I am beyond excited to announce that I have been accepted to speak at the annual SQL PASS Summit 2013 in Charlotte, NC.  This will be my first time to speak at this event and I can’t wait!  The session I will be presenting is titled “How Active Directory Affects SQL Server”.

I have been working with SQL Server since the 2000 release and I have been working with Active Directory since it hit the shelf.  Prior to becoming a full time production DBA for Verizon, I was an AD guy and actually helped design and architect their worldwide Active Directory infrastructure.  I couldn’t be happier that this was the session that got picked from my submissions.  It’s a perfect melding of my two favorite technologies and I have a unique and rare perspective of both how they can work together and how they can work against each other.  For instance, have you enabled Instant File Initialization for your SQL Server instance?  Good!  Did you go back and make sure the setting was still there 90 minutes later?  If you haven’t then you better go double check it because Active Directory has a mechanism to not only change it, but persist that change.  If Active Directory was SQL Server’s kid then it just pulled a Ferris Bueller.

If you are planning to attend the conference make sure to add my session to your schedule.  I will explain the mechanism I alluded to in the above example along with all the other things good and bad that it can do, plus much more.  Here is the abstract:

If you have ever had a Kerberos or SSPI context error, then you won’t want to miss this session. SQL Server has a large surface area and Active Directory can influence a big part of it. I will discuss AD DNS configuration, Group Policy Objects, Kerberos (of course), and how all of them affect your SQL Server. By the end of the session you’ll have a check list of things to discuss with your domain administrator when you return to work.