Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • How Can I Get Accepted to Speak at the PASS Summit?

    There has been some discussion and concern over the changes to the speaker selection process for the PASS Summit. I’ve written some thoughts, as have others (Joey, Andy), but I was struck a bit by Eugene Meidiner’s post. In it, he asks, how can I speak? What do I need to do beyond presenting at user groups or SQL Saturdays? How do you get to the Summit?

    I’ve got a few thoughts, but keep in mind this is a complex topic. I’d like to see some people write about their experiences, preferably those that have spoken only once or twice.

    The Path

    First, there is no one path. Unlike martial arts, or some other program, there isn’t a series of things you need to do in order to get selected. What works for one person might not work for another.

    It’s like getting recognized by Microsoft as an MVP. There isn’t a set of things to do, but some guidance that may help.

    Compete

    The next thing to understand is that this is a competition. Imagine that you want to run in the Olympics as a sprinter. You can do everything possible to increase your speed. You might be the best sprinter in your college, or region. You might run the 100m (mens) race in 9.90 in college. When you get to the trials, you run a 10.0.

    That’s not good enough if the top three go to the Olympics that year. The best three times at the trials were 9.8, 9.84, 9.98.

    Does that mean you’re not an amazing sprinter? No. You just weren’t one of the those selected that day.

    The PASS Summit speaker selection is way more complex. We divvy up the abstracts into various piles, mostly based on the topic area. If you look at last year’s schedule, there were five main areas. Your session is in one of those areas, competing with many others. If we pick (roughly) 60 sessions in an area, you have to be top 60 to make it. Doesn’t mean you’re not a great speaker, or don’t have a great session. It means you didn’t compete well enough at this time, for this event.

    Get Help and Get Better

    The way into the Summit is to get better at your craft. That’s better at your speaking craft, better at your abstract writing, certainly better branding yourself as a SQL Server expert. It’s not that you need to be smarter, better at the Microsoft Data Platform, but people have to think you are worth going to see.

    Adam Machanic has a great post on session abstracts. Louis Davidson has thoughts, and Brent Ozar has hints. There’s no magic formula. You have to build something that catches the eye of your peers, who are those reviewing the abstracts, and you have to impress them with the talk.

    Most of these people are volunteers that have attended lots of talks at events. They’ve seen lots of speakers. Certainly there can be bias towards those people whose sessions they’ve seen, or who they think has submitted an abstract, but mostly they’re looking for great content. Something they’d consider attending, or think others would.

    That’s subjective and unlikely to get much better. At some point someone has to make decisions, and so you need to ensure you impress people.

    Use the advice that’s out there. Have friends, or even more experienced speakers review your abstract. Try to find a good place to submit. If you want to talk T-SQL tricks, you’re going to compete with Mr. Ben-Gan, Mr. Betrand, Mr. Kline, and plenty of experienced speakers. Be careful of that. Find a place where you solve a problem, do it well, and it’s interesting to others. You won’t know if that’s true in a vacuum. Get feedback and advice from others.

    Gain Experience

    Part of the process is getting experience. This means presenting often, and learning to do it well. You need to ensure the audience likes watching your presentations.

    • Are you invited back?
    • Do multiple people tell you afterwards you had a great talk?
    • Do multiple places accept your abstract?

    You should be answering yes to all of these.

    My suggestions:

    • Present multiple talks for one group –  Learn to express yourself, communicate well, and handle different demos. You should get positive feedback from your local group, your virtual chapter, something.
    • Present the same talk to multiple groups – One of the things that helps me get better is to deliver the same talk more than once. I learn how to build better flows, how to correct previous issues, and explain myself better.
    • Enjoy Yourself – If you don’t really enjoy teaching people something, or impressing them with your knowledge, why do you want to speak at the Summit? Is it resume bullet? A bucket list item? Those are fine, but passion and enjoyment shine through.

    Cross Your Fingers

    This is a hard competition. Lots of people want to speak, and if you have submitted 4 times and never been picked, that doesn’t mean PASS is out to get you. Or that you suck. It means you didn’t make it over the bar those four times. Whether you did the same thing or four different things, the results could be the same.

    This year, I’d suggest that you try a multi-pronged approach. Refine something you submitted last year, with feedback from others. Add something new, but make sure you get feedback on this as well.

    Don’t give up, but don’t get too frustrated. At least this year if you’re a first time speaker, things are slightly easier. Invites mean that you aren’t competing against someone like Itzik Ben-Gan or Brent Ozar, who likely get invites. Therefore your abstract isn’t weighed against theirs. A focus on getting some level of new speakers mean you should get a little weight added to your submission as well.

