Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Making Better Presentations–Organize Things

    This is part of a series of tips for speakers on how to make your presentations better.

    Organization matters, and it makes a difference to how your presentation goes. The more organized you are, the better the experience for attendees. If you are very unorganized, then it becomes hard for the audience to follow what you are doing.

    I’m am giving a few tips and tricks here, not for the actual outline and focus of your talk, but a few items that can help you smoothly move through your presentation.

    Startup

    Most of us don’t present a talk exclusively from Powerpoint. If you do, that’s great, but often I find people need to move from Powerpoint to Management Studio, or switch to a VM, show code in Visual Studio, run a browser (for Azure), etc. I personally need to sometimes run Red Gate tools as part of my talks, so I’ve learned to get organized.

    I actually got this trick from Brad McGehee and I think it’s great. As I’ve written and organized my talks, I’ve learned to make notes in Powerpoint. Every time I need to run some tool or application, I put a note in the first slide of my deck. These are a few things I need to run, and when I get ready for a talk, I have a list of items to start right away.

    Here is the first slide from my Continuous Integration for Databases talk.

    betterpresent_a

    Even if you only have one talk, it’s easy to forget things. I’ve seen lots of presenters forget to run Zoomit, start Visual Studio, or even SSMS. As someone that watches dozens of talks a year live, I can tell you it’s less than impressive or exciting when I get to watch Visual Studio start up on a projector.

    Code

    I’ve tried different methods for organizing my presentations. I’ve put all the code in separate folders. I’ve numbered the files; I’ve named them. I’ve put everything in one long script file with comments.

    All of those have worked, and all of them have failed. The important thing is that you have some organization. When you’re speaking in front of people, you’re concentrating on your topic and flow. Anything that distracts you is PAINFULLY obvious for attendees.

    It will happen, no matter what, but minimize it. Get some sort of organization and ensure that what you’re showing on the screen smoothly transitions from one section to the next.

    Comments

    In line with having code organized in files, I would highly recommend that you include comments and notes in your code for both you and the audience. We are trying to teach and explain our code and concepts. There’s no mystery or magic that we need to keep people from knowing, so the more we can disclose, the better.

    Your attendees will appreciate some instructions in the code when they try to duplicate your efforts on their own machines. However these same instructions can be very helpful for you during a talk. The instructions will guide you alone, allowing you to continue to speak and explain things, without trying to multi-task and remember the flow of your presentation.

    Think Ahead

    All of the organizational items really come down to you thinking ahead. Just as you might do as a DBA or administrator, considering what might go wrong, or what might interrupt your “uptime” as a presenter will help you prepare for a smooth delivery in front of an audience.

  • PASS Rocks SQL Saturday

    I had another piece that looked at some issues with PASS slated for today, but it’s been a tough morning. Both with work, and with the conflict with PASS, so I’m going to move this up and give PASS more praise. As conflicted as I am about the organization, it does amazing things for the community.

    SQL Saturday #318 – Orlando

    I remember when Andy first pitched me on this idea. I was dubious, but we talked about it over months and finally got the first event running in Orlando on Nov 10, 2007.

    This weekend, starting already with pre-cons, is the EIGHTH SQL Saturday in Orlando, SQL Saturday #318.

    8!!

    There have been have only been 14 Summits. I went to SQL Saturday #300 a couple weeks ago. That’s amazing. Free training, probably 20+ sessions at each event, held in countries all over the world, from Brazil to Nepal.

    If that doesn’t make you smile, you don’t get community.

    Now, I know some of you will say “Andy and Steve started SQL Saturday.” True, but it was hard, it was a time sink (mostly for Andy) and while we grew a number of events, we would never have gotten this far.

    It’s mostly due to the efforts of Karla Landrum and I can’t praise her enough for the enthusiasm, excitement, and support she brings to the process.

    But it’s also PASS.

    The organization supports Karla with behind the scenes help from people at headquarters. Without their decision to absorb SQL Saturday and promote it, market it, support local organizers, this would not have grown as it has.

    If you search the hashtag, you’ll find some amazing notes. Tweets, excitement, blog posts, and more. If you have been to an event, then you get it. You know how amazing this is and you should thank the people that work and volunteer for PASS.

    If you haven’t been, you’re missing out.

    Go. Give it a try. Carpool to one near you. Help organize one with your user group. You’ll be amazed.

    PASS has done something special with SQL Saturday and they deserve a lot of praise and credit.

  • People Helping People – Volunteers

    Continuing on with things that PASS does well, since I want to be balanced, I wanted to talk about volunteers.

    I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but PASS gets a lot of volunteers. There are volunteers that run SQL Saturdays. Volunteers that run user groups. Volunteers that help out for both of those, and volunteers that handle all sorts of tasks for the organization from picking speakers to choosing board candidates and more.

    In the past there have been people disillusioned with the usage and valuation of volunteers, but I have to say that I think PASS overall does a great job here. How else can you explain so many people willing to help out each year. They can’t all be treated poorly. Heck, most of them can’t be.

