Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Recording Sessions for the Virtual Summit

A week ago the SQL Bits conference took place in London, sort of. The event was virtual, but it was held during the London timezone, which makes sense as all the organizers are there.

A few weeks before this, PASS announced that they wanted speakers to record their sessions in advance of the Virtual Summit. Some speakers were already doing this for SQL Bits, but I saw lots of complaints in blogs, on Twitter, and various other places. I understand the complains, and the concerns over the time needed. I also understand the equipment concerns, which can be an issue for some people.

I feel all those things myself.

This post talks about how I view this process for 2020. If you want to know what the platform looks like, I have another post on that.

My Advice

I’ve talked with a few people, all of whom have different views on this. My approach for this is to forget about the issues and prepare as you would for any other conference, albeit with a deadline being 2 weeks early.

Write your presentation, build the deck, practice the demos.

Then just record it. Set aside a quiet time, and put a timer on your desk and start recording. If you make a mistake, treat it like you are on stage and keep going.

Stumble over words, keep going. Have a demo break, move on or spend 30s trying to debug it. Just like on stage.

Get the recording done and make sure it’s under time. If things really went poorly, then correct them in your demo, practice again, and record one more time.

That’s it.

Don’t spend more time or effort. This is a conference, we all have things go wrong, so adapt to them as you might on stage.

Perfection Is an Enemy

I tend to not want a lot of mistakes, and often end up with 5, 10, or more takes for some things I record. I may spend lots of time editing, or re-watching the recording and trying to decide what to do.

I may practice a talk 10 or more times before I give it, including going through it the night before. I often set a timer, close my door, tell my wife I’m busy, and run through things in real time. I may even speak out loud, working through tough times. I try not to fix anything while I’m rehearsing, but I might make a quick note on a pad.

I worry when I have to do recordings because an hour of recording could easily be 20+ hours of stuff. However, much of that 20 hours is also what I spend getting ready for a conference. So I’ll do that part and ignore any minor mistakes.

Just prepare as best you can, test equipment, and then pretend you are on stage.

If you really hate the recording, I might request that PASS delete it after the year of access for attendees. I may do that anyway.

There are three options people have noted that might help some of you. If you just need slides, you can record directly in PowerPoint. You can also record in Teams, if you have access to that platform. Zoom is a great tool, and you can do a limited recording for free. I have an account and happy to help record you remotely if you need it.

October 9, 2020
Daily Coping 9 Oct 2020

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

Today’s tip is to be a realistic optimist. See life as it is, but focus on what’s good.

I think that I’ve lived my life as a realist. Sometimes pessimistic, but more I’m careful and conservative, not looking to take changes. I often see the problems with some approach or decision. My wife is constantly optimistic, so she helps me balance out.

As we go through this pandemic, I am optimistic. I actually think that we will get back to many of the things we love in the next year. Already I’m back to coaching volleyball and my team is competing. No parents, wearing masks, but we’re playing.

I have a couple trips planned, and I saw that no infections in the US were linked to plane flights, so I do think we’ll start traveling more in 2021. I’m working on an event of some sort in Denver, and I’m hopeful that some people will start planning and executing events in 2021 as well.

I think we need to improve testing, and I think we will. Already we’re seeing better tests coming out. I am sure we’ll get a vaccine, though I think that is more likely a summer or later in 2021 timeframe for many of us.

Realistically the world has changed, especially for business and conferences, but we will find ways to move forward.

October 9, 2020
Daily Coping 8 Oct 2020
I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

Today’s tip is to write down your most important goals for this month.

A little late, 8 days, but still time to do this. I am not a huge an of this, but as I think about this month, which is busy for me, what do I want to accomplish?
- Presentations done and recorded for the PASS Summit
- Finalize planning for the Nov Denver SUG meeting and start to promote it.
- Winter prep around the ranch, a little vehicle maintenance, markers on the driveway, and gas drained/stabilized from a few tools for the winter
- Work hard to enjoy time with family on a vacation trip. Engage and deal with the extra social time and time zone changes.
- Book extra time for my team to practice volleyball during the month.
October 8, 2020
Pgadmin Environment Variables
I’ve had to do some work on PostgreSQL, and I wrote an article at SQLServerCentral about getting started. Once I had things working, and could connect from Azure Data Studio(ADS), I also wanted to get pgadmin working in a container for admin tasks.

I downloaded the container and ran it with this:
```
docker container run -p 5050:5050 \

-e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL=sjones@sqlservercentral.com' \

-e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD=Str0ngPwd!' \ 

--name="pgadmin4" --hostname="pgadmin4" -d dpage/pgadmin4
```
However, when I checked status, it would always be down. When I checked the logs (docker container logs pgadmin4), I’d see this:

Ugh. I kept looking through docs and checking different posts. Lots of different options with quotes that I kept trying, but eventually when I went with double quotes, things worked.

Leaving off the –d let me see this was actually starting up.

This was on Docker for Windows, with Linux containers for me.

I would swear that I tried just double quotes before this, but I bet I kept adding single quotes and double quotes in different ways, like this:
```
docker container run -p 5050:5050 \

-e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL="sjones@sqlservercentral.com"' \

-e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD="Str0ngPwd!"' \ 

--name="pgadmin4" --hostname="pgadmin4" -d dpage/pgadmin4
```
In any case, I got it working. I couldn’t connect for some reason to the PostgreSQL server, but that’s for another post.
October 7, 2020