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

Microsoft Fabric: Ultimate Data Security for Robust Data Warehousing

This session delves into the advanced security features of Microsoft Fabric, specifically designed for data warehousing. Attendees will learn how to classify and protect sensitive data using sensitivity labels and policies in Microsoft Purview.

The session will cover the implementation of Row-Level Security (RLS) to restrict access at the row level, ensuring users only see data relevant to their roles. Additionally, it will explore Column-Level Security (CLS) to secure specific columns in datasets, providing an extra layer of protection for sensitive information.

Participants will also discover how to use data masking techniques to obfuscate sensitive data, making it unreadable to unauthorized users while maintaining usability for authorized personnel. The session will emphasize aligning data warehousing practices with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, leveraging Microsoft Fabric’s compliance tools and features.

Join us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how to secure your data warehouse end-to-end within Microsoft Fabric.

Wednesday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 347

How much SQL do you need to know as developer?

In today’s data-driven world, developers must accurately utilize SQL and database functionalities to provide effective and cost-efficient solutions. This presentation covers key database skills for developers at all levels, focusing on design, querying, and optimization.

The topics are categorized by developer levels (Jr, Sr, Ld). We will begin with fundamental topics, such as using the correct data types, and progress to advanced topics, including vectors and artificial intelligence.

We will utilize SQL Server, one of the most commonly used databases globally. By knowing how to use this well-known server, you automatically qualify for numerous projects. Though many database engines have similar functionalities, they use different terms, so everything learned in this session will apply to other database systems you encounter.

How many new technologies will remain next year is uncertain, but SQL has been essential for decades. Mastering SQL can give you a significant competitive advantage!

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.

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 348

Getting started with SQL database in Fabric

Microsoft Fabric, the unified data platform, now includes an operational database solution and it is SQL! Come learn all the fundamentals of how this solution is the same and different from other SQL deployment options. We will also show you the value of using SQL in the Fabric ecosystem including developer experiences, automation, monitoring, and integration for AI applications.

Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 344

PowerBI, DirectQuery and SQL Server. It is a good choice?

You will learn best practices, tips and tricks on how to successfully use SQL databases (OnPremise,IaaS, PaaS,SQL Managed Instance) with PowerBI on production environments.

How improve the performance, using for example, Read-Scale, HyperScale or Synapse, partitioning, ColumnStoreIndexes, Indexed views, etc..

How to monitor and diagnostic your database and find out issues with Query Data Store. These learnings are fruit of Microsoft CSS support cases, and customer field engagements.

Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 320-321

Everything you need to know about Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database

Learn everything you need to know about Data Virtualization, OPENROWSET, External tables, parquet, Delta, best practices, how to access external data using Azure SQL Database, export cold data, and create your very own data tiering solution.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 320-321

SQL Server and AI, tomorrow has arrived

Applications in need of modernization and integration with AI usually pick up an AI broker to bridge the gap. Microsoft SQL Server 2025, still in private preview, as announced interesting features to implement this bridge and help developers to get AI results in existing applications faster. In this session will you learn about these features and how they will help infuse AI in current apps.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 343

SQL Server 2025: The Enterprise AI ready database

Come learn about the latest information for SQL Server 2025, now in preview. You will learn how to bring AI to your data with AI applications using built-in vector capabilities ground to cloud. In addition, you will learn about new enhancements for developers including JSON, RegEx, REST API, GraphQL, Change Streaming. You will also learn about all the new engine features for security, performance, and availability. You will also see how to integrate your SQL Server 2025 experience using the new SSMS21 and SSMS Copilot.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 320-321

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale elastic pools - a deep-dive

Azure SQL Database offers a very popular deployment option called elastic pools, to help ease the challenges around right-sizing and cost-optimizing resources for a group of databases. In this session, we will dive deep into the latest generation of elastic pools which leverage the Hyperscale cloud-native architecture. Starting with a quick overview of the motivation for using elastic pools, and a quick recap of the Hyperscale tech, we will use demos to show you:

• How Hyperscale elastic pools ("HSEP") implement resource sharing...
• ... while maintaining strong isolation between databases -  What are the performance and capacity limits of each HSEP
• How you can proactively control "noisy neighbor" databases in a HSEP
• How HSEP scales vertically and / or horizontally, and what the impact of such scaling is on your workloads
• How to monitor HSEP effectively using DMVs, Azure Monitor and Database Watcher
• How backups, high availability, and disaster recovery work for databases in a HSEP
• Last but not the least, how HSEP helps in cost optimization - and what you should watch out for as well to manage TCO.

To make best use of this session, some Azure SQL knowledge would help, but it's not necessary. Anyone who plans to run databases in Azure SQL should be aware of elastic pools so that they can benefit from the optimizations they provide. This session will directly help you in understanding how HSEP work and how they may be beneficial to your scenario.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 348

Mastering Elastic Database Pools: Best Practices and Troubleshooting from Microsoft Support

Join us for an in-depth exploration of Elastic Database Pools, the game-changing technology that empowers developers and DBAs to efficiently manage and scale their databases. In this session, we'll delve into best practices and strategies for leveraging Elastic Database Pools to optimize your workload management and improve performance. Drawing from real-world support cases at Microsoft, we'll demonstrate the significant impact and benefits of using Elastic Database Pools in various scenarios. Our talk will also cover essential troubleshooting techniques to identify and resolve incidents effectively. Plus, don't miss our live demos showcasing practical examples and code in multiple programming languages. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a DBA looking to enhance your toolkit, this session is tailored for you! Gain valuable insights, practical tips.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 340-341

Securing Azure PaaS Network Communications

Many companies use one or more Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings when working with Microsoft Azure. However, these companies don't want to allow the network traffic to these PaaS services to go over the public Internet. In this session, we will learn more about why companies want to secure this network traffic and, more importantly, how to secure this traffic and what application changes need to be made to use these private connections.

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 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 343

Data Virtualization in SQL Server 2022

PolyBase is Microsoft's primary data virtualization technology, allowing you to integrate SQL Server with a variety of external systems such as Oracle, MongoDB, Cosmos DB, Teradata, Apache Spark, and even other SQL Server instances. In this talk, we will walk through the mechanics of PolyBase, showing how we can write T-SQL queries to access data from heterogeneous sources. We will see how data virtualization in SQL Server has evolved over the years and the new capabilities you will find in SQL Server 2022. Finally, we will look at several interesting use cases for data virtualization in the modern data environment.

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.