I’m Speaking at SQLSaturday #150 in Baton Rouge

I will be presenting my “Managing SQL Server in the Enterprise with TLAs” session at SQLSaturday #150 in Baton Rouge on August 4^th! 

However, this is more than just a regular SQLSaturday, as this is a “SQL Saturday & TECH Day” and is presented by the Baton Rouge Chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server along with the Baton Rouge .NET User Group and Baton Rouge IT Pros User Group.

Therefore the sessions offered will cover the gamut from SQL Server DBA, Business Intelligence, and SQL Development tracks to SharePoint to .NET Development to Windows Phone to Career Development.

Check out the complete schedule here and sign up today for this FREE training event!

See you there!

 

SQLRally 2012 Dallas – Recap

PASS and NTSSUG (North Texas SQL Server User Group) hosted this year’s SQLRally. As the chapter leader for HASSUG (Houston Area SQL Server User Group), I was also part of the host team and volunteered on the program committee and served as a room monitor during the conference. Putting on a conference of this size with mostly volunteers (there is some paid staff from PASS HQ, but the majority of the work is by volunteers) is no small feat and the NTSSUG team did a great job of organizing.  

Sessions Attended

Based on the sessions offered at SQLRally, I set my focus on learning about SQL Server 2012 features, investigating areas outside my current area of expertise (enterprise deployments), and considering my future career development.

• Bob Ward – What’s New for SQL Server 2012 Supportability

• Craig Purnell – Upgrade Roadmap: Let’s Delve into SQL Server 2012

• Kathi Kellenberger – SQL Server 2012 T-SQL

• Denny Cherry – Using SQL Server 2012’s Always On

• Suresh Kandoth – SQL Server 2012: Memory Manager Rebooted

• Tim Mitchell – Introduction to Data Quality Services

• Robert Davis – TempDB: Performance and Manageability

• Erin Welker – So, You Want to Start a Career in BI

• Andy Warren – Building Your Professional Development Plan

All of the sessions were top quality and I will definitely use what I learned in both my day-to-day work and overall career development.

Networking

SQLRally had lots of opportunities for networking, both informal and formal. The scheduled opportunities included:

• Wednesday night’s “Meet the SQL Professionals”

• Thursday night’s “SQLKaraoke”

• Friday morning’s “SQLRally at Starbucks”

During lunch and between sessions provided ample opportunity for informal networking. And, I took time off during one session timeslot to continue networking and be available at the PASS Community Corner to promote local user groups (continuing the networking after attendees get home) and the virtual chapters. As several people have confessed (among them Andy Warren, Brian Moran, and Tim Mitchell), the networking aspect is actually probably the most important activity when attending a conference. This is how #SQLFamily is built.

Things Done Well

• Guidebook – This mobile app is a great way to keep attendees up-to-date with speaker/session changes. Other than seeing that a printed agenda was in our attendee bag, I never looked at it and used Guidebook exclusively for checking where I needed to be next!

• SQL Clinic – This was a “must-have” with the event in Dallas so near to the SQL CSS team’s home and didn’t disappoint with members of SQLCAT also in attendance.

• Networking opportunities – already mentioned. Good job by the planners!

• Bus – looping between convention center and SQLKaraoke site was a win!

Things to Improve

• Guidebook (yes, it is on both the “done well” and the “to improve” list!)
  • Include room numbers along with the Session Title and Session Number in the main entry, if possible. You had to click the session to find the room number; simple once you knew to do this, but many people didn’t realize it.
  • Include all activities in the “schedule”:
    • Welcome Session 
    • Closing Session
    • WIT Luncheon
    • Include all “extracurricular” activities – from SQLKaraoke to Starbucks Networking.
• Beverage choices during breaks – coffee or nothing – how about some water and sodas?
• Ensure bottled water in the sessions rooms for each speaker.
• Signage to A4 ballroom from the majority of session rooms could have been better. It was confusing to most attendees that one session room (A4) was far away from the majority of the session rooms and on a different floor level. 
• Station volunteers at the top of the escalators and along the hallways, not just at the rooms to help attendees find their way. 
• Where to find the speakers’ slide decks? I had several people ask me during the conference, but I had not personally looked for them yet and couldn’t answer. Now, I have looked and I can’t find them either!
• Overall Event Evaluation form – I hear they will be done electronically after the event, but I would have liked to have it available to comment on as I experienced the conference real-time.

