PASS Data Community Summit Webinar Series: Learn From the Community, Then Meet Them in Seattle

PASS Summit West takes place November 9-11, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, and it’s the flagship event of the year for the data community.

To get you ready, we’re hosting a free webinar series running from July through October featuring speakers who are also taking the stage in Seattle. Every two weeks, you’ll hear directly from practitioners, experts, and Redgate ambassadors on topics aligned with the themes shaping the data world right now including AI, analytics, cloud, and database management.

Exploring SQL Server 2025’s Practical Operational Benefits for DBAs

SQL Server 2025 hasn’t grabbed headlines the way some past releases have, especially with AI dominating the conversation everywhere else. But for the people who actually keep databases running, this release is a big one. In this PASS Seattle Webinar Series 2026 session, Deborah Melkin (Senior Database Reliability Engineer at GLG, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and Redgate Community Ambassador) and Andy Yun (Field Solution Architect at Everpure/Pure Storage and Redgate Community Ambassador) walked through the operational improvements that matter most once you’re the one on call.

Deborah and Andy covered how Standard Edition finally gets meaningful hardware limit increases, plus a new Standard Developer Edition that lets your dev team build against the same feature set you’re actually running in production. They also dug into Resource Governor’s expansion to Standard Edition and TempDB, giving you a real way to stop one noisy workload from starving everything else on the instance.

From there, the session moved into the two features with the biggest day-to-day impact: Accelerated Database Recovery, which turns hours-long rollbacks into a near-instant operation and now extends to TempDB, and optimized locking, which tackles writes blocking writes so high-concurrency workloads stop tripping over their own lock escalation. They closed with a run of Availability Groups fixes, from a hardened restart threshold to a long-standing quorum bug finally getting resolved, that are easy to overlook on a feature list but make a real difference during a failover at 3 a.m.

Watch the Full Recording

We only scratched the surface here. Watch the full recording on YouTube to see Deborah’s and Andy’s complete walkthrough, including the versioning mechanics behind Accelerated Database Recovery and optimized locking, the new MAX_UCS_SEND_BOXCARS flow control tuning for Availability Groups, and the operational caveats worth knowing before you flip any of these switches in production.

What’s Next in the PASS Seattle Webinar Series

This session is just one stop on the PASS Seattle Webinar Series 2026, our lineup of free sessions building up to PASS Summit West 2026. Each one is built to give you something you can use immediately, plus a taste of the content and community waiting for you in Seattle this November. See the full webinar lineup and what’s coming next.

Join Us at PASS Summit West 2026

Recordings and webinars are a great start, but nothing beats the real thing. PASS Summit West runs November 9–11, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, with 6 Pre-Conference Deep Dives, Keynotes, and over 65 sessions covering everything from SQL Server internals to AI and cloud architecture.

Register now to join us at PASS Summit West, November 9–11, 2026, in Seattle.