    Every year at the Summit, volunteers are recognized with in meetings and with a party. There’s even an award for the volunteer: the PASSion award.

    I greatly appreciate all the efforts of the volunteers, but I have to give credit to the organization itself for recruiting, managing, and using volunteers. There may be room for improvement, but without a doubt, something is being done right here.

  • The BaCON Debacle, or Who’s Mike?

    Who is Mike in the business intelligence/analytics world?

    Is it Mike White? If it is, he’s the guy I call for help with SSAS stuff. I’ve known Mike for years and he’s a smart guy.

    Is it Mike Davis? He’s another smart guy. I don’t know him, but I read his blogs often, and he seems to know a lot about the BI side of things.

    If it’s Mike Bag ’o Data, then I don’t know him, and I can’t vouch for his skills. I’m sure he’s a good BI/BA worker, and he deserves a conference to go to and discuss the problem and challenges he faces. I’ve linked to Tom LaRock’s description of Mike, and there’s a lot I agree with. In fact, I do think Tom is onto something.

    I’m just not sure it’s something PASS should do.

    I do think that analytics are important. I think this is a growth area in the data professional world, and I also think that lots of current DBAs better learn a bit more about how to support Mike, build tools or platforms for Mike, or transform into Mike.

    I’m just not sure that PASS is the group to do this.

    At least not in a way that it’s been done. The BaCON idea, which I suspect had a little inception from a for-profit company that’s a touch larger than PASS and gets to voice it’s opinion behind closed doors.

    inception

    Now I like inception. I think there are plenty of times when I can’t come up with ideas on my own and it’s good to have someone suggest them to me. I can even take those ideas and run with them and make something of them.

    However I’m just not sure I think PASS should be doing this, at least not at BaCON scale.

    super-bacon-burger

    I attended the first Microsoft BI conference and thought it was a success. Lots of people, a disparate group of technical people, PMs, managers, and more. A great mix of content and I was looking forward to future conferences.

    I wasn’t expecting the concept to be mismanaged and abandoned. I think MS lost its way here, combining the event with TechEd, then having it fall apart.

    Or did it?

    WORLD-WAR-Z

    I think the concept was reborn, but by having someone else take the risk, and do the work. That’s fine, but if that’s what we want to do, then I’d like to start small.

    Little BaCON

    images 

    Have some small experiments, two slices, run a Business of Software, 200-person conference and build some momentum. See if you can grow the event with some new speakers and attendees outside your audience. Limit the exposure, and limit the work required. By all means, though, place the bet.

    You see, I don’t have a problem with PASS doing more BI or BA work. I think it’s a good area in which to grow. I think there’s potential. I also think that most people would agree to making inroads in this area.

    However the whole BA idea wasn’t well developed, and certainly wasn’t well presented to the community. A vast group of speakers and attendees weren’t sure what was happening. In fact, even after attending the event, a number of people felt confused about what the purpose was for the event. I think plenty of people thought it was this:

    FMD-Field-of-Dreams

    Time will tell if we get any players out there, but I can guess the purpose of the exercise, and I think it’s less about community and more about $$, though certainly there is some overlap.

    I want PASS to experiment and place small bets. I want them to try new things. I certainly don’t want them to hoard their reserves and not improve their infrastructure or stagnate.

    However I also want the organization to remember that the members are the organization. We’re not there to be pushed to manage some other organization’s agenda.

    puppet-master

    If there is a BA need, then someone should work on it. I’m just not sure that someone is PASS, at least not at scale.

    Personally I’d much rather them expand into the BI area. We know this area, we know there are people dedicated to working in this space. In fact, I bet we could get a nice, 3,000+ person event every spring dedicated to BI. We could then have a 5,000 person Summit in the fall that’s mostly DBAs, the core audience, and includes some BI.

    I bet we could grow the BI conference to 5,000 as well.

    Imagine two 5,000 person conferences, bringing together data professionals. Maybe even have one of them on each side of the US each year.

    lucy

    Then imagine that we take an infant area, something like analytics, and grow it into a toddler at a small scale. Some of our current #SQLFamily won’t want to interact with the little one, but some will, perhaps a few hundred. However, it will grow, I truly believe that, and we can help it continue to move to 1,000, then 2,000, and who knows how much more.

    We could even see PASS grow, with new funds to providing tracks or information at developer events, truly trying to expand the horizons of those that work with SQL Server and increase their competency.

    We could do it. We really, really could.

    If we’d learn to not work in secrecy, not spring the grand ideas on the community unexpectedly and then continue to defend the problems rather than embrace them and work to fix things.

    If we worked from vision, transparency, and responsibility, I think we’d do better. Unfortunately, I think the structure of the organization leads to fear based decision making, and an overall perception of disappointment. I can’t help but think that the way things are set somehow takes good people and beats them down into something different in meetings.

    I struggle with PASS as an organization, and I know many of you don’t care. However I hope you care about PASS as a concept and help work to make it something better.

    If that’s with BaCON, that’s great. If it’s not, that’s OK as well.

    I just would like more than the board to help shape decisions, and certainly more than a few bloggers spouting words at their screens.