David Pless
Principal Program Manager - Microsoft Corporation
Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
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David Pless is a Principal Program Manager in Azure Data at Microsoft, where he focuses on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, performance engineering, storage architecture, and Azure Arc. With nearly three decades of experience in the data platform industry and almost twenty years at Microsoft, David has worked across consulting, support, technical sales, and product engineering roles.
A Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), David specializes in SQL Server performance tuning, high availability and disaster recovery, Azure SQL, and cloud modernization. He is a frequent speaker at SQL Saturdays, Microsoft events, industry conferences, and user groups, where he shares practical lessons learned from helping customers run and optimize mission-critical SQL Server workloads at scale.
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Built-in Intelligence with Azure SQL and SQL Server 2022
Intelligent query processing is a key component to help business-critical workloads improve when running at scale, while remaining adaptive to the constantly changing world of data.
In this session we will cover how the latest SQL Server versions improve performance with features and enhancements under the intelligent database feature family. These features include query store and intelligent query processing that helps improves performance and scalability with minimal changes to your application or database design.
We will cover the scenarios where intelligent query processing can have the most benefit for your application workloads and how Query Store can help make it easier to identify poorly performing statements and respond to regression scenarios. We will cover Query Store use cases such as Query Store internals, performance regressions, and improvements in the latest versions of SQL Server including the new Query Store Hints improvement.
Managing SQL Server with Azure Arc Unleashed
Unlock the potential of your SQL Server investment
In today's hybrid world, managing SQL Server instances scattered across on-premises data centers, edge locations, and multi-cloud environments can feel like herding cats. But what if you could bring them all under one Azure-powered umbrella?
Join this session to explore SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc, an innovating solution that extends Azure's robust management, security, and governance tools to any SQL Server - without ripping and replacing your existing infrastructure.
We'll start with key concepts: How the lightweight Azure Arc agent enables seamless auto-registration for your SQL Servers, supporting flexible connectivity modes (direct for internet-facing setups or proxy for air-gapped networks).
From there, we'll dive into unifying your estate with centralized inventory, advanced monitoring via Azure SQL Assessment and Insights, and effortless governance that scales from a handful of instances to thousands.
We will also cover Arc Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and touch on Microsoft Defender for Cloud - Database Protection.
Get practical with real-world demos, including:
Azure Arc for SQL Server deployment made easy by leveraging the Azure portal and PowerShell.
Best practice assessment (BPA) analysis to identify SQL Server performance, security, configuration, and more where you can identify trends, what has changed from the last assessment, and analyze historical data.
Migration Made Simple: Use built-in assessments to gauge Azure readiness, identify optimization opportunities, and plan phased migrations without downtime.
Cost Control: Leverage pay-as-you-go licensing for dynamic workloads, with transparent billing tied directly to Azure Cost Management - perfect for bursting to the cloud during peaks.
Whether you're a DBA managing on-prem solution or plotting a hybrid future, this session arms you with actionable steps, troubleshooting tips, and battle-tested best practices to supercharge your SQL strategy. Walk away ready to assess, secure, and optimize your SQL Servers like never before.
Top Takeaways:
Centralize inventory, monitoring, security, and governance for SQL Server across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments using Azure Arc.
Evaluate migration readiness and discover cost-saving opportunities with Azure SQL Assessment and pay-as-you-go licensing.
Apply best practices for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server, from agent installation to policy enforcement and performance tuning.
Platform Innovations with SQL Server 2022 + Intel
Get ready for a journey through the cutting-edge platform advancements in SQL Server 2022! In this must-attend session, our Microsoft and Intel subject matter experts will take you on a tour of the latest platform innovations, demonstrating the new capabilities and solutions that are driving the next generation of database administration. Discover how Intel technologies are powering the SQL Server experience and hear about the latest hardware advancements from Intel that are shaping the future of the platform space. We'll dive into the backup compression improvement enabled by SQL Server 2022 and Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT). You'll learn how this integration allows for offloading of compute overhead, reduction of CPU usage, improvement of backup completion times, and reduction of storage consumption. We will also discuss the latest Intel hardware and where we are going next with SQL Server and Intel technologies. We will also cover Intel AVX-512 (Advanced Vector Extensions 512-bit) technology designed to accelerate the performance certain computing tasks, allowing the processor to perform multiple operations in parallel. SQL Server 2022 can leverage AVX-512 instructions to improve the performance of certain query operations by offloading compute-intensive operations to the processor. By utilizing AVX-512, SQL Server can take advantage of the improved parallelism and faster performance offered by modern processors, providing customers with faster query execution times and improved overall performance by offloading some of the work from the CPU to the processor. Don't miss your chance to be at the forefront of the platform revolution and discover the latest advancements in SQL Server and Intel technologies!
SQL Server 2022 - Next Level Scalability and Availability
In this session we will focus on the scalability and availability improvements in SQL Server 2022 driving advances for mission critical applications.
