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As DBAs, one of our top priorities is keeping the organization’s data backed up and ready to be restored when needed. We also need to be prepared to answer questions about those backups. Do you have a standard backup process? Can you meet your recovery time requirements? Do you know the backups are good? Do you have documentation of your backup history and verification? Are you backing up your instance configuration as well as the databases themselves?

dbatools has a suite of versatile Powershell functions designed to help you answer those questions confidently and quickly. In this presentation filled with practical examples, we’ll take a tour of the core dbatools functions for creating, restoring, and monitoring your backups, whether you’re managing one instance or dozens of them.

Runtime is 75-90 minutes. Target audience is DBAs, Powershell experience is not necessary.

Speaker:
Andy Levy
Database Administrator & dbatools fanatic
Andy is a database administrator, PowerShell fan, former developer, Open Source contributor, SQL Saturday organizer and user group leader. He’s worn a number of IT hats since 1999 before landing in database administration, including web server administration and development, systems integration, and database development. When he isn’t picking queries apart and wrangling an unruly herd of databases, he can be found making BBQ ribs or planning the next family vacation with his wife.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a language in depended, very popular, open standard format for data exchange between applications and services. On this session accompanied by numerous examples we should pass through the usage of JSON in MS SQL.
Main topics:
– Format MS SQL data in JSON format
– Read JSON data in MS SQL – Modify JSON data using JSON_MODIFY
– JSON functions, tips & tricks

Speaker:
For many years Damir is a passionate programmer and a Microsoft SQL Server developer (ver. 2000+).
He is a certificated Microsoft professional on various technologies. In 2020 Microsoft awarded him with Data Platform MVP.
Damir leads the Croatian SQL Server User Group (PASS) and he introduced and organizes SQL Saturday events in Croatia. Founder and organizer of #DataWeekender
He is working as Senior Database Developer @Span.eu.
Damir speaks on various community events and conferences.
When free he blogs about SQL @ https://blog.matesic.info.

Are you tired of not knowing who’s changing what on your SQL Servers? Maybe your company can’t afford to buy third-party auditing tools, but there’s no need to buy expensive auditing tools if you can’t afford them or don’t want to use them. You can know about everything changing on your SQL Servers without having to pay for a tool. By auditing with the built-in features of SQL Server Audit, you can report on usage to auditors, change user permissions or passwords without breaking functionality, and/or understand your workload to migrate parts or all of your database to the cloud or other database technologies. This session will help you understand how to use SQL Server Audit. You will also learn how to compile the results in a central location for easy reporting and learn how to email audit findings with a SQL Agent job.

Speaker:
Josephine Bush has over 10 years of experience as a Database Administrator. Her experience is extensive and broad-based, including in financial, business, and energy data systems using SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. She is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert: Data Management and Analytics. She holds a BS in Information Technology, an MBA in IT Management, and an MS in Data Analytics. She is the author of Learn SQL Database Programming published by Packt in May 2020. She blogs on sqlkitty.com and you can reach her on Twitter @hellosqlkitty.

Modern database administrators have many responsibilities, including perhaps their most important responsibility of performance tuning. Performance tuning takes many forms. It might include tuning
server settings, improving database designs, or even extensively tuning queries and query code. This becomes even more important when database workloads moved to the cloud because poor performance increases consumption of resources like CPU, memory, and IOPS.

In this session we will teach you how to conduct a database design review that yields improved storage behavior, consistent table designs, good data types choices, best practices for keys and constraints, and
strong indexing. The design review is scripted and does not require that the developers explain their code to you. Instead, you can run a set of scripts on a database that is actively testing workloads to see if
any anti-patterns are in play. We will also show examples of anti-patterns that are the direct result of poor database design choices.

Join us to learn this tips and techniques that improve not only your personal skillset, but also have the potential to vastly improve your SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance.

