I’ll be doing a precon for SQLSaturday #422 in Oklahoma City on August 28th, 2015 titled “Creating a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plan” .  If you are in the area or thinking of attending this event, I would love to have you in the class.  We are going to cover backups, windows clustering, AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and more.  This class will take each of those technologies in a progressive order to build on each other.  At the end of the day we will have a single solution built out in virtual machines on my laptop that use all of those technologies to build a comprehensive and real world high availability and disaster recovery plan.

Still not convinced?  Here are some testimonials from previous classes.

Denver Attendee

This past weekend was SQL Saturday #331 Denver. I always enjoy SQL Saturdays, but I was especially looking forward to this weekend because I was going to attend a SQL Saturday Pre-Con for the first time! The pre-con was fantastic! The Denver SQL Server User Group did an outstanding job, and it was a wonderful day of learning and networking.

I attended Ryan Adams’ session A Day of High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Ryan did an excellent job with this all-day session. You could tell that his agenda was carefully planned to build upon each module. Ryan’s first module was an in-depth tour of backups and restores, pointing out that these concepts were foundational to all High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. In his next module, Ryan expanded on backup/restores as he introduced us to mirroring. Ryan then walked us through the concept of Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). Culminating in his module on AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups, Ryan tied all the concepts together providing a holistic view of HA/DR. I would definitely recommend this all-day session to anyone looking to expand his or her knowledge of HA/DR. To find out more about Ryan Adams, you should check out his blog at ryanjadams.com.

Madison Attendee

One thing I liked the most about this session is the speed of the presenter was just right.  He would get our feedback frequently to see how fast or slow we want to move.  He had a lot of real world examples from his own experience and from other participants.

Madison Attendee

Great lecture!  Ryan is a very logical presenter; made the material extremely easy to understand.  I greatly enjoyed the class.

Want the full description?  Here it is:

Abstract: You have been tasked to configure a high availability and/or disaster recovery plan to ensure your company’s systems are always up and running while able to withstand a disaster. SQL Server offers several options, but how do you choose the right one to meet your business requirements? I’ve been faced with this same problem. I’ll help you figure out how to choose the right technology. We will start off with a solid foundation in backups and demonstrate how to configure them for initializing the various HA/DR technologies while also cutting your backup and restore time in half. You will see how you can keep an offsite copy of your database in sync with your production system with mirroring.

You’ve read that several of the HA/DR solutions require Windows Failover Clustering, but you don’t know anything about managing a complicated Windows cluster. I’ll show you how to setup and configure a Windows cluster and we’ll build on that with SQL Server AlwaysOn Failover Clustering Instances that provide the 99.999% of up-time your management demands. Lastly we’ll dive into how to setup AlwaysOn Availability Groups to solve both HA and DR in one solution. We will see how all these technologies work together by discussing a case study and developing a comprehensive solution just like you have to do when you return to the office. Here’s what you will learn:

Planning a backup strategy to avoid a data disaster
Cutting your backup and restore time in half when initializing DBs for Mirroring or Availability Groups
Configuring mirroring to keep production in real-time sync with an offsite database copy
Learning configuration tips to increase throughput
Configuring a Windows Failover Cluster to meet that five 9s business requirement
Discovering how to properly configure a Windows Cluster quorum to support the AlwaysOn feature set
Implementing a SQL AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance
Creating a SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group to solve both your HA and DR requirements in one solution

You’re just as excited and convinced as these fine folks, right? Then click the link below to get signed up.