Karim Ourtani

In today’s fast‑paced development environments, relying on manual, ad‑hoc scripts to modify SQL Server databases is a recipe for inconsistency, deployment friction, and elevated risk. This session equips IT professionals and developers with a pragmatic roadmap for transitioning to fully automated change‑management…

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, the ability to introduce new features and toggle them without deploying new code is a game-changer. This session will explore the concept of feature flags and how they can be implemented directly within databases to manage product features dynamically.

Branching strategies are essential for any data professional - whether you're a DBA, DEV or BI professional. Even as a data professionals you can create and manage different versions of your code, data, and models without affecting the main branch/definition of your code, data, and models. Branching also enables easy collaboration, experimentation, and testing in a safe and organized way. In this session, we will introduce the basic concepts of branching, such as branch creation, merging, and deletion. We will also discuss some common branching strategies, such as feature branches, release branches, and hotfix branches. Finally, we will put this into practice using Git as well as try and provide you with some best practices and tips for using branching effectively in your data projects.

Entity Framework (EF) has been around for some time, and what never seems to amaze me is the way in which developers and DBA's still don't seem to agree on whether EF is a good thing or not. In this session: I will try to explain how EF actually works so you as a DBA understand why developers love working with EF. What is "Code First"? What is "Database First"? Is their a middleground to be found? I will also try to explain how you can work WITH your developers and get EF implemented and still have performance up to the high standards that you as DBA are used to. Actually I will try to approach this from both the DBA as the Developer's point of view, A RED Team vs BLUE Team of Entity Framework if you will.