knowledge is highly valuable in Azure VMs or SQL DB, AWS, GCP, and on-premises as the SQL Server engine is the same. Together we will dip into why data types matter, ponder pages, sample the storage engine, and ponder the query processor as we see what happens when your query runs.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 344

SSMS 21 Spotlight: What's new and why it matters

With the Preview 1 release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 in November, the SQL Tools team made available the biggest set of updates to SSMS in recent memory, including numerous requests that customers have been waiting to see...for years in some cases.

In this session we'll show off what's new in SSMS 21, what's in progress, and what we have planned for SQL 2025. We'll start by walking through installation and jump to the first step for each launch - connecting. You'll want to connect to a database using our new connection dialog - we'll take a tour through the experience and take feedback (we're always listening :) We'll also cover updates you'll find throughout SSMS such as changes to Azure authentication, and improvements in the query editor and results grid. Folks have been excited about support for Git in SSMS, so we'll show you how to get started. If Git is new to you, it may seem daunting. Don't worry, if we can figure it out, so can you!

Expect lots of demos, as many tips, tricks, and updates as we can fit in.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 347

AI and SQL ground to cloud to fabric

New to AI? Come learn the fundamentals of how to get started with AI and Microsoft SQL everywhere it exists: ground to cloud to fabric. This includes SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, and SQL database in Fabric. SQL is the perfect place to integrate data with AI because of its industry proven security, scalability, and availability. We will show GenAI capabilities like vector search, how to integrate these with your application, and Copilot experiences everywhere SQL exists including GitHub Copilot.

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 343

Wait Wait Do Tell Me: A Look At SQL Server Wait Stats

Hurry up and wait, it happens to all of us, even SQL Server. Why is SQL Server waiting? What can we do about it? These questions will be addressed as we define what a wait really is in SQL Server and some approaches to make SQL wait less. This session, targeted at data professionals, managers, developers, and sys admins, will also explore a few of the common SQL waits and specifically what we can do about them

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 347

Introduction to SQL Server Essential Concepts

When I first started learning about SQL Server, really deeply learning, there were a few “key” concepts that you hear repeated often by top speakers and SQL MVP’s. Internals, recovery models, and backups. They are interconnected. As the learning continued, it was self-evident how understanding basic data internals with pages, extents, and allocation bitmaps or database recovery models, the transaction log, and VLF’s or advanced backup options backups like stripping and piecemeal restores affected the uses of SQL Server. They affected not just SQL Server but the way you make decisions in order to determine how best to use SQL Server to support your business. This session enables you to have that core set of understanding required for advanced SQL learning.