Daniel Hutmacher

In this 20-minute love letter to SQL Server Management Studio, I'll share the most important productivity tips and some lesser-known features that you may have missed. We’ll look at keyboard shortcuts, editing tricks, version control, some practical development and debugging features, even a couple of brand-new tricks introduced in SSMS 22.

Working with date/time datatypes in T-SQL can be quite frustrating if you don’t have the tools and know-how. This session will cover the wide range of datatypes available in SQL Server/Azure SQL, and help you understand which ones are right for your goals. We’ll dig in to explicit and implicit conversions, optimal indexing strategies, and some hidden gotchas when working with date/time data.

With the recent introduction of new JSON functions and JSON indexes in SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL Database, this is a good time to learn what JSON is, and how to work with it in. While JSON support is a great addition to T-SQL, some of these new features will require a little planning and tweaking to get just right. We’ll cover the basics of the JSON format, common JSON functions in SQL Server, and how to make practical use of them when importing and exporting JSON data.

SQL injections can be found everywhere, including your ETL frameworks, your desktop apps, even your login prompts. In this session, we'll take a look at a wide range of code patterns that bad actors can exploit, from the obvious to the obscure, but we’ll also look at ways to prevent or mitigate the effects of SQL injection attacks.

One hard-boiled DBA, one rogue developer, one dead database. Step into the aftermath of a failed deployment, where our two protagonists examine the evidence and decipher the clues to get to the bottom of who, or what, killed the production database. Was it a bug, an honest mistake, or was it something more sinister? As this riveting story of lies and database corruption unravels, our investigators will uncover the shocking truth of what really happened that fateful Friday evening.

Rather than overwhelming your client app with all of the data at once, you want to implement paging in your SQL database. But things have not gone well. Let’s take five and look at some common pitfalls, how the simple solution may not be the best, and how to think like a SQL performance tuner.