Event Format

Instead of 2 pre-con days, consider having only 1 pre-con day or splitting into a pre-con day and post-con day. Consider having the post-con session on Saturday. The success of SQLSaturday has already shown that many of us are willing to give up some of our personal time to improve our skills.  As part of the purpose of SQLRally (at least in my mind) is to provide a “taste” of Summit and at a lower price point, I don’t see many people justifying being out of the office 4 days (or 5 if Monday is a travel day); that would be practically the same as Summit (unless they are local).  By combining the SQLRally 2-day main event with a post-conference Saturday all-day seminar, maybe more people could convince their employers to pay for SQLRally and the post-con since in theory it isn’t all on “company time”.  Attendees can make the case that they and their employer have a joint investment in their training.

Personally, there was a pre-con on Tuesday that I probably could have justified, but not one on Wednesday which fit my development needs. Since I was coming from out-of-town, this just didn’t work for me logistically or financially. Consequently, I didn’t attend any pre-con. If I could have attended that all-day session on consecutive days with the main SQLRally days, then I would have done that – even if one of the days was a Saturday. However, I recognize that this format (especially using a Saturday) may not work for others and may not work with venue rental. I know PASS has tried the pre-con\post-con format in the past with Summit, but is back to two days of pre-cons for whatever reasons. I think the host team for the next SQLRally, however, should seriously reconsider this concept for maximum attendance.

Conclusion

Overall the event provided great technical content and networking opportunities to the SQL Server community. While many people who attended SQLRally have previously attended a PASS Summit, I talked to just as many people who have not attended a Summit, but now have it on their list of things to do! I think the event also did a good job of reinforcing the value of local user groups, and even encouraged some folks to consider starting a user group or hosting a SQLSaturday in their area.  This was only the second SQLRally event in the United States, so it will be interesting to see how this event evolves for 2013 filling the gap between Summit and SQLSaturdays.

Improving Speaker Rating Evaluations

I finished compiling all the individual session speaker ratings from SQLSaturday #107 held in Houston on April 21, 2012 and sent the results to the speakers this past weekend.  We used the default form provided on the SQLSaturday Admin site, which had two basic inputs.

1) Expectations:  Did Not Meet \ Met \ Exceeded. 

2) Overall Quality of the Presentation: rate 1-5 where 5=great.

Plus there was a request to write any other comments on the back of the form.  A few people did provide some constructive criticism which the speakers can use to improve; many people provided positive encouragement; but most wrote nothing.

Anybody have a problem with this form?  I do; and I’d like to make it more useful for both organizers and speakers.  But, how?

We’ve been conditioned since early childhood in school to receive a grade for our performance. Consequently, we tend to provide evaluations with number ratings so that we can come up with an average rating for each speaker.  The problem with this type of rating for speakers, in my opinion, is that there are no defined criteria for the students (e.g. graders) to use in their evaluation – it is purely subjective and purely based on the individual’s experiences which could vary wildly at an event like SQLSaturday.     

The “Expectations” rating to me is really not very useful – it is too general.  There are two things that I, personally, am gauging from an “expectations” basis when I attend a session: 1) the content to be delivered based on the abstract provided; 2) the quality of the speaker based on the presenter’s professional credentials.  However, what if I’m so new to a topic area that I really do not comprehend what the abstract means (although I think I do) and therefore my expectations of what I’m about to experience are very different than the reality?  Or, what if I have really high expectations of a well-known speaker and I feel like their presentation is just average? How do I handle this in my evaluation? Based on what I saw in our SQLSaturday evaluations, it seems to me that most people whose expectations were not met also rated the overall quality of the presentation low.  But, how can that be, when the majority of the other attendees at the same session believed that the session met or exceeded their expectations and gave a high rating on the overall quality?  I saw this anomaly several times.

One of the goals of SQLSaturday is to grow the speaker base. I don’t know about you, but “grow” to me doesn’t mean just numbers, it means providing experience and maturity. How do we get the necessary feedback to the speakers to enable them to improve their presentation skills in order to better train us?

