This weekend, I’m flying to Phoenix to be a part of SQLSaturday there. I will present two new sessions on Saturday:

Extending Your Availability Group for Disaster Recovery

Did you know that SQL Server Availability Groups can be a great solution for disaster recovery?  Availability groups have become well known for their high availability capabilities, and for good reason: they work well, they remove some of clustering’s limitations, and they are fairly straightforward to setup.  Extending an availability group to multiple sites for disaster recovery becomes more complicated.  A lot of moving parts have to come together for it to work properly – SQL Server, Windows, Active Directory, and DNS all get involved in this advanced configuration.  In this session, we’ll discuss some of the factors that complicate a multi-site availability group deployment, and we’ll walk through a multi-site deployment so you can see how it’s done. (Level: Intermediate)

Protecting Your Data With Encryption

We’ve all seen the recent news stories about companies whose data has been stolen by hackers.  What was once a rare event has become all too common, and companies large and small are at risk.  While it isn’t always possible to prevent intrusions, you can reduce the risk by encrypting your data.  In this presentation, I’ll show you the four ways that SQL Server provides to encrypt data: hashes, cell-level encryption, database-level encryption (also known as transparent data encryption), and backup encryption.  We’ll also discuss the keys required for each type of encryption and discuss how to protect the keys themselves. (Level: Intermediate)

Pre-conference sessions will be held on Friday, and the main conference is on Saturday. If you’re in the Phoenix area, stop by and say hello. I hope to see you there!