Voice of the DBA

Tag: speaking

DevConnections – Fall 2012

This fall is the DevConnections SQL Server Connections conference in Las Vegas again. It’s at the Bellagio, setting for one of my favorite movies, Ocean’s 11. It’s a smaller conference this time, and SQLServerCentral only has 4 slots for the event. Both Grant Fritchey and myself will be speaking on the Monday. At least I think we will. The schedule isn’t out, but that’s what I was told.

I haven’t decided, but I’d like to try for a tweetup/meetup one night there, perhaps in front of the famous fountains. It would be neat to see a few SQL Server people at the spot shown at the end of the movie.

In any case, I’m heading back to Las Vegas. I enjoy visiting, and am looking forward to wandering around a bit.

I’ve also got a lot of work to do. I have two sessions, one on binary data search in SQL Server, using the Integrated Full Text Search, and another on Policy Based Management. Both interesting topics to me, and areas where I’ve done some work, but I have to dig in over the next month or two and build a couple great presentations.

If there is anything you want to learn about these topics, let me know. I haven’t quite decided where I’m going to focus, other than what’s in the abstracts. I have some room to speak in a few areas, but I’ve learned time goes away quickly when you’re presenting, so I need to be sure I’m focused.

Hopefully I’ll meet some of you at the event. SQL Server Connections is a neat conference, one where you have the chance to learn a lot in a bunch of different areas. With 8 other conferences co-located, I always find a few sessions outside the SQL world that I find very interesting. A lot of the private cloud, SVVM, and related topics I’ve seen talked about recently were things I saw at the last Connections event in March. I expect there will be a lot of Windows 2012 stuff in the fall, just in time for you to plan for the 2013 budgets.

Check out the event, and think about joining me in Las Vegas. It’s a good place for an event, easy to get to, and there are lots of activities to join in outside of the conference.

July 25, 2012
SQL in the City – London 2012
It’s a wrap. Two days of SQL in the City are complete, and I’m back at home, almost feeling normal. I prefer short trips to the UK, but this one was extra hard since it was a conference schedule. For me that’s up at 6:30 to run and usually not getting back to my room until 10:00pm. Long days.

The event was great. If you haven’t been, or wonder what it’s about, SQL in the City is a day of training from Red Gate Software. We do have a track that talks about how to use our tools, but we have two tracks that are mostly technical information. Brad, Grant, and I do mention Red Gate tools, but we aren’t really there to focus on the tools. We’re there to talk about technical subjects and ideas.

Think SQL Saturday, but a bit more “posh” and sponsored by Red Gate Software. Not this posh:

This posh:

Once again this year the event was held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. We had a tremendous number of people sign up, so we added a day and ran the same one day conference for two days. Friday was packed, with over 400 people coming to learn a few things about SQL Server.

A note for the US: We’re bringing this event to the US in September and October, touring 5 cities in two weeks. We’ll also be in Seattle on the Monday before the PASS Summit.

A note to the UK and Europe: Let us know if you enjoyed it, missed it, and want us to come next near. I’d like to do more of these if there is a demand.

One of our two joint-CEOs, Simon Galbraith, opened the event, giving a short keynote on building software. For those of you used to long-winded, marketing filled keynotes, take note. This was 10 minutes, about 10 slides, 3 laughs from the audience, and that’s it.

Then it was time to learn. I watched a session from two Red Gate employees, Dave Atkinson and David Simner, on Continuous Integration (CI). If you aren’t using CI in your software process, you should. They showed how this process works, and how it has helped them build software quicker, and more bug-free. A few of the Red Gate tools make this easier, but there are many ways to do it.

I’ve never used CI before since the last time I developed software in a team was almost a decade ago. I realize now that I was really missing something. There aren’t a lot of cool, new things that I think have come through our industry, but this is one of them. Read the white paper we have, and start learning more about Continuous Integration.

There were a number of other talks on database maintenance, writing T-SQL, and more. I did two, one on preparing for disasters and thinking about things ahead of time and one on Contained Databases and AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012. Grant talked about Sandbox development and monitoring your servers with the ring buffer (an amusing talk with movie photo quizzes included).

This was a little more of a formal event than most SQL Saturdays. We recorded the event, and while the videos will only be available to attendees for the next few months, that does mean that if you missed a session, you can watch it.

We also had a very hard working staff, including product managers

developers

and quite a few people from all parts of the company.