Prerequisites: Basic proficiency with core SQL statements, like CREATE, ALTER, DROP, GRANT, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Speaker: Kevin Kline
Kevin Kline is a noted database expert and software industry veteran. A long-time Microsoft Data Platform MVP and noted community leader in the IT industry, Kevin is a founder and former president of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS.ORG), as well as the author of popular IT books like “SQL in a Nutshell”. Kevin is a top-rated speaker at industry trade shows worldwide and has a monthly column at Database Trends magazine. He tweets at @kekline and blogs regularly. Kevin is Head Geek at SolarWinds, a leading vendor of database and infrastructure management tools

SQL Server is a leading enterprise database solution for good reason. However, it’s not the only popular RDBMS used in an increasingly cloud-first, price conscious world.

PostgreSQL is arguably becoming one of the most used alternatives today, and in 2021 all three major cloud platforms have one-click deployments for spinning up new instances. All of this adds up to the increased likelihood that you will be asked to manage an alternative RDBMS like PostgreSQL in the next 3-5 years.

In this session we’ll look at 10 areas of PostgreSQL through the lens of a SQL Server DBA to familiarize yourself with the main differences between the two platforms.

By the end of the session you will have enough information to connect to PostgreSQL with free tooling, modify common T-SQL to run correctly, get information about the state of the database, and help with basic query tuning.

Speaker: Ryan Booz, Developer Advocate at Timescale

Ryan is a Developer Advocate at Timescale, the supercharged time-series database built on PostgreSQL Prior to Timescale, Ryan worked for more than 17 years as a developer, DBA and product manager in multiple ISVs delivering SaaS products based on time-series data.

Ryan is a long-time DBA, starting with MySQL and Postgres in the late 90s. He spent more than 15 years working with SQL Server and the #SQLFamily and has a desire to bring some of that community spirit into the growing PostgreSQL world. He’s at the top of his game when he’s learning something new about the data platform or teaching others about the technology he loves.

Over the last few years the term Data Engineer has popularized in the IT industry and there are millions of openings found across the world posted on job sites. With the amount of data being generated and the challenges with leveraging it, this need for data engineering is not going away any time soon.

But what is data engineering? How does it relate to other IT roles like BI or ETL developer? And where can you learn and get yourself up to speed on this field? Azure offers Synapse Analytics as an all-encompassing analytics development service that can be great for learning as well! Microsoft took the power of the MPP database engine of SQL DW and added more powerful capabilities, full big data integration through Spark and data pipeline authoring to bundle the entire data engineer workflow in one environment.

In this demo-heavy session we will go over the main concepts behind Data Engineering and Synapse, with demos on how different tasks are done using this cloud-based integrated environment.

Speaker: Warner Chaves
Warner is a SQL Server Certified Master and SQL Server Principal Consultant at Pythian, a global Canada-based company specialized in DBA services. A brief stint in .NET programming led to his early DBA formation working for enterprise customers in Hewlett-Packard ITO organization. From there he transitioned to his current position at Pythian, managing multiple customers and instances in many versions and industries while leading a highly talented team of SQL Server DBAs. When he’s not working out of his office in Ottawa, Ontario he can be found on the sandy beaches of his home country of Costa Rica.

The cloud enables us to quickly and easily, create and destroy resources when we need them.

Automating this process reduces manual mistakes and the need for user input.

You can use Terraform to put Azure SQL Databases into Infrastructure as Code, then deploy them with Azure DevOps with any additional steps that your business requires for approvals or other processes

Once you can create your Azure SQL Database programmatically, a cool next step would be to be able to grant and remove access using automation as well.

With a sprinkling of dbatools and a couple of configuration changes, you can also set this up in Azure DevOps

This session will take you through the steps required to build an automated solution to create an Azure SQL Database with a Service Principal and create users and apply permissions using Azure DevOps, Terraform, Azure Key Vault and PowerShell.

Speaker:
Rob Sewell
Be-Whiskered PowerShell Ninja

Rob was a SQL Server DBA with a passion for Powershell, Azure, Automation, and SQL (PaaS geddit?). Now he just helps people. He is a Cloud and Data Center MVP and a Data Platform MVP, an officer for the PASS DevOps Virtual Chapter, co-leader of Data South West and PSConf EU organiser and has spoken at and volunteered at many Data and PowerShell events all over the world. He is a proud supporter of the Data and Powershell communities.