We will highlight scalability improvements in tempdb, buffer pool parallel scan and other engine improvements designed for predicable scalability and performance.
We will also focus on availability improvements in AlwaysOn Availability Groups with Contained availability group, parallel redo enhancements, and improved throughput for Distributed Availability Groups (DAG).
Finally, we will cover multi-write replication to enable multi-master writes across multiple locations.
We look forward to seeing you! Join us to talk about how your applications can maximize scalability and availability with SQL Server 2022.
SQL Server 2022 tempdb - The Uncontended
Over the years, there have been many recommendations regarding configuration options for tempdb.
tempdb is used by every database workload for temporary storage, and additionally for internal operations.
So, it’s important to get SQL Server’s tempdb as optimal as possible.
The behavior of tempdb has also changed over time, but what hasn't changed is the criticality of tempdb and how its proper use and configuration can have major implications in the performance of your application.
In this session we will discuss some of the improvements with tempdb in the latest versions of SQL Server and what good tempdb practices look like today.
We will also discuss the improvements in SQL Server that will unlock scalability of tempdb-heavy workloads now and into the future.
SQL Server has improved tempdb in every single release and SQL Server 2022 is no exception.
Modernizing SQL Server: Upgrade, Migrate, and Innovate with SQL Server 2025 & Azure SQL
This session is designed to help you modernize with confidence covering upgrading to SQL Server 2025 and migrating to Azure SQL.
In this session, we'll start with a brief look at the evolution of the SQL Server platform and how Microsoft’s data platform strategy has evolved from traditional on-premises deployments to fully managed cloud services. From there, we'll dive into the latest innovations in SQL Server 2025, including performance, security, availability, and AI-driven enhancements that provide compelling reasons to upgrade from older SQL Server releases.
We'll then explore the Azure SQL portfolio in depth, covering Azure SQL Database, Hyperscale, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. You'll learn the architectural differences between these services, where each solution excels, and how to select the right deployment model based on business, operational, and technical requirements.
Beyond product features, this session focuses on real-world modernization scenarios. We'll discuss common brownfield and greenfield migration patterns, application compatibility considerations, operational tradeoffs, and lessons learned from customer modernization projects. Attendees will gain practical guidance on assessing existing SQL Server estates, identifying modernization opportunities, and reducing migration risk through Microsoft's assessment and migration tooling.
Finally, we will cover methods to evaluate workloads and quickly identify the most appropriate Azure SQL destination based on technical requirements, operational preferences, and modernization goals.
Whether you're a DBA, architect, developer, or IT decision maker, you'll leave with a practical framework for modernizing SQL Server workloads and accelerating your path to Azure with greater confidence and clarity.
SQL Server Performance Monitoring: A Deep Dive with Tips and Tricks
Monitoring SQL Servers in the enterprise can be complex and it is difficult to get a real assessment of a single SQL Server instance and much more difficult to get the right performance health assessment from multiple servers in your enterprise.
Additionally, performance monitor counters aren't clear which ones to use and how to match these performance counters to DMV and wait statistics outputs.
In this session, we step way outside the box. We'll start with how Microsoft itself collects diagnostic data using SQL Log Scout, SQLdiag/PSSDIAG, and the PAL tool for threshold analysis these are the same tools CSS support engineers use when your escalation lands on their desk.
From there, we dive deep into PerfMon composite templates as deployable code, building your own custom performance counters using the SQL Server: User Settable Object counters, leveraging Resource Governor as a pure monitoring engine, automating alerting pipelines with PowerShell, and mining SQL Server's built-in black box - Ring Buffers and the always-on system_health session.
Every topic includes real demos and scripts you can take home and use Monday morning.
This is one of the sessions I can guarantee you will learn something new and valuable as we will be touching on some unique approaches and techniques for SQL Server performance monitoring.
Unleash the Beast: Scaling Azure SQL Virtual Machine with Premium Storage
Ready to unleash monster performance and scalability from your Azure SQL Virtual Machines? This session dives deep into the latest advancements in SQL Server on Azure VMs and the power of Premium Storage.
Join us to explore the newest VM series—our 'monster' lineup, including the Mbsv3, Mbdsv3, FXmsv2, and FXmdsv2 - built to attack your mission-critical SQL Server workloads.
Discover how these monsters, paired with Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk, smash through limits with up to 650,000+ IOPS, 10 GiBs of throughput deliver unmatched storage performance for even the most demanding SQL Server workloads.
We’ll walk through:
-The cutting-edge capabilities of the newest high-performance VM series
-The revamped storage provisioning experience with Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk
-Price-performance options for Azure SQL VM + storage
-Gain insights on storage health with the new IO Analysis Feature
Leave this session armed with the knowledge to supercharge your Azure SQL VM deployments and tame the toughest workloads.
Don’t miss out - awaken the monster with new scalable Azure VM and storage options!
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