Speakers, what input would you like from your audience?  If you were to redesign this simple evaluation form, what 2 or 3 questions would you ask? Do you derive value from a subjective numeric rating?

SQLSaturday organizers and User Group leaders, how would you like to see speakers evaluated to help you in selecting sessions for your next event?

Please post your comments here.

More Reflections on PASS Summit 2011

So, I did some more reflecting after my last post and I’ve come up with some more reasons why PASS Summit 2011, in particular, was so great.  Reason #4: Recognition of volunteers. I mentioned previously that volunteers are truly the life-blood of PASS. And if volunteering doesn’t totally suck the life out of you, then you may survive to be named the PASSion Award winner. This year’s recipient was Lori Edwards (twitter). Lori ran the Program Committee this year, so, yes, you have her to blame praise for the content at this year’s Summit. Next to being on the Board of Directors, running Program Committee is probably the most time-consuming task a volunteer could undertake. There were some 70 volunteers on Program Committee this year to review, select, schedule, and review again the hundreds of sessions submitted by hundreds of speakers in 6 different tracks this year. But someone is ultimately responsible for overseeing the coordination of all those volunteers and that was Lori. Thanks, Lori!

This year PASS also recognized additional “outstanding” volunteers: Jack Corbett (blog | twitter) and Tim Radney (blog | twitter).  Jack was recognized for his leadership and work with PASS SQLRally 2011 in Orlando, the PASS Nomination Committee, the 2010 PASS Program Committee, and leading SQLSaturday #49 and OPASS (Orlando PASS Chapter). Tim was recognized for his leadership as a Regional Mentor to PASS Chapters, for leading the Columbus, Georgia, SQL Server User Group to a 50% attendance increase, for organizing SQLSaturday #89 and for speaking at other SQLSaturday events.

Reason #5: Fresh blood First-timers! Beginning with the PASS Summit 2010 conference, “first timer” and “alumni” ribbons were handed out to attendees. If you’ve never been to a PASS Summit, then you’ve missed experiencing “ribbon envy”.  Attendees are provided ribbons to attach to their badges based on their various levels of involvement in the PASS community (that word again!). Board of Directors, Program Committee, MVP, Chapter Leader, Virtual Chapter Leader, etc. etc. etc. all designations get ribbons (each with its own color designation).  If you attend a pre-con then you get a different colored ribbon for each day of pre-cons; and it seemed to go on and on this year with some creative attendees and vendors devising their own ribbons (Dr. Data, etc.).

But, I digress, back to the first-timers. This year, PASS expanded the First-Timer experience and provided Big Brothers and Big Sisters (alumni) to help steer the First-Timers fully into the community of PASS Summit. First Timers were put in touch with their Big Brothers/Sisters ahead of Summit so that they could ask questions about what to expect. In addition to the traditional orientation session, the newcomers had a special networking session with Don Gabor (website) prior to the Welcome Reception. Then, they were introduced into the Welcome Reception with flashing lights, loud music, and dry ice…with apologies and kudos at the same time to Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter), they were SQLRockstars! And they kept coming and coming and coming until between 800-1000 “first timers” filled the reception area wall-to-wall along with “alumni” attendees! According to Tom’s recap blog there were glitches and he wants to continue to improve the first timer experience, but from where I stood it was truly awesome for this “old timer”.

I hope that even just a few of this year’s “first timers” caught the volunteer bug that I caught back when I was a “first timer” in 1999. PASS needs you and PASS wants you to volunteer to serve! Seriously, like any organization, PASS needs a continual infusion of fresh ideas. If you are interested in volunteering with PASS, go here to learn more.

SQL Saturday #97 – Sessions Announced

The free SQL Server training phenomenon known as SQLSaturday is coming to central Texas (Austin) on October 1, 2011.  This event is coordinated by CACTUSS – The Capitol Area Central Texas Users of SQL Server – and my good friend and fellow PASS Chapter Leader, Wes Brown (twitter | blog).

The final presentation selections were announced today. There will be 30 sessions covering Business Intelligence, DBA, Application Development, and a Bonus track for that hodge-podge of sessions which apparently did not fit neatly into the other tracks!   

