I am excited and humbled to be speaking at the PASS Summit for my second year in a row! There were 943 submissions and only 144 spots, so I am really excited and honored to be a part of the largest and most amazing SQL Server conference in the world.  They are expecting around 5,000 people this year in Seattle from November 4-7.

The current full conference price is $1595 and considering the speakers are consultants and folks like you and me that deploy these technologies in the real world every day, it’s worth every penny.  However, today (June 27th, 2014) is the last day to register at that price.  It goes up by $300 to $1895 tomorrow.  I have more good news.  You can contact your local chapter or virtual chapter to get a discount code worth $150 off.  The codes are good at the current price and after the price hike.  There will be more price hikes as the conference date gets closer.

I’m President of the PASS Performance Virtual Chapter so if you are looking for that code, or don’t have time to get one from your chapter, you can use this code:

VCSUM23

At the Summit I will be presenting a session titled “SQL Server AlwaysOn Quickstart”.  I would love to see you in my session.  Even if you have seen me present this session before, I’ll be making some changes and adding content since I have more time.  It is a beginner level introduction, but I talk about every aspect of the technology.  Here is the abstract so you know what to expect, and I hope to see you there!

In this presentation I’ll explain what the SQL Server AlwaysOn high availability and disaster recovery solution is all about.  I’ll talk about the different levels of protection it provides through Windows Clustering, SQL Clustering, and Availability Groups.  We’ll discuss how these three things come together to protect your databases. We’ll finish with a dive into availability group configuration, the new capabilities it gives us, and what’s new in SQL Server 2014.