Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • SQLSaturday Advice – Scheduling

    One of the things that I’ve seen cause a few headaches at SQL Saturday events is the scheduling. First, before anyone gets upset, I think the organizers have done a good job, and I haven’t really seen anything wrong with what they’ve done. I just think here’s a little room for improvement.

    Easy to Hard

    One thing that I noticed at an event earlier this year was a number of sessions that covered the same technology, but at different levels of difficulty. For example, I saw a beginning Powershell and a more advanced Powershell session in the same schedule.

    However the advanced session was first, and the beginner one later. That’s fine in a vacuum, but if I’m getting into Powershell, or wondering what it’s about, I’d rather go to the beginner one and then if I want more, I can go to the advanced one later.

    So the first piece of advice is to schedule beginner content first, and then more advanced content. I might even try to schedule things back to back if I can, but definitely get beginner content out first.

    Big Names

    I don’t really consider myself a big name, but a lot of people know who I am, and I think there’s some attractiveness to having me at your event. The same thing goes for Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy), Thomas LaRock(Blog | @sqlrockstar) and a few others.

    So,

    I would suggest that you look at your list of people, after you’ve scheduled content in order from easy to hard, and then make sure that your out of town people, or your big names, aren’t speaking at the same time. Attendees that are coming because of a few big names will want to see them, so spread them around. Make sure that you have your MVPs, your high profile people spread out so that your audience can go see them.

  • One Meel-ee-yon Posts

    We crossed the 1,000,000 post mark on SQLServerCentral today and that’s very cool to me. A few others as well since there’s been a “Race to post 1,000,000” thread going for a few weeks.

    It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached 1,000,000 posts. On one hand I would have thought we’d have gotten there sooner since we crossed the 1,000,000 visitors a month mark years ago, but most people read and don’t post. 

    I ran some averages earlier. When I sold the site, we were getting around 400-500 posts a day on most weekdays. Now we’re up over 700 a day and frequently crossing 1000 on busy days.

    Very exciting for me.

  • Speaking Ideas – Plan to End

    Over the years I’ve seen probably hundreds of technical presentations. I’ve seen good ones, bad ones, on all sorts of topics, many of which I didn’t completely understand. However a good speaker still leads me down the path of allowing me to connect the dots, or enjoy the talk, even if I don’t know exactly what he or she is discussing.
    One issue that I often encounter, however, is that speakers tend to run up until time is out and don’t leave time for questions, or not enough time. I’ll see the next speaker coming in and waiting, and unsure of how to interrupt. Speakers get rushed, and they try to slip a lot of content in the last 5-10 minutes.
    A suggestion that I have is that as a speaker, plan for 45-50 minutes of content for an hour presentation. I think the worry for most speakers is that people are expecting an hour of content and so you have to deliver an hour.
    That’s not necessarily true. I know some people might be disappointed in 30 minutes of material, but if you end at 45 minutes and allow 15 minutes for questions, they’ll be satisfied. They’ll learn something, they can ask questions, and if there are no questions, they can go have a few minutes to relax, check email, or network with others before the next session.
    Plan to end early. If you have too much material, look to cut things out, or build  a second, more advanced presentation that can follow on from this one.

  • MongoDB

    I found a comparison of MongoDB and SQL Server recently, from a C# MVP and a person that works with SQL Server regularly. It’s an interesting read, and on the surface, you might think that MongoDB is much better than SQL Server in terms of raw performance.

    That certainly might be the case, especially for large data loads. MongoDB has the ability to scale out widely, and that always can help with performance. Even in single server environments, I have no doubt that MondDB has less overhead, and likely requires less resources, so it can be faster.

    However it also lacks some of the robustness and security that comes with an ACID compliant systems. It’s entirely possible that you could lose work you think you have committed in a MongoDB system. Not likely, but possible.

    These are, however, very different products. SQL Server is designed to handle some domains, and some loads very well. MongoDB has other purposes and ideas in it’s design. They aren’t interchangeable in some loads, but for many simpler systems, like web site back ends, they might either work fine.

    I like SQL Server, and I think it offers a very rich, and well rounded environment on which to store and work with your data. I’m not sure how MondoDB would fair in some situations, especially those that involve lots of calculations and summarizing of data sets, but it does seem to be a very robust database system for managing documents and scaling widely across servers.

    It will be interesting to see in the future of NoSQL systems, like MongoDB, start to become more prevalent in those places where ACID compliance is not critical.