PASS Summit 2014—My Sessions

I was honored again this year to be able to speak at the PASS Summit, and even more so with the fact that I got a three hour session as well as a regular session. So what am I going to be talking about?

Building Perfect SQL Servers, Every Time (Wed 11/5 10:15 PST Room 6A)

If you are reading this blog and you enjoy my postings on esoteric internals of columnstore indexes or availability groups, this probably isn’t the session for you. However, if you are new to SQL Server, or are just looking for ways to improve and automate your installation process this is the session for you. In this session you will learn about what you need to change after you install SQL Server (and why), how to do scripted installs for automation and efficiency, and the lessons I learned in building a private cloud environment when I worked for big cable. As a consultant, I write a lot of health checks all about things that are wrong with client’s configurations—come to this session and your health check will read “This company clearly knows SQL Server and has a well qualified DBA”

SQL Server DR in Microsoft Azure—Building Your Second Data Center (Wed 11/5 15:00 PST Room 6A)

So Wednesday is going to be a busy day for me. Last year at Summit, I spoke about building out a hybrid AlwaysOn Availability Groups model—building out my demo environment was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done in IT. I’m happy to report Microsoft has made a lot of things a lot easier, and I’ve learned a lot more about hybrid networking.

Please don’t let the Azure part of this topic scare anyone off—you will learn a lot about Azure infrastructure and how things like hybrid networking work, but at the same time I plan on walking through the basics and more of the fundamental SQL Server DR techniques, their pluses and minuses, and which one might be right for you given your situation.

Even if you can’t make it to one of my sessions, I’ll be around all week and would love to chat about technology. See you in Seattle.