Many SQL Server environments support mission-critical applications that rely heavily on T-SQL, stored procedures, and long-established patterns. While teams increasingly need global availability, resilience, and elastic scale, full migrations to new platforms often take years and introduce significant risk.

This session presents a practical, phased approach for extending SQL Server workloads to CockroachDB as the target distributed database, without forcing an immediate rewrite of existing T-SQL application code. By utilizing advanced migration strategies and real-time translation tools, organizations can bridge the gap between legacy systems and modern cloud-native databases. These tools convert T-SQL code to PostgreSQL-compatible syntax on the fly, allowing you to start quickly while giving your team the breathing room to make long-term architectural decisions.
Rather than positioning modernization as a replacement exercise, this talk focuses on coexistence and controlled migration, where SQL Server remains in place for critical systems while teams gradually adopt CockroachDB for new, less-critical, or geographically distributed workloads. The result is faster time to value, lower risk, and a clear path to always-on, multi-region architectures.