Voice of the DBA

Tag: conferences

  • Summit Launch Pricing Ends June 7

    The PASS Data Community Summit is back in Seattle this November, the 14-17, 2023. It’s in person only, and if you can come, you should register today. Launch pricing is discounted and ends next week, June 7.

    Complete pricing is on the site, but next week the prices rise, not only for the event, but the pre-cons as well. $500 for a pre-con is a great price, and it’s not something you see from many of the experts when they run private training. The conference is also 30% off now, so let your boss know now is the time to register.

    You can see the pre-cons listed, and a number of sessions on the schedule as well. There is a lot of learning and more to come. This isn’t a complete list of sessions as the volunteers on the program committee are still making their final decisions.

    If you need to make a case for your employer, there is some great information on the site about what you can learn and why it’s worth attending. The networking alone, which let’s you meet and talk with experts, can be worth a lot later. One support call and the time spent could be avoided with a new colleague that you can query.

    I hope to see many of you there. I don’t know if I’m speaking, but I am going and helping run the event. Come to Seattle this fall (and SQL Saturday Oregon the weekend before) and grow your career and get excited about being a data professional.

  • Do Hybrid Conferences Work?

    The pandemic forced many events online, which has worked fairly well inside many companies and certainly spurred some technological advances in how we meet and share information. With the pandemic ending or at least entering an endemic phase, there are many live events now, as well as some attempting to embrace a hybrid philosophy.

    I went to two conferences in 2022 that embraced the hybrid concept: SQL Bits and the PASS Data Community Summit. I was just a speaker at the former, and mostly a speaker at the latter, though I saw quite a bit of the behind-the-scenes action from the organizers’ perspective at the Data Community Summit.

    During SQL Bits, I watched a hybrid session with a remote speaker. I also presented two sessions with a moderator that was engaged with the virtual attendees. The experience watching a remote presenter wasn’t great, and the audio at times was hard to hear. I also spoke with a few virtual presenters who also noted they struggled to hear people in the room. All in all, it felt somewhat live, but I felt disengaged from the speaker, and missed a feeling of interaction from the picture-in-picture of the individual speaker inside the larger screen. It was just too hard to see them and understand body language.

    At both events, the sessions I presented with a moderator went well, and I felt the moderator could be a good proxy for people online. I also know that I have little visibility into what people online see and hear. I’ve gone out of camera range at times, and I rarely know if the virtual audience can see my entire screen, me, or some combination of both, much less hear what I’m saying.

    After the Summit, I read a post about hybrid events from Andy Galbraith, which made a lot of sense to me. I enjoyed seeing and speaking with Andy in Seattle, though I know that our interactions would have been fewer, less satisfying, and less connected if we were virtual using Spatial.IO or some other technology. Spatial has been the best online platform I’ve seen for groups, but it’s still not great.

    Like Andy, I don’t want to pick a fight, but I have a few perspectives on why I don’t think hybrid works for the most part. First, it’s resource expensive. The equipment, people, and time spent putting the show together make it less attractive for most events, even paid. The people managing AV find it more than twice as hard to manage the technology and don’t like the added stress.

    Second, the interaction is still very limited, and when we do try to interact, it’s full of pauses and stutters in conversation that make this much worse than in person. Even a proxy adds delays and a very un-natural feeling to the engagement.

    Lastly, we don’t really create the same engagement as the view from a virtual event is very limited, and one can’t really engage with other attendees in the same way we can in person. Not only in sessions but before/after and in other spaces. Meetings with more than ten people are often hard to engage with more than a few people, so I don’t expect we can make things better when there are 50, 100, or more people in a virtual meeting.

    I appreciate the accessibility aspect of virtual attendance. I think we ought to have more virtual events. I was glad we had a few virtual SQL Saturdays in 2022 and I’d like to see more in 2023. If you want to put one on, especially with a niche technology, please reach out. I’d love to see more of these events.

    I just don’t think hybrid works. Not at large conferences, not at SQL Saturday, and not at user groups. My view is you should choose one or the other. Make it in-person or virtual.

    That being said, I do like the broadcast efforts from large conferences. I thought PASSTV was great. I have enjoyed the shows between sessions at Ignite and Build, and I hope we can do some of that for the 2023 PASS Data Community Summit. One thing I think has worked well across decades is broadcasting. The effort is lower and the experience for the remote audience can be better. They aren’t included, but they can see a “show” that is better than a clumsy attempt at bringing thousands of people into a “room” of some sort.

    I don’t think hybrid conferences work, but I know I’m biased in that I help run and organize live events. I want to see more live events in the future, and I want to see more virtual events.

    Just not together.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • An Amazing Summit

    It’s been a couple of weeks since the PASS Data Community Summit 2022. I was lucky enough to attend the event, and I had the chance to experience things firsthand for the in-person part of the event. I also had many people come up to tell me that they loved the event as well. It truly felt like a homecoming with so many people that I’ve seen at past Summits in the same place at the same time. I know I’m biased here, but it was a wonderful way to reboot the Summit after not having an in-person event since 2019.

    Before the event, I was a bit nervous. While we have a number of people who have been a part of the Summit previously, and a lot of Redgaters coming who had been to events, the effort to execute on an event of this scale is high. There was a lot of stress and worry, and a lot of last-minute tasks. I was watching the various Slack channels in the background while being available to offer help where needed.

    To be clear, I really had nothing to do with organizing, planning, or executing this event. I spoke at a few sessions, but it was a lot of other Redgate employees and various contractors that made everything run fairly smoothly. Despite a few hiccups with getting started and some streaming issues, almost everyone I talked to thought that the event was very similar to previous Summits and the highlight of their year.

    For me, this was fun for many reasons. First, because of the people. Far too many to name, and far too many that I didn’t get a chance to speak with, but it was wonderful to meet new people and see so many friends from the past. The event was 5 days for me, but I never had enough time to stop and talk with others.

    Second, it was fun to be a part of the Lego Steve promotion. Every time I saw a picture posted or talked with someone about it, I had to laugh a little. It was a fun part of the event for me, and I have some fun memories of the experience. Starting the week off with a photoshoot was very enjoyable.

    Lastly, I loved seeing plenty of people taking advantage of networking and also seeing very quiet hallways during the presentations. People were learning from speakers and taking time between sessions to talk to each other. I had more than a few people tell me they networked and met some great new friends. Something that I have done many times over the years.

    I’ve had a strange relationship with the Summit over the years. Sometimes I’ve loved the event, other times I’ve been angry with the organizers. I’ve skipped a few as well. Over time I’ve come to realize that this is a magical event for the data community, bringing many of the best and brightest together with a happy, eager, hopeful, and wonderful #sqlfamily. I look forward to next year, and hopefully, finding more time to chat with people during the week.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Future Data Driven

    I was honored to speak at Future Data Driven last year. This year has a great lineup with some fantastic sessions on data related topics.

    Register today for the Sep 28 event

    This is online, so you can attend from anywhere. You can see Anna Hoffman talk about the innovations from Microsoft. Get CosmosDB tuning tips from Hasan Savran, learn about SQL Server 2022’s contained AGs from Eitan Blumin and more. Machine learning, performance, Power BI, Graph, Azure Data Factory, there’s something for most anyone working with data.

    Sadly, I won’t be there. Well, not sad for me. I’m traveling back from Venice with my wife to London to speak at a conference in-person.

    You can attend, however. Make plans today and register for the Sep 28 event