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.
Tag: speaking
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Speaking Ideas – Plan to End
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Speaking and Presenting Tips – Bullets
I’ve heard this before, it came up in the Tufte seminar I took, and it also was something that grated on my nerves at TechEd recently. I was in a presentation and saw a slide titled “Agenda” that had bullet points like this:
- History of xxx
- Problem of DIY
- Reference examples
- Basic structure
- Enhancements
- Security
- Common Uses
- Expansion to other systems
- Summary
These weren’t the exact items, but it didn’t matter. This was a BI course on a Microsoft technology, but a Microsoft PM, and he read each of these, giving a sentence or two about what it meant.
HE READ EACH BULLET POINT.
Don’t do that. Studies show that people can read much, much faster than you can speak. By the time you’ve started to talk about this, most everyone in the room has read the entire slide.
The same goes for any other slide. People read it, heck, as the speaker I’ll glance back and usually read the entire thing in a couple seconds and then start talking.
Give people information that’s not on the slide. They’ll read what’s there, so go into depth on what you actually want to say. If everything is on the slide, why are you there? Just send them an article, or move them all to Starbuck and hold a “reading” of your material there, similar to what most libraries do for 4 year olds.
Give people information that’s not on the slide, and don’t read what is.
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SQLSaturday #23 – Session Submitted
I’m committed to SQLSaturday #23 in Louisville on October 24, 2009. I got a note the other day from the organizer and today I sent back my session. I’d been waiting to hear from Red Gate that it was OK to go and commit, and I did last week.
I submitted The Modern Resume presentation again, since that one has proven to be popular and I could use another delivery before the SQL Connections conference. I’m also working on a Hierarchy ID presentation that I’ll bring along. The last couple of events I’ve attended have had a cancellation, so it’s good to have something to present in case it’s needed.
I also found out my wife is traveling that week, so it will be a bit of a kid shuffle. I think my sister-in-law can help, but I might end up taking a kid with me to Louisville. Fortunately my other sister-in-law lives there, so I don’t have to bring a kid to the event.
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Denver SSUG – AUG 2009
I attended the Denver SQL Server User Group meeting, wanting to get a chance to catch up with some friends in from out of town. Peter Shire and Steve Wright of SQL Sentry were in town this week to present at the three local groups (Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver) and this was a good chance to catch up a little. I typically see these guys once or twice a year at events, and it’s always a good time.
The meeting started with the basic user group business. Letting people know what the group is about, who’s in charge, thanking sponsors, etc. They called out SQLServerCentral and even asked if I’d like to show the site. I stood up and asked about who didn’t know about the site and no hands were raised of the 35-40 people that were there. That was pretty cool since almost every time I go to an event, there seem to be a good percentage of people that have never heard of SQLServerCentral.
There were a few people looking for jobs, and one company looking to hire some developers. It seems that the SQL job market isn’t great in the Denver area.
The first presentation was an Introduction to Reporting Services by Steve Wake of Visa. Steve gave a 30 minute opening presentation that was just showing the basics of SSRS. He started with some basic facts and information about SSRS
- all editions of SQL Server
- separate service (written in C#)
- Extensible
- RDL is report storage format based on XML
- Has a Sharepoint integrated mode – allows managing / accessing reports in Sharepoint
- Lots of data sources out of the box.
- Lots of report objects for presenting data as well as exports (Word added in 2008)
- 2008 changes
- 2x faster for rendering engine. Steve sees about 3.5-4x improvement
- memory is better used, especially for large reports. (also improved in Excel export. Steve mentioned that a number of reports used to time out, but now run well.)
- IIS not required
The majority of the presentation was a demo. What was interesting was Steve presented on a Macbook using a VM (VMWare Fusion) to show the SQL demo. When the VM didn’t rake up right away, a few nice Apple jokes resonated with the audience.
We got a nice explanation of the various parts of the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.
Overall the presentation was OK, and some good basic info, but the slowdown of the VMs caused a few issues. One reminder to people presenting, be sure you’re connected to the projector when you make check your setup at the event.
The main presentation was Memory Management in SSAS by Steve Wright (SQL Sentry). Steve and Peter Shire traveled from Charlotte, NC to the Denver area to present 3 nights in a row at all 3 area user groups.
Steve’s presentation
There are two types of memory. The first is Shrinkable memory
- Easily reduced and returned to the OS
- Primarily caches, SE and FE
As you might guess, the other type is Non-Shrinkable
- system related activities
- allocators
- metadata objects
How do you measure memory? A couple counters from PerfMon
- Memory Cleaner Memory KB
- Cleaner Memory Shrinkable
- Cleaner Memory Non-shrinkable
Just as with SQL Server, you can configure memory for SSAS. Steve talked about setting the low memory as well as the total memory limit. These refer to the physical memory on the machine, not virtual memory. The low memory limit refers to the percentage of memory if the value is between 0 and 100. If it goes over 100, then it’s the bytes on a server. That’s bytes, not MB or KB. Sounds crazy to me, but that’s a useful bit of trivia. The same value applies to the total memory limit.
Once you hit the low memory limit, the cleaner threads start to move data out of memory non-aggresively and release that memory back to the OS. There is a “cleaner memory shrunk” counter you can use to monitor this. If the total limit is reached, it’s “crisis” mode. I like that description. The cleaner now more aggressively starts to clean memory. There is a more dramatic performance impact. Steve talked about the “memory price” which can be set in the ini file. The price is 0 below the low memory limit, and above that, the cleaner starts to try to manage memory using a model that accounts for the price of memory, which rises as more memory is used.
One interesting point here is that SSAS isn’t looking at other services, or even Windows. It’s memory management is internal only,so you need to set limits that account for other needs on the host. Objects are also files on the file system, so the data is loaded into the file system cache. Usage of the file cache isn’t considered part of the SSAS limits.
Steve says that Task Manager is not the place to track this. Use the counters in Perfmon.
In a demo of Perfmon, he showed counters, and pointed out the memory shrunk counter. IF that isn’t zero, or close, then you have memory pressure. It would be great if SQL Server had a counter of some sort that could indicate memory pressure. Maybe there is one, if so, let me know.
A large part of the talk showed a memory issue with a client of SQL Sentry. During the beta test of the Performance Monitor tool, they reported a graphical issue. It turned out to be the low and total settings, which the client thought was kb or MB, but were in bytes. So for a large SSAS server 32GB or RAM, they had set 2MB and 13MB as the values. Steve walked through what this showed on the counters using the SQL Sentry tool. It was a good use of their product to show how the memory settings had affected the SSAS server.
Steve mentioned a change in SSAS 2008 of pre-allocation of memory. What was interesting was that this doesn’t see to matter with Windows Server 2008, but if you have Windows 2003, then pre-allocation makes a huge difference in how SSAS runs. Note that the pre-allocation doesn’t override memory limits. Be sure that you set this at a level that makes sense. Don’t set it to the same value as the total limit.
It was a good presentation, and a good meeting of the group. Thanks to Steve Wake, Steve Wright, and SQL Sentry (www.sqlsentry.net)
We meet the third Thurs of the month, so come on by if you are in the area.
To do
– Julie- SQL Saturday space
– Marc blog
– sSRS scripter – sqldbatips.com
– Marc – Might survey people for areas they work (DB engine, SSRS, etc) Get ideas for topics focus
Steve Wright
- ref for ssas memory limits
- file cache usage
Voice of the DBA 