Designing Sustainable SQL Server Migrations: Why Efficiency Starts Before the Cloud

Most SQL Server cloud migrations promise efficiency gains, yet many organisations unknowingly carry forward design decisions that increase both cost and carbon in the cloud.
This session challenges the assumption that sustainability begins after migration, showing how choices around edition usage, core sizing, and high availability architectures directly shape resource consumption before a workload ever leaves on-premises. Through real-world SQL scenarios, it explores how DBAs, developers, and data professionals can influence efficiency without ever touching a finance dashboard, and how emerging AI workloads amplify the impact of these decisions.
Attendees will leave with a practical set of questions to assess their own environments and a clearer understanding of how to design SQL Server migrations that are not only cost-effective, but genuinely sustainable.

Attendees will gain:

Pre-migration optimization strategies to identify inefficient SQL Server design decisions that drive up cloud costs and carbon footprint
Practical assessment framework to evaluate current environments for sustainability opportunities
Future-ready insights on how AI workloads amplify resource consumption impacts