He relishes sharing and learning and can be found doing both via Twitter and his blog. He spends most of his time looking at a screen and loves to solve problems. He knows that looking at a screen so much is bad for him because his wife tells him so. Thus, you can find him on the cricket field in the summer and flying a drone in the winter.

He has a fabulous beard

Have you tried implementing source control? How has your continuous integration (CI) process gone?

This session is for developers, database administrators, database engineers, and data architects that want to automate their database deployments. Particularly for those individuals that have hit roadblocks along that way. We will discuss the differences between migration and stated-based deployment methods. We will also discuss options with branching and merging.

At the end of the session, attendees will know how to select the best deployment method for their environment. In addition, attendees will be familiar with branching and merging strategies that can be used as part of their continuous integration strategy.

Attendees should be familiar with general concepts about source control and be comfortable with Visual Studio or VS Code.

Presenter: Elizabeth Noble
Elizabeth Noble is a Director of Database Development in the metro Atlanta area. She is also the author of “Pro T-SQL 2019”. When she was introduced to her first database over 10 years ago, her whole world changed. Her passion is to help others improve the quality and speed of deploying database changes through automation. When she is not trying to automate all things, she can be found spending time with her dogs, playing disc golf, or taking a walk. She is also a frequent speaker at SQL Saturdays across the United States and was a first-time speaker at PASS Summit in 2019.

The work of database administrators does not stop at the database level. There are many tasks that require the use of external tools to maintain and improve our databases. These tasks can be very challenging when we use a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) such as Azure Database or Azure Elastic Pool.

Azure Logic Apps for the rescue! Azure logic apps and the Azure Database can interact in a two-way way. The database can trigger execution of logic apps and a logic app can trigger read and manipulate of the data stored in the database. For example, Azure logic Apps allow us to send email notifications triggered by DDL and DML actions in the database, it allows us to monitor database usage and database events, and it allows us to read the data stored in the database and use it in the content of the email.

For whom? Azure SQL Database is a fully “serverless” managed platform as a service (PaaS). This makes it very simple to be used without any need to maintain the host. It has a fully functional GUI using the Azure Portal, which means that we can use it without writing any code. If you are a DBA and you manage Azure databases, then this session is for you. No previous experience in developing applications is needed.

In this session I will show you how to send emails using Logic apps and interact with Azure SQL databases. I will go over common scenarios, and present practical examples with step-by-step guidance for implementing the solution. According to the time, I will show some tricks, tips, troubleshooting and automated maintenance tasks using Azure Logic Apps and the new Azure Logic App (Preview) services…

This session is a practical demonstration!

Speaker:
Ronen Ariely
Senior consultant and architect, data platform and application development, Microsoft MVP

Ronen Ariely is a senior consultant and architect, in the fields of data platform and application development. He has more than 15 years’ experience in variety programming languages and technologies, leading development teams, and software companies, SQL & BI enterprise level solutions. Ronen is active in communities (aka pituach) in the field of Programming, SQL Server, and T-SQL. He serves as Moderator at MSDN and as one of the Microsoft TechNet WIKI communities’ leaders. Ronen writes technical blogs, TechNet articles and blogs, and has been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.

In this session you will learn the best practices, tips and tricks on how to successfully use Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance on production environments and how the DBA job changed versus OnPremise. You will learn how to monitor and improve Azure SQL Database query performance. It will cover how using Query Store, Extended Events, DMVs to help for our monitoring and improve query response times when running their databases in the Microsoft Azure cloud. These learnings are fruit of Microsoft CSS support cases, and customer field engagements. This session includes several demos

Speaker:
Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz, Escalation Engineer Microsoft

José Manuel Jurado currently works as SQL Escalation Engineer and Subject Matter Expert in Azure SQL Database at Microsoft Spain. With over 20+ years of experience in SQL Server environments (administration and database development), he is a speaker for internal events at Microsoft and for public events such as SQLSaturday, SQL Nexus, SQLBits, Pass Summit, SQL Server Konferenze, TechReady, DotNetConference, and Azure BootCamp. In the past, he worked as Project Manager for large global retail company for more than 10 years developing projects using different Microsoft Technologies.