Even more importantly, we had free refreshments at the end of the day. I remember because I was told more than a few times to mention this before my talks. Our 2012 Red Gate brew of Select Star beer (along with wine and soft drinks) was handed out at the end of the day.

We also had a nice happy hour with a few prizes. A SQL Toolbelt from Red Gate first, and then a ticket to the PASS Summit 2012. That one had quite a few people hurriedly filling out their evaluation forms.

This was a great time, and though it was hard and long for me to speak two days in a row, I enjoyed the trip. I got to run through Hyde Park (haven’t done that in 25 years) and Regents Park (never done that), and had the chance to meet a lot of people from the SQLServerCentral community, including a few I’ve corresponded with for years.

The US tour starts in September. The cities and dates are:
- New York City – Sept 28
- Austin – Oct 1
- San Francisco – Oct 3
- Chicago – Oct 5
- Boston – Oct 8
- Seattle – Nov 5
I’ll be at all of them, along with a crew from Red Gate and a few guest speakers from the local areas.

This is a great chance for free training, one that we think is worth a day of your time. Sign up today if you’ll be near one of the events, and I look forward to shaking hands with you if you attend.
July 16, 2012
Back Across the Pond

This coming weekend is SQL in the City – London 2012. Friday, July 13, and Saturday, July 14, I’ll be at One Wimpole Street in London. This is the Royal Society of Medicine, a fantastic venue for events near Oxford Circus. I’m looking forward to the event and the venue.

This is the first stop in 2012 for our SQL in the City tour. These are the only two days in Europe and then we come back to the US with a 5 city, 11 day tour of the US. I’m looking forward to the events, but not the travel. It’s a lot of flights in a short time, and quite a few hotels. Fortunately I’ve consolidated down to one carry on bag and a backpack for travel, so I should be in and out of airports quickly.

This week I fly overnight on Wednesday to arrive in London and recover on Thursday before the Friday and Saturday events. Then I’m back home on Sunday, just in time to start another week of work. A quick trip, and likely not much sightseeing for me, but if you’re up early, you might find me running down Oxford Street in the mornings.

I’ll be delivering two sessions in London. They are both new and while I’ll link them to a few of the Red Gate tools, these aren’t sessions built around our products. These are sessions that talk about the issues of Disaster Recovery and Contained Databases.

If you’re coming to one of the London events, please feel free to grab me and shake my hand. I’ll be the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and cowboy hat

July 9, 2012
A Speaker’s Dilemma
I read Eddie Wuerch’s post on cross-submissions for SQL Saturdays and found it hitting close to home. It provoked a few thoughts, and I wanted to write a little bit about what I think since it’s something I think more and more people will deal with over time.

The idea behind SQL Saturday was to get more local events, more local speakers, and improve our industry at a grass roots level. That was Andy Warren’s vision, and it was something we strived for as we grew the SQL Saturday framework. Over time it’s evolved into something we never expected, with many speakers traveling from remote locations to talk.

It’s also grown so much that many of the weekends of the year have multiple events. This year we have 58 events (completed or scheduled) and we have multiple collisions, including
- 3 on Apr 21, Apr 28, Aug 4, Sept 15, and Sept 29,
- 5 on Apr 14
There are also plenty of weekends with two events.

As a speaker, I like attending these events. I’ve been to quite a few, and I turn many more down because of scheduling conflicts. I try to get to 4-5 a year, and meet a lot of people. These are fun events, and I’d like to do more, but travel is hard and it takes away from other things in my life.

When I decide to submit to a SQL Saturday, I usually start making plans to attend. I don’t book travel, but I free up my schedule, and I don’t submit to events on consecutive weeks. Traveling two weeks in a row, while it might not seem like much, is a big impact to my family, and to me.

My method for dealing with multiple events and choices is to contact the organizers of my first choice. I don’t ask them for a favor, but I do ask if they would like me to submit and attend. I’ll give him an idea of what I am prepared to talk about and let them know that I don’t want to submit if I’m not being chosen, only because I would like to attend some event that weekend. If they decline, and I have had some decline, I thank them and contact my second choice.

I don’t like the idea of adding in more rules, or restrictions, or even asking the organizers to work out among the various events who will get speaker X. I think it’s the burden on the speakers to make as little an impact on the organizer’s workload.
June 14, 2012