And, (shameless plug here) – I will be presenting “Managing SQL Server in the Enterprise with TLAs”.  Kind of a goofy title, I know, but here is the pitch: Technologists are overwhelmed with TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms) in their everyday life. This session will introduce several SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 features designed to make a DBA’s life easier. If you aren’t using CMS, PBM, EPM, MDW, UCP or DAC – come learn what they are and the potential benefits for managing your environment.

So, if you are in driving distance of Austin, check out the schedule and register to attend – you’ll be glad you did!

If you are on Twitter – you can follow this event using hashtag #sqlsat97.

SQLSaturday #57 in Review!

Here are all the known recaps (other than my own – here, here, and here) of SQL Saturday #57 which occurred in Houston on January 29, 2011.  Thanks for the kudos and suggestions for improvements.

Jen McCown – http://www.midnightdba.com/Jen/2011/01/sql-saturday-57-houston/

Sri Sridharan – http://sqlrocks.com/?p=24

John Sterrett – http://johnsterrett.com/2011/02/01/wheeling-wv-to-houston-tx-a-sql-saturday-57-recap/

Rhonda Tipton – http://rhondatipton.net/2011/02/02/sql-saturday-57-houston/

@SQLAvenger – http://sqlavenger.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-sql-saturday-57-houston.html

Ryan Adams – http://www.ryanjadams.com/2011/02/sqlsaturday-57/

Pictures

SQLSaturday #57 Pictures (Photos by Rhonda Tipton & Sri Sridharan): http://picasaweb.google.com/houstonsql/SQLSaturday57Houston#

Presentations

Ryan Adams – Presentations:

• PBM and CMS – http://www.ryanjadams.com/2011/01/pbm-cms/
• Mirroring – http://www.ryanjadams.com/2010/10/mirroring-slides-code/

William Assaf – Presentation: http://sqltact.blogspot.com/2011/01/slides-and-sample-code-from-dmv.html

Wes Brown – Presentation: http://sqlserverio.com/my-presentations/

Sean McCown – Presentations: http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/Events.aspx

Jason Wong – Presentation: http://usa.redirectme.net/repriser/houstonsqlpassvideo.html

Additional SQLSaturday #57 presentation materials are available here for sessions with an asterisk: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/57/schedule.aspx

Thanks again to all the speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees who made this event possible! If you know of any review or presentation link which I’ve missed, please leave a comment and I’ll get it added.

SQLSaturday #57 – Recap

In my prior post, I discussed all the people and organizations that made SQLSaturday #57 a successful event in terms of delivering valuable content and networking opportunities to the attendees. But, now I want to focus on what we can do better next time.

Communications

We (the core planning team) did not have a good handle on how to effectively use the SQLSaturday Admin website to communicate to sponsors, speakers and attendees. This was glaringly obvious when the reminder email went out to attendees at 11:30am on the day of the conference. PASS HQ needs to make sure that the SQLSaturday organizers know how to optimally utilize the tools provided by the admin website.  

In communications that we did send, I think we didn’t always clearly communicate the what, when, where, how.  Personally, I know I was guilty of this – assuming because I’d sent info in a prior email that I didn’t need to repeat everything in later emails. I should have made sure each communication stood on its own – lesson learned.

Facilities

How did we end up at Bammel Church of Christ, you ask? We had been searching for a site for months. Houston area colleges/universities either didn’t have the facilities we wanted or they were booked for years out! Hotel/conference centers charged outrageous fees. When we publicized that we were having difficulty finding a location, HASSUG member Lynn McKee contacted me about his church where he is a volunteer on their facilities team. They had everything we were looking for – a very large concert hall for holding opening/closing and general sessions, and multiple “break-out” rooms for regular sessions all with A/V equipment, a couple of different areas we could use for sponsors, and networking/lunch areas. The fee we paid to use the facility was basically to cover the operating costs (electricity and janitorial services) for Friday (setup) and Saturday.

I’ve always heard people say that you have to learn how to use a building (or in our case buildings). I think we did a pretty good job of this as we had a great venue to work with, but I think we can do better next time (if we get to use the same facility). I know we needed more signage than we had – both inside and outside. Also, I think we need to separate the Speaker Ready Room and HQ – we used the same room and it was really too small to effectively serve both functions.

