Uros Milanovic

If you plan to migrate and modernize your SQL workloads in the cloud, Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) is your best choice - now reimagined for speed, scale, and flexibility. In this session we will deep‑dive into the Next‑Gen SQL MI GP architecture and how it delivers faster performance, greater scalability and smarter resource tuning, making it a great choice for your key database workloads.

Modern applications need databases with high availability and resilience. You can build the most resilient databases with highest availability using the latest capabilities of SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL. In this session we will deep dive through architectures, configurations, and our industry leading SLAs which will help you meet your availability, resilience and disaster recovery needs.

See how organizations are adopting Azure SQL Database Hyperscale for new and growing workloads. We’ll walk through real implementations—including scaling from zero to hundreds of databases— to learn what DBAs and devs learned along the way, and show demos of the tools and features that made those deployments successful.

Managing SQL performance across your environments can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Introducing a fully managed performance monitoring solution that provides near real-time data, scales effortlessly, and delivers actionable insights for all workloads on Azure SQL and SQL Server. You’ll see just how fast and easy it is to monitor SQL performance, without any operational overhead.

Performance tuning in the cloud isn’t just a matter of bigger cores and faster disks, it’s about choosing the right deployment model and knowing which levers you can (and can’t) pull. In part 1 of our 2 part session, we will start with a pragmatic tour of Azure SQL options, then contrasts performance tuning when you manage the infrastructure yourself on SQL on Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS) versus when you move to a managed platform with Azure SQL (PaaS). We’ll map familiar DBA responsibilities (IO, memory/CPU, tempdb, HA/DR, patching, and maintenance) to their cloud equivalents, and add the cost angle: right-sizing compute, understanding consumption vs reserved capacity, and recognizing when performance “fixes” simply shift spend to another meter. You’ll see what you still control, what changes, and what the platform takes off your plate to supercharge your environments.

Don’t know where to start when it comes to choosing where to run SQL Server on Azure? Join this session to learn about the latest infrastructure for SQL on Azure. Get tips on how to quickly identify the VMs best suited for high performance with lower costs. Suited for DBAs who want to continuously improve the developer and end user experience while also keeping FinOps happy.

Part 2 of our session is demo-heavy and focuses on making Azure SQL (as well as SQL Server 2025) databases faster and more performant. You’ll see how to use Query Store and DMVs to understand workloads, spot regressions, and validate improvements, then how Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) features can change plan quality and runtime behavior, especially as cardinality estimates, memory grants, and row goals shift across executions. We’ll also cover practical optimization patterns for PaaS: index strategy and tuning workflow, parameter sensitivity approaches, resource governance, and where automatic tuning helps (and where you still need to intervene). You’ll leave with a repeatable troubleshooting flow and a clear mental model for optimizing Azure SQL, without trying to recreate every on prem habit in a managed world.