22-25 April 2026 
Re-architecting your old-school database into Azure
2016TL; DR
The quickest way to migrate your on-premises OLTP database to Azure is to "Lift & Shift". In this session we will investigate how we could use more of the cloud features like SQL Database, Redis Cache, Search, etc.
Session Details
The quickest way to migrate your on-premises OLTP database to Azure is to simply "Lift & Shift".
You create a vm in Azure and size it to match your local system and move your database into it.
This might not be the most cost effective way though and also, you still have to do all the database maintenance yourself.
In this session we will investigate how we could use more of the cloud features like SQL Database, Redis Cache, Search, etc. in order to truly scale our system. And we'll see if this increases or lowers the total cost of ownership.
This excercise is about an OLTP system but we will also look at how it affects loading our DWH from this new setup.
You create a vm in Azure and size it to match your local system and move your database into it.
This might not be the most cost effective way though and also, you still have to do all the database maintenance yourself.
In this session we will investigate how we could use more of the cloud features like SQL Database, Redis Cache, Search, etc. in order to truly scale our system. And we'll see if this increases or lowers the total cost of ownership.
This excercise is about an OLTP system but we will also look at how it affects loading our DWH from this new setup.
3 things you'll get out of this session
Speakers
Andre Kamman's previous sessions
A Python primer for DBAs, how to talk to a SQL Server
Tinkered with Powershell but not with Python yet? Let's get you started, and we'll do that with some practical examples focussed around talking to SQL Server and importing and exporting some data.
The Enterprise Cloud Journey Learning Curve
From the perspective of a DBA who had to work with the internal fairly new Cloud Competence Center of an Enterprise to get many TB's of data into Azure, a story about the learning curve corporations go through
Creating complex labs from start to finish with Lability
Introduction on how to use the Powershell library Lability to create complex SQL Server based test labs.
Powershell community scripts for DBAs
We will take a look into my favourite Powershell scripts
Visualizing performance tuning data
Over the years I've tried various ways to look at output from SQL Server for performance tuning reasons. We will look at virtual_file_stats, waitstats, the buffer cache etc. and we will visualize them in various ways
ORM Tuning From A Database Perspective
Most ORM's tend to be very chatty and generate complex queries. In this session we will look at optimizing database access in ORM's. Using Nhibernate, LINQ &Entity Framework in the demos, we will examine how your ORM talks to the database and why.
Build your own Monitoring Environment with Powershell
Learn how to write Powershell that will use Remoting to run scripts parallel on any number of servers. We'll talk about remoting, background jobs and how to collect and report on the results
How to write professional Powershell scripts
It's time to take your ad-hoc Powershell scripts turn them into your very own module. And while we're at it we will add proper error handling, parameterization & pipeline support. I will also demonstrate how to build help, force and whatif support.
Running SQL Server 2014 on a Scale Out File Server
In this session I will show you how to use Storage Spaces and Auto Tiering and some other features to build a highly available, fast, scale out file server. And then we'll use it to host SQL Server data & log files on it.
ETL shootout-SSIS vs Powershell
I know what you're thinking, Powershell is not an ETL tool. And you're probably right. But I keep running into weird requests that were just easier to fix with Powershell. I'll show you why some things are not easy in SSIS.
A better SSIS? Migrating a datawarehouse to SQL Server 2012
SSIS in SQL Server 2012 has a lot of new features to help control larger projects. I'm doing a trial migration of our datawarehouse (100+ packages, 1TB+ db size) This session will be a will be a walkthrough of this process and a lessons learned
How DBAs can use PowerPivot for Performance Tuning / Troubleshooting
PowerPivot can be a great troubleshooting / performance tuning tool for a dba besides just loading all the data in a database and start querying. I'll show the pro's and cons of PowerPivot while trying work with waitstats, profiler data etc.
RoboDBA
I'll explain how to manage a large environment of 400+ instances in such a way that it's also useful if you have only 5 instances. Expect 50% processes and war stories and 50% demos and scripts (lots of PowerShell of course, but not everything)
Automating SSIS
I had to import and process 100+ files for my latest project and wondered if there was a way to generate SSIS packages based on a repository table containing the rules. As it turns out, this can be done but the programming model is a bit awkward.
The samples that you can find online are not allways functional and debugging is difficult. I did get it to work though and will show you how I did it and what problems I ran into.
After this session you will know how to generate packages that contain sources, destinations, cached lookups, derived columns, conditional splits, sorts, union all, etc.
This session is not about the script component inside SSIS but about generating SSIS packages and programmatically reading and changing properties of existing packages.This session should also be usefull if you're not a full blown developer but more of a DBA type. I'm a DBA and I got through this :-)