Wireless internet access – by the time we realized this was missing, we didn’t have the time or the budget to do anything about it. Again, if we are able to use the same facility next time – we’ve got this on the list.  And, if we end up with a different facility – we’ve got this on the list!

I think more than a few people were probably apprehensive about using a church facility, but it seems their fears were alleviated when they experienced the site. I believe that there has been at least one other SQLSaturday event which also used a church facility. Perhaps more SQLSaturday planners will consider “outside the box” venues in the future.

Programs \ Schedule

Somehow we missed getting the legend on the pages in the program with the schedule to clearly identify the room numbers for the sessions; and there was no explanation of what DB-102, BI-204, and AD-301 meant! I had multiple people ask me where to find, for example, room DB-102. So, we obviously need to improve the schedule layout and ensure we have a legend.

Also, I’m not sure we effectively communicated that the program\schedule was in the bags which attendees received at registration.  Lots of people were using the program they printed from the website and unfortunately it did not have the rooms indicated on it….which goes back to our learning how to use the SQLSaturday Admin website effectively.

And, we probably should have had larger signs indicating the sessions which changed (only 3) from the time the program was printed. We did have an insert for the 2 sessions which changed before we were 24 hours from the start of the conference and we tried to have the current schedule running on the big screens in the common areas.

Name Badges

We actually made a conscious choice to not print name badges for this event.  It was simply a time and budget thing. However, after talking to a couple of people about this decision at the event, it will be a priority for the next time to provide name badges.  

Raffle

We were actually on plan C for the general raffle items, but unfortunately we only had a plan A and a plan B and they both cratered on us!  We’ll definitely have this activity better organized and prepared next time.

Food

While feedback on the lunch was great (thank you Hinze’s Barbeque & Catering), we severely underestimated the number of no-shows (even though they had paid the lunch fee).  Thus, we had an abundance of food leftover which we donated to the True Light Baptist Mission in Houston. They were then able to feed over 50 adults to whom they minister.  So, if you are planning an event like this for the first time – apparently the expected rate of attendance is only 50% of those who signed up (even with the lunch fee).  This held true for our event as we had a final count of 362 registered as planning to attend and an estimated 184 who actually showed up!

Volunteers

We have to make better use of our volunteers. The core planning team needs to be enlarged, so that no one person is responsible for too many things! I think this was definitely one of the big things which Jonathan Gardner (blog | twitter), Malik Al-Amin (twitter) and I learned – delegate more! There was actually more to do than we realized. We survived, but it could have been far less stressful on us.

What’s Next?

Over the next few days, the team will be discussing what went well and what we can improve upon. The items above are a starting point for improvements. This was our first time putting together an event like this; so obviously we had a lot of on-the-job learning. We welcome additional feedback from attendees, speakers, volunteers, and sponsors on how to improve. You can comment here or send an email to “HoustonSQL at live dot com”.

SQLSaturday #57 Thanks

The Houston Area SQL Server User Group (HASSUG) held its first SQLSaturday event on January 29, 2011. Thanks to Bammel Church of Christ for the use of their Youth and Ministry buildings! Lynn McKee (twitter) (HASSUG member), Andrew, Michael, and Leroy worked facilities for us and we greatly appreciate their contribution to our event.  The planning team received lots of compliments on the venue. I sincerely hope that we left things the way we found them (we tried) and can use this facility again in the future.  

Numerous volunteers helped to make this event a success. It was a pleasure working with Jonathan Gardner (blog | twitter) and Malik Al-Amin (twitter) as co-chairs on the event. While we haven’t had our formal “post mortem” meeting on the event yet, I’m really hoping that both will sign on to work on the next event (when we get to that point; we need to decompress first!).  We all learned a lot in coordinating this event – and most of it was not about SQL Server!

Other key volunteers included Steve Allison, Eric Cruz and Ken Goins on the Program Committee. They helped to select the sessions and create the printed program included in attendee bags. Rhonda Tipton (blog | twitter) and Sri Sridharan (blog) took photographs during Friday setup and all day Saturday; you can find them here and on Sri’s blog. Greg Rowland took charge of registration and ensured that all rolled along smoothly. 

