There are countless articles, blog posts, messages, and even conference sessions glorifying new features, services, and versions, urging you to embrace innovations and implement them in your production environment to stay current with evolving technologies.

However, in a world where downtime is not an option, developing and maintaining databases in a 24/7 environment presents a significant challenge. How can you ensure seamless updates without compromising performance? What techniques are essential for indexing and managing statistics in constantly active databases? Who writes the code that ends up on production servers, and how can you be sure their expertise is sufficient? How should you prepare for an upgrade to a new version, decide which new features to enable, and determine which databases need them and which might suffer from them? What should be done before the upgrade and what afterward? Who should be involved?

This session will delve into these questions and more, offering insights and strategies from real-world experience in developing and managing MS SQL Server databases that never sleep.