22-25 April 2026 
Upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2014
2015TL; DR
With Microsoft SQL Server 2005 going End Of Life in early 2016 it is vital to start planning your migration to a supported version of Microsoft SQL Server. let me help you get ready for this by helping you understand the process and tools available.
Session Details
An upgrade these days is not always a simple case of backup and restore or upgrading the software in place as it used to be. Rigorous planning is needed to ensure a successful project, ranging from gathering the business requirements, understanding the scope and performing the discovery phase all the way through to the planning testing and migration.
In this session we will discuss how business requirements help drive upgrade approach. We will look at the free tooling that is available for SQL Server environment analysis and enumerate the upgrade paths for different version of SQL Server. Moving through the stages to identify what to look for and how to capture data on a pre-upgrade environment, and interpret the data to scale a new environment. We will address design for SQL Server on-premises and in Microsoft Azure VMs. Finally we will cover validating your upgraded SQL Server environment. We will look at the options for side-by-side and in-place upgrades, and approaches such as mirroring, log shipping, backup and restore, and detaching and attaching the files.
In this session we will discuss how business requirements help drive upgrade approach. We will look at the free tooling that is available for SQL Server environment analysis and enumerate the upgrade paths for different version of SQL Server. Moving through the stages to identify what to look for and how to capture data on a pre-upgrade environment, and interpret the data to scale a new environment. We will address design for SQL Server on-premises and in Microsoft Azure VMs. Finally we will cover validating your upgraded SQL Server environment. We will look at the options for side-by-side and in-place upgrades, and approaches such as mirroring, log shipping, backup and restore, and detaching and attaching the files.
3 things you'll get out of this session
Speakers
John Martin's previous sessions
The Swiss Cheese Security Pattern
Understanding that there is no panacea when it comes to securing your data assets is important. We will look at how to adopt the right mindset and then build a secure architecture to minimise the risk to your data.
Introduction to Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Join John as he introduces Terraform as a cloud agnostic management interface for taking a code first approach to cloud infrastrucutre deployments.
Making Managed Instance Perform, a dive into storage.
Moving to the cloud means that we need to take a different approach when it comes to how we design and tune databases. Managed Instance included, get the storage configuration wrong and it will not perform. We'll look at the storage options and architecture for Managed Instance before demonstrating how to get tune the storage layer to get the performance we need
In-Memory OLTP, how to use it
We have all heard about In-memory OLTP and how fast it can go, but just how do you use it? In this session we will look at how to migrate a system to use this new capability.