Ah, spring – that time of year when young men’s thoughts turn to T-SQL.  The next SSWUG V-Conference will be April 22-24th, and I’ll be giving a few sessions:

Log Shipping To The Cloud (300-level)

In an ideal world, we’d have a standby SQL Server in a disaster recovery datacenter, but we can’t always afford that luxury. In this session, I’ll explain how to log ship your database to Amazon S3, a cloud-based file service, and bring up a standby SQL Server in the event of an emergency. It’s like having your own disaster recovery datacenter, but without the cost – until emergency strikes.

Attendees will learn:

• What Amazon S3 is, and how it works as a log shipping target
• What Amazon EC2 is, and how you can turn on a new SQL Server in the cloud in a matter of minutes
• Best practices learned from real-life deployments

Log Shipping Basics (100-level)

The boss wants you to plan for disaster, and wants to know the business will be protected if the production SQL Server goes down. Be armed with answers about log shipping with this presentation, which will cover the basic concepts and how to implement it.

Attendees will learn:

• Best practices for log shipping setups
• How to use the secondary server for reporting purposes
• Risks involved with log shipping, and how to avoid them

Reaching Compliance with SQL Server 2008 (200-level)

To become a production DBA at a public company, hospital, bank or even just a security-minded firm, you need to understand the basics of regulatory compliance. In this session, you’ll learn how to talk the language and learn what tools are available in each version of SQL Server to make your job easier.

SQL Server Encryption (200-level)

Regulatory compliance needs are a big pain point for DBAs. How do we make sure our data stays safe? I’ll will explain the options available for SQL Server 2005 and 2008, do a Transparent Data Encryption implementation with SQL 2008, and demonstrate its strengths and weaknesses. Attendees will get scripts and sample Policy-Based Management policies.

If you sign up to attend, I’d highly recommend watching the live sessions on those days (22nd-24th) instead of watching the recorded sessions.  During the live sessions, some of the speakers actually attend, and you can ask them questions in the chat room.  I’ll definitely be there for all of my live sessions.