The pros and cons of four typical configurations of AlwaysOn Availability Groups; stand-alone instances, fail-over cluster instances, multi-subnet, and a hybrid approach that I call disaster-recovery-on-the-cheap. We also cover their exclusive features such as read-only routing and backup off-loading. In addition, you’ll learn how to use the Availability Group Listener correctly and why you should be using Windows Server 2012 R2 or above, along with some of my own personal lessons learned.

This session will provide an overview of how SQL injection works and how to write injection-proof queries through a series of T-SQL demos. We’ll also take a look at why some commonly used techniques aren’t as secure as many people think.

If you ever write or maintain dynamic SQL queries, or work with developers who do, then this session is for you.

You’ve just been given a server that is having problems and you need to diagnose it quickly. This session will take you through designing your own toolkit to help you quickly diagnose a wide array of problems. We will walk through scripts that will help you pinpoint various issues quickly and efficiently. This session will take you through;

What’s on fire? – These scripts will help you diagnose what’s happening right now
Specs – What hardware are you dealing with here (you’ll need to know this to make the appropriate decisions)?
Settings – are the most important settings correct for your workload?
Bottlenecks – We’ll see if there are any areas of the system that are throttling us.
By the end of this session, you should have the knowledge of what you need to do in order to start on your own kit. This kit is designed to be your lifeline to fix servers quickly and get them working.

All code we’ll go through is either provided as part of this presentation or are open source/community tools.

There are tools available from Microsoft, as well as from a number of third-party vendors, to ease the process of integrating database unit testing into your development environments and your continuous delivery pipeline.

This session is an attempt to get back to basics - with the open source tSQLt framework - and address questions like:

Why is database unit testing important? Why is database unit testing difficult? What do I need to test? What do I not need to test? What is a "good" unit test?

Do you work for an institution that fears its DBAs could go rogue on their production databases?

Do you want to revoke continuous sysadmin permissions from your DBA team in an attempt to avoid being the next WikiLeak?

Do you have concerns that the DBA team is querying sensitive databases?

Then you need Uptight Database Security. Come to this session to learn how to deploy a configurable permission model that provides on-demand access to SQL Server databases. This model allows DBAs to do routine work without sysadmin, and elevate permissions to sysadmin only during production emergencies or disaster recovery scenarios.

Attendees will leave this session with the fundamental knowledge and scripts to implement a low hassle solution that provides DBAs the minimum necessary access required to maintain a production database server.

In this session, I will talk about advantages of Query Store, features, configuration and query optimization using Query Store on SQL Server 2017. The session will also cover how one can monitor query performance, how Query Store gathers data and which are the best practices for using Query Store. During the session, there will be various demos.

In this session, we introduce how data moves between systems on networks, then look at TCP/IP internals. We’ll discuss real-world scenarios showing you how your network’s performance impacts the performance of your SQL Server and even your recovery objectives.

Based on the successful 500 Level talk at PASS 2016, this session will provide an internals view of how In-Memory OLTP works for SQL Server 2016 and 2017. Because this session is Advanced, it is intended for those that understand the basic fundamentals of In-Memory OLTP but want to learn how the “Hekaton” engine works behind the scenes to deliver the amazing 30x performance improvements seen for customers moving to In-Memory OLTP.

Microsoft has introduced native capability to the database engine around masking sensitive data and restricting access at the row level. Allowing us new options for building more secure Data Platform solutions. However, it is important to understand the differences from our previous options in order to be able to gain the most benefit from these new technologies.

Join me as we look in more detail at how we can engineer these features into our Data Platform solutions. Starting with identifying the problems they are trying to solve, through their core architecture and on to potential design patterns for their use. As with any security technology solution, there are a number of ways to use these features. However, as with all security features, there are gaps in coverage, using them effectively in a layered approach is vital.

After this session, you will be in a position to start looking at whether your systems can benefit from these features. Along with how you can potentially start building functionality into your applications.

It just works – performance and scale in SQL Server 2016 database engine and what is being added to in-market versions. This session will showcase several improvements in SQL Server, focusing on the latest enhancements that address some of the most common customer pain points the Database Engine, involving tempdb, new CE, memory management, T-SQL constructs as well as diagnostics for troubleshooting query plans, memory grants, and backup/restore.