When storage doesn't perform and scale it causes issues for SQL Server and can make DBA life extremely challenging.  In many cases, SQL Server storage is provisioned on a SAN.  However, very few DBAs even get to see a SAN or understand how it works.  Even though the SAN is someone else's responsibility, as a DBA you feel the pain and you're typically a first responder when there is a problem.  Understanding the "magic" behind it will make you a better DBA and help you have productive conversations with your storage administrator.  After all, pointing fingers has a negative impact on your superhero status! In this session, you will learn what a SAN is, how it works, and why it's typically used vs. direct attached storage.  These 'black boxes" have a lot of capabilities, so you will also learn about some of the common features today that they offer and how they can help you.  You will also learn about what can go wrong, some basic troubleshooting when you're not getting what you expected, and how to communicate with your SAN administrator if you're not getting what you need.

SAN Primer for the DBA by Doug Bernhardt

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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.

Architecting Availability Groups by Derik Hammer

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.

SQL Injection Attacks: Is Your Data Secure? by Bert Wagner

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.

Making Your Emergency Toolkit by Rich Benner

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?

Effective Unit Testing for SQL Server by Gavin Campbell

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.

SAN Primer for the DBA by Doug Bernhardt

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