The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs...

Also, catch Thursday's keynote with Quentin Clark which will feature a cool IaaS demo!

SQL Server in Windows Azure VM Sessions

CLD-309-A SQLCAT: Best Practices and Lessons Learned on SQL Server in an Azure VM

Steve Howard, Arvind Ranasaria - Wednesday 11/6 10:15

This session looked at some best practices to optimize Networking, Memory, Disk IO and high availability based on lessons learned during SQLCat work with customer deployments. Well worth catching the recording.

SQL Server in Azure VM patterns: Hybrid Disaster Recovery, data movement and BI

Guy Bowerman, Peter Saddow, Michael Washam, Ross LoForte - Friday 11/9 9:45 Rm 613

[Note: In the guides this has an outdated title.]

This session has a focus on SQL Server Azure VM solutions. Starting with the basics and then going deeper into:

- New features in the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.0 to help plan and size SQL VM migrations.
- A Look at a Windows Azure VM SQL Server app making use of load balancing and SQL Server high availability features.
- A BI case study running SQL BI components in Azure VMs and making use of Windows 8 tiles.
- A training class in a VM case study.

SQLOS Sessions

DBA-500-HD Inside SQLOS 2012 (half-day session)

Bob Ward - Wednesday 11/6 1:30pm

Bob Ward from CSS applies his wealth of experience to look at the internals of SQLOS and what's changed in the various SQL 2012 components, including memory, resource governor, scheduler.

DBA-403-M: SQLCAT: Memory Manager Changes in SQL Server 2012

Gus Apostol, Jerome Halmans - 1:30pm

Covers the redesigned SQLOS memory manager in SQL Server 2012 including the new page allocator for any size pages (and all that implies), DMVs, demo's. Not sure why this was placed at the same time as the SQLOS half-day session, but since it's recorded it's available for catch-up.

- Guy