Building Reliable AI Apps and Agents with Microsoft SQL

Learn how to build production-ready AI applications and agents powered by Azure SQL. In this hands-on workshop, you'll prepare Azure SQL Database as a resilient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) data source, implement hybrid search that combines vector and relational retrieval techniques, and integrate your retrieval layer with applications and AI agents.

Through guided labs and real-world scenarios, you'll explore core patterns for semantic search, vector search, hybrid retrieval, embeddings, and agent-driven application design using Azure SQL Database as the implementation platform. You'll also learn how these same architectural patterns align with the broader Microsoft SQL portfolio, including the AI capabilities introduced in SQL Server 2025 such as vector search, embeddings, hybrid search, and agentic application development.

Leave with practical patterns, hands-on experience, and an understanding of how to build reliable, secure, and scalable AI solutions using your existing data, whether your future deployments run in Azure SQL Database, SQL Server 2025, or hybrid environments.

Speaker: David Pless

Principal Program Manager - Microsoft Corporation

David Pless is a Principal Program Manager in Azure Data at Microsoft, where he focuses on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, performance engineering, storage architecture, and Azure Arc. With nearly three decades of experience in the data platform industry and almost twenty years at Microsoft, David has worked across consulting, support, technical sales, and product engineering roles.

A Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), David specializes in SQL Server performance tuning, high availability and disaster recovery, Azure SQL, and cloud modernization. He is a frequent speaker at SQL Saturdays, Microsoft events, industry conferences, and user groups, where he shares practical lessons learned from helping customers run and optimize mission-critical SQL Server workloads at scale.