22-25 April 2026 
SQL Server 2016, New Features & Enhancements
2016TL; DR
SQL Sever 2016 is just around the corner and with it come some great new features and enhancements to existing capabilities, in this session we will look at some of these and understand how they might make us change the way that we look at designing
Session Details
SQL Sever 2016 is just around the corner and with it come some great new features and enhancements to existing capabilities, in this session we will look at some of these and understand how they might make us change the way that we look at designing and implementing SQL Server solutions. We will focus on the SQL Server engine, covering topics including Operational Analytics, Temporal & Stretch Tables and Always Encrypted. And we will be having a look at some of the old favorites, including enhancements to In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton) & AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
By the end of this session you will have a jump-start on getting ready for the next version of SQL Server, whether you are an application developer, DBA or Business Intelligence developer.
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.