However, since this was a FREE training event for attendees, we couldn’t have done any of it without our sponsors! So, thanks again to Platinum Sponsors: CTREC Hilton IT Academy and Idera Software; Gold Sponsors: Bradmark Technologies, Dynamic Worldwide Training Consultants, Quest Software, Red Gate Software, Sparkhound, and Texas Memory Systems; Silver Sponsors: Confio Software, Fusion-IO, MelissaData, SQLServer Magazine, and Intellinet; and Bronze Sponsors: CozyRoc and Telerik. 

The ultimate key to the success of the event, however, was the speakers and the content they delivered. Over 150 attendees participated in 42 sessions presented by 28 speakers. When I had people telling me in the middle of the afternoon that their head hurt because they were learning so much, I knew we’d delivered what we hoped for! To make it even better – on Monday I saw a tweet stating that an attendee had been able to immediately put to use something that they learned on Saturday – that’s awesome!  

I know there has been debate lately about speaker evaluations for PASS in general and specifically around the question worded something like “how valuable was this session to your daily work”.  I always struggle with this question as an attendee and as a speaker. As an attendee, I may be attending the session to learn something new that may be outside the arena of my current job role, but is an area I want to move into or incorporate into my role. So, how would I answer this question? As a speaker, high ratings are obviously good per the guy who could immediately put to use what he learned; but, is a low mark necessarily bad? Or does it just reflect that the attendee does not currently have the ability to put the knowledge to use immediately? However, I digress.  We requested for speakers to setup their sessions on SpeakerRate (which does not have the question just mentioned!). It is a fairly simple feedback mechanism to rate the content and the delivery and provide comments. Of most value to speakers is constructive feedback – they sincerely want to improve those two items (content and delivery), but that is hard to do just based on a number. So, if you attended SQLSaturday 57, please go to SpeakerRate, see if the sessions you attended are posted, and provide specific comments on what they did well and how they can improve their presentation for the next time.

As this is getting rather long, I think I’ll save the analysis of the event for another post. But, once again, thanks to our sponsors, speakers, and volunteers for making SQLSaturday #57 a success!

Rate My HASSUG Presentation

If you attended my presentation, Managing SQL Server in The Enterprise with TLAs, to the Houston Area SQL Server User Group (HASSUG) on January 11, 2011, whether in-person or via the LiveMeeting, I’d really appreciate some constructive feedback.  What did I do well?  What can I improve? 

Instead of leaving comments in my blog, I’ve registered on SpeakerRate.com for this purpose.  Please use the following link to provide your feedback on my session – Managing SQL Server in the Enterprise with TLAs.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to provide feedback which may enable me to become a better presenter!

PASS Community Summit 2010 Recap

A little slow on writing up my recap of my 12^th PASS Community Summit, but I guess “better late than never”.  As usual there were several highlights and one major lowlight.  Highlights included a record number of registrations – it was amazing how many people were in line to check-in on Sunday night when the booths opened.  This truly speaks to the value provided to the SQL Server professional community by this conference.  Over the past 12 years I have periodically had the opportunity to attend an additional conference during the year, but continue to find that the best value for my training time and dollars is provided at the PASS Community Summit.  So, I’ll go ahead and get my biggest disappointment of the conference out of the way – the Tina Turner impersonator at the opening.  I think the “Simply the Best” theme was good, but the choice of execution for the opening of the conference did not present a very professional image of PASS, especially considering the strong support for WIT (Women In Technology) that exists in the community.  I attended the Board of Directors Q&A later in the week, and I believe that additional scrutiny will be applied in the future as to how “performances” may come across to the diversity in our community (not just differences in gender, but also cultural differences in a global community).  OK – enough said about that subject.

The technical highlight from the keynotes (which are available in full here, including the WIT luncheon) was obviously the CTP1 announcement and demos of “Denali” aka “SQL Next” aka “SQL 11”.  The demo by Amir Netz of project “Crescent” which provides data visualization really got everyone pumped up.  In case you missed it, check the keynote video from Wednesday and an additional video from the Reporting Services Dev Team is also here.  Attendees were provided with a CTP1 DVD of Denali and it is now also available for download.  Interestingly, it is available in both a 32-bit and 64-bit platform. I don’t know about you, but I was really counting on this version being 64-bit only.  If you only want to start reading up on it, then the Denali BOL is also available here. 

