In the last two decades, we’ve moved from hand-cranked SQL scripts and "huddling" around a single CRT monitor to fix production bugs, to the high-speed world of EF Core migrations and automated CI/CD pipelines as we evolve our DevOps practices. But as we’ve traded our "stick shift" precision for the "automatic transmission" of modern abstractions, have we lost the art of the database?

In this session Gordon Beeming will take a trip through the evolution of how we ship data. We’ll look at:
* The Agentic Future - How AI agents might finally let us have our cake and eat it, giving us back high-performance, deterministic SQL design without the manual overhead.
* The Human Element - How moving from office huddles to remote Teams calls added a "latency" to our problem-solving.
* The Modern Plumbing - Navigating the hidden complexities of Azure SQL, from Private Link and vNet integration to the "magic" of keyless deployments with Managed Identities.
* The Abstraction Trap - Why EF Core makes us faster but often leaves us one layer too far from the metal when things go wrong.

Whether you’ve been shipping SQL since the days of "running it live" or you’re just trying to get your first Private Endpoint to talk to a GitHub runner, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of where we’ve been and why the future of the "Digital DBA" might be brighter than you think. 🚀