    Enjoy the challenge, do your best, meaning put effort in, and let the chips fall.

    At least you won’t compete against me this year. I won’t submit, so there’s one or two slots that will be open.

  • More Open Data

    Steve Ballmer retired from Microsoft almost three years ago. It seems like a small eternity, and since his purchase of the NBA Los Angeles Clippers, I haven’t heard much about any ventures with which he’s been involved. Apparently, he’s spent some of his time, and quite a bit of money to build a site that discloses data about revenue and expenditures for the US Government. There’s a piece in the NYT about this project, as well as a shorter Engadget summary of the site, which provide a short look at the project.

    USAFacts.org is the site, and it’s a treasure of data sets. I look at this as a really interesting way to examine data sets that might be more difficult to gather than you’d expect. The Data Act deadline takes effect in May of 2017, which should also provide another way for anyone to look at public data and perform an analysis. I am disappointed the downloads aren’t working yet, but I hope that this will come soon, along with some sourcing information about where the data comes from and how it was gathered.

    Having data sets to analyze is important for any organization. Certainly within our organizations we spend a lot of time producing reports and queries that help various people analyze data. In fact, finding, collating, cleaning, and organizing information can be a taxing proposition in any size organization. Our data sets and sources are so diverse and often inconsistently producing data that it’s amazing at times that our organizations run well. It seems on a regular basis someone wants to rebuild the methodology used to gather and organize information. I am not surprised that I constantly find incorrect calculations in software because the basis we use changes too often.

    The big issue for me is that so many of us are amateurs when it comes to analyzing information. There aren’t many organized classes or a good structure for most data professionals to learn how to analyze data. We learn on the job, we make guesses and assumptions, and overall do a good job. However, data analysis is highly inconsistent from person to person. I’d like to see that change, and as I see more and more people blogging and talking about how they look at a particular data set, I hope more people are thinking about how to analyze information and how the choices we make for calculations, visualizations, and even ordering can affect how the results are interpreted.

    I’m glad Mr. Ballmer has started this project, and I look forward to seeing how people might use this data and other data sets to provide some analysis of the world.

    Steve Jones

  • GroupBy–Bringing DevOps to the Database

    Today was my presentation in the April GroupBy conference lineup. I presented on DevOps and changing your database development to include more agile, DevOps, flexible development practices.

    If you want to get the deck, the slides are here: BringingDevOpstotheDatabase.pptx.

    The video is also up on the GroupBy Youtube channel

  • Starting to Use SQL Server 2017

    We’ll have a new version of SQL Server this year. If you missed the Data Amp keynote, in it Scott Gu announced the name as SQL Server 2017, which I assume means we’ll have installable RTM bits sometime this year. Maybe in June, maybe August, maybe later. In any case, there are some interesting changes coming, though not a ton. We will get a new platform (Linux) and certainly some nice improvements in a few areas, but overall a limited release. Given this will be a year or so after the last one, that’s not surprising.

    This rapid release cycle means that all of us will support more versions of SQL Server. I don’t know many organizations that wholesale upgrade all their servers. The last time I saw that at any size was in SQL Server 2000, and even then it was painful. Since then it seems many organizations will add some instances of new versions, but continue to support old versions. The more people I talk to, the more I think the ten year rule does exist in many companies. I met someone years ago that said their company (Fortune 100) expected any server installed to run for ten years. Period.

    That seems to be the case. Lots of people still have SQL 2005, or at least SQL 2008 instances. A few SQL 2000, and certainly newer versions, but a mix. Keep that in mind, as most of your companies will move forward with new work even as you support old server. This week I wanted to ask, when do you think you’ll have SQL Server 2017 in production.

    Realistically, when will you have a 2017 platform running a live workload. I don’t care how big or small, Windows or Linux, bare metal or in a container. When will you start to use resumable index rebuilds, graph structures, adaptive query processing or more? Will it be in 2017? 2018? For budget or other reasons, later than that?

    I’m at an interesting place. We still run SQL 2008 at SQLServerCentral, and it works fine. The site needs a basic relational system, though certainly some of the T-SQL changes in 2012+ would be welcome and make some code easier to write. The thing is, code is already written and most things work. We’re debating going to 2016, but I wonder if we shouldn’t just aim at 2017, get one more version ahead, and delay the next upgrade for another decade. I’m certainly tempted as most of the work we through at the database is simple relational work that really would run on SQL 2000 if it had to.

    Regardless of when you might upgrade, are you interested in doing so? Anything catch your eye in the new version? Or have you not even bothered to pay attention? All valid answers, and I’m interested in your view of the new platform.

    Steve Jones