The Thursday keynote by Dr. David Dewitt just reminded me once more of why I fell in love with database technology.  His presentation on query optimization almost made me want to go back to school again!  I love this stuff!  You can find his slide deck on the Microsoft Jim Gray Research Lab’s Facebook Links tab.  How cool is that? But, seriously, you have to watch the keynote video, too.

There are so many great speakers and presentation topics to attend in person that you really do need to get the DVD set of the conference to have the chance to hear the ones where you couldn’t be in two (or even three or four) places at one time.  Or for that matter, to re-watch ones that you did attend!  If you were not able to attend PASS at all, then you can also now order the Summit 2010 DVDs here. If you did attend the Summit, but didn’t order the DVDs and want to now, then go here to email or call Shannon Cunningham to purchase at a reduced rate.  

Over the years, I’ve learned to change my plans for session attendance on the fly.  This year was no exception. Many of the Microsoft sessions which were to be about “future” features could not actually be promoted as such until Denali was announced in Tuesday’s keynote.  Thus, I found myself immediately changing session plans for the very first session following the keynote in order to attend Paul Mestemaker’s and Bob Ward’s session on “Atlanta” – a new configuration assessment service from the cloud.  Basically, Atlanta is a checklist of best practices/configurations as compiled by Microsoft’s SQL Server CSS team.  It is planned to be refreshed as needed and based in the cloud.  The goal is to help you prevent problems (not detect them), thus it is complimentary to SCOM (or other real-time monitoring tools).  It will require an agent to be deployed on your server to collect and of course would require internet access, so it remains to be seen how useful it will be for production environments as most I’m aware of do not allow their SQL Servers to have internet access.  You don’t have to wait for Denali to try out Atlanta, but it does require Windows 2008+ and SQL 2008+. You can try it out today at https://www.microsoftatlanta.com/. If you get the DVDs, then this was session DBA-226M.

I’ll just quickly mention two other sessions which I attended and picked up nuggets to be researched further.  The first was Bill Ramos’ DBA-450M session entitled “Advanced Data Collection & Reporting with the MDW” (or something to that effect).  If you are doing Data Collection, then Bill has published several very useful report definitions to his blog in an ongoing series. The second session was Joe Yong’s DBA-353M “Upcoming SQL Server Upgrade Planning”. Key learning from this session is to watch out for increased lockdown in W2K8R2 (if you haven’t moved here already) and there will be a distributed replay feature available in the CTP1 for Denali to help analyze upgrade impacts.

Besides the great sessions, one of the biggest reasons for attending conferences such as the PASS Community Summit is the networking.  Multiple opportunities exist for mingling with your peers – from the Opening Night reception (with the now infamous annual Quiz Bowl event) to lunch which is also geared around networking each day (BOF – Birds of a Feather, WIT Luncheon, Regional\Local User Groups).  I was able to speak with several people from the Houston area (and some planning to move to the Houston area) about our local user group (Houston Area SQL Server User Group) and upcoming SQL Saturday 57 planned for January 29, 2011. By the way, registration is still open for attendees, speakers, and sponsors for SQL Saturday 57!

Next year’s conference will be in Seattle again, but a month earlier than usual – October 10-14.  I’m hoping to experience slightly better weather in that timeframe, although we did see a significant amount of sunshine this year.  So, start your planning now!  There is a really good rate offered through the end of the year which includes the pre-conference seminars – - $1295 for the full bundle, including 3 days plus 2 Pre-Cons until Dec. 31; $995 (for 3 days) until Jan. 15 – check it out at: www.PASSSummit.com. If you need to plan your training for earlier in the year or don’t have quite the budget for the full-blown conference, then you should check out SQL Rally.  This shorter 2-day conference with a 1-day pre-con will be held in Orlando from May 11-13 – details are at: www.SQLRally.com

And, finally, if those dates and prices don’t work for you, did I mention that there is a SQLSaturday on January 29, 2011 in Houston?  SQLSaturday events are “free” training days (with usually a nominal lunch fee charge). If Houston isn’t in your travel plans, then there is likely to be another event scheduled close to you – check out the main website: www.SQLSaturday.com for places and dates.