Security continues to be a top concern for database administrators as they face the ever-present threat of data breaches and the increasing pressures from compliance regulations such as PCI and HIPAA. Fortunately, SQL Server 2008 delivered some key features, such as TDE and SQL Server Audit, to help administrators achieve their security goals and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 makes further progress with enhancements to Audit and security manageability. This session takes an experienced users approach to the advanced topic of recent security enhancements to SQL Server and explains the new changes coming to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and how they can help you satisfy your security objectives.

This session will describe how to build practical end-to-end HA and DR solutions for mission critical applications using Microsoft SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn technologies, for example, how to combine Failover Cluster Instances with Availability Groups to provide a complete HA and DR solution, how to use Availability Groups Multiple Secondaries to replace existing database mirroring + log shipping solutions. We will share learning's from early customer engagements, and discuss some practical customer examples on why they picked a particular solution. We will also discuss upgrade from existing solutions to new Microsoft SQL Server 2012 solutions with minimal downtime.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces a number of T-SQL enhancements. This session gives you a comprehensive view of what is coming in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and also provides insight into best practices

In this session we will look at a new tool in SQL Server 2012 called Distributed Replay that can be used for different types of testing using real application workloads. One of the examples we will demonstrate is how DReplay can be used to perform application compatibility testing in preparation for upgrading to SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server AlwaysOn provides the flexibility of protecting the application database and also the instance as a whole. AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances enhances the existing Failover Clustering feature and delivers faster failover, support for multi-site clustering and other enhancements that improve availability, performance and manageability. This session provides an in-depth view of the enhancements and also provides best practices around cluster configuration.

It is important for businesses to meet the high availability SLA's for their mission critical applications. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces SQL Server AlwaysOn, the new high availability and disaster recovery solution that will help achieve the required 9's for your applications. In this session we introduce the new AlwaysOn Solution and provide a drill down into the Availability Groups feature which is the new feature that help improve availability for application databases. In this session we will go over the various capabilities and also how to implement specific solutions that will help achieve your availability SLA's.

The hardware investments you make to deploy a high availability solution is typically very high. Normally the return of investment from typical high availability deployments are low since the secondary servers are not utilizable till a failover happens. With SQL Server AlwaysOn you now have the option of Active Secondary(s) which allow you to optimize your hardware utilization and improve performance on the primary system by offloading your reporting workload and maintenance operations to Active Secondary(s).This presentation is divided into two parts. The first part will focus on offloading database and log backup to active secondary (s), how to configure these backups across secondary(s) and how to construct the backups taken across multiple secondary (s) into a coherent restore model. The second part will focus on offloading reporting workload to secondary replica and the best practices around it.

The hardware investments you make to deploy a high availability solution is typically very high. Normally the return of investment from typical high availability deployments are low since the secondary servers are not utilizable till a failover happens. With SQL Server AlwaysOn you now have the option of Active Secondary(s) which allow you to optimize your hardware utilization and improve performance on the primary system by offloading your reporting workload and maintenance operations to Active Secondary(s).This presentation is divided into two parts. The first part will focus on offloading database and log backup to active secondary(s), how to configure these backups across secondary(s) and how to construct the backups taken across multiple secondary(s) into a coherent restore model. The second part will focus on offloading reporting workload to secondary replica and the best practices around it.

This session will walk you through the Xevent infrastructure, the enhancements that were made in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and provide real-world examples on how to use Xevents to solve real-world problems.