Speaker

Michael Wall

Michael Wall

Architect/DBA at 3Cloud Consulting

Vancouver, Washington, United States

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Michael Wall has been an IT professional going back to when he had his own software store and worked with his customers with their “dose” problems. Originally hired by a small consulting firm to write web pages, he was thrust into the SysAdmin world when their lead consultant changed the passwords of all of the servers at a major pulp and paper company’s systems to 100%s$%t and walked out the door. He was sent down with a copy of UNIX for Dummies and 50 cents for the bus ride back. Fast forward a few years, he was asked if he wanted to be a DBA after successfully managing a fifty server Y2K upgrade. Since then, he’s never looked back and has survived a number of data and system challenges.
When not wrangling cats at home, he currently keeps busy with being active in the SQL Community by presenting and coordinating. He is blessed with a wonderful family and two lazy cats and keeps treading water literally down at the local pool.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • database administration
  • migration
  • azure
  • sqlserver
  • professional development

Azure Best Practices for Lift and Shift

Going to the Cloud can be a very scary proposition for most companies, but many of your fears can be mitigated as long as you prepare for the experience. Come learn with me and learn from my experiences as we cover the preparatory steps that can be taken to improve the initial experience. Next, we will be review all of the items that need to be setup in order to maintain an expected level of performance. Next, we will be working on how to improve performance on an existing hybrid VM running SQL Server. Finally, we will learn how to use Azure Monitor and Azure Metrics to maintain your investment in the cloud!
This will be a deep dive into Azure Storage layer and configuration, be ready for some optimization fun!
Note, this session will primarily deal with issues on a hybrid VM running SQL Server in Azure. We will be covering performance issues for Azure SQL instances with some real life examples of production servers.

Becoming a Master by Giving it all Away

Novices absorb knowledge like a sponge, immediates horde it for themselves, and Masters just simply give it away. This a simple yet powerful phrase that you too can use to advance your skills, your career, and your life! By holding onto your knowledge, you are literally keeping yourself from moving forward in all aspects of your life. Come to an fun and inspirational session on how you too can become a Master!

Storage: You want to put what where?

Migrating to the cloud has become a fairly commonplace activity, but what do you do once your systems and data are up there? If I’ve chosen a VM, how do I set up my storage? Should I choose premium disk or ultra? What are the limitations? What about the cost?
Now we have the choice of Azure SQL Business Critical? Is my business critical? Why would I need such a solution? It’s the same with Azure SQL Managed Instance! There are multiple tiers of service and storage and which one is needed for my business?
Join us for a session that dives deep into the various options in the cloud for storage, how to determine your business needs, and finally look at some real life scenarios. Everything has changed and nothing has changed in the migration to the cloud, but there are a number of tips and tricks that can be used in order to optimize your not so cheap investment in the cloud!

SQL MI - Making the leap

With the advent of Next Gen SQL MI, SQL MI can truly be said to be a "Fairly" cost-effective solution for migrating your data estate to the cloud! Come join us while we consider the following:
Which SQL MI flavor will work for me?
What's under the covers?
What method will work for migrating?
What are some of the limitations and gotchas before I migrate?
How do I setup DR in SQL MI?

Bring your question for an interactive session!

Azure Backup - ready for prime time?

Azure Backup has some limitations. We'll be comparing the performance with backups locally, to a storage account, and maybe something else!

Let's go over all of the different options for when you're getting ready to move your SQL Server backups to the cloud and also what happens when you perform the restores! "Your last backup is only as good as your last restore..."

Using different sizes of databases, we'll discuss how long it takes to backup and restore these databases to a variety of storage options in the cloud.

Don't worry, we're NOT going to do live demos of backups....

A Tale of Two D365s

Are you a DBA who's been told to connect your company's D365 instance to a data lake for reporting? If so, you should talk to me. There are two ways for this to happen and I'll be talking about both ways.

There are lessons to be learned with both, and both have their advantages and disadvantages!

We will cover the few gotchas and then talk about how to set up your Azure environment to be ready for the flood of D365 data.

Trust me (I hate that phrase), but it's a lot easier to report on D365 from a data lake!

SQL Saturday Jacksonville 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming

May 2025 Jacksonville, Florida, United States

Michael Wall

Architect/DBA at 3Cloud Consulting

Vancouver, Washington, United States

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