SQLSaturday #150 – Baton Rouge: Presentations Uploaded

My presentation slide decks and demo scripts from SQLSaturday #150 have been uploaded.

• Managing SQL Server in the Enterprise with TLAs
• SQL Server 2012 Database Engine – Why Upgrade?

Thanks to the planning team for selecting my sessions and thanks to everyone who attended my sessions – I enjoyed the opportunity to share my passion.   

SQLSaturday #150 – Baton Rouge – Signup Now!

There’s an awesome FREE technical training event coming to Baton Rouge on August 4, 2012. That’s right; SQLSaturday and Tech Day 2012 will be held at LSU’s new College of Business facility.  This is the fourth year that the Baton Rouge technical community has held this event and they expect around 400 people – if you live anywhere close by, then you should be there!  William Assaf (blog | twitter) even got some local TV exposure for the event this year.  

This event is bigger than your normal SQLSaturday. In addition to tracks for the SQL Server professional, there are also tracks for .NET developers, Windows Phone developers, SharePoint, and general professional development. Check out the full schedule here, and then sign up here.

Why am I plugging this event? Well, for one thing the Baton Rouge SQL Server community has always come west across the state line to support our SQLSaturdays in Houston. Secondly, I’ll be speaking at their event this year on “Managing SQL Server in the Enteprise with TLAs”.  TLA is “Three-Letter Acronym” for those unsure. We have lots of those in techno-speak. I’ll be covering CMS, PBM, EPM, MDW, and more…. If you work with SQL Server and don’t know what those are or how they can help you, then register today for SQLSaturday #150 and come to my session at 8:20am in Room 1700! 

Addendum: I’ll now also be presenting a second session “SQL Server 2012 Database Engine – Why Upgrade?” in the 2:45pm slot in Room 1700.

 

If you can’t attend this event, then check here for all the currently scheduled SQLSaturdays in the US and around the world! 

 

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!

 

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.

SQLSaturday #107 – Event Evaluation

April 21, 2012, marked the 176^th anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, my nephew’s 14^th birthday, and the 2^nd “annual” SQLSaturday in Houston hosted by the Houston Area SQL Server User Group! If you follow us on Twitter, then you may have noticed that @HASSUG uses as its picture the San Jacinto Monument.

So, I could delve off into Texas history now and remind everyone that this epic 18-minute battle ultimately resulted in the United States acquiring present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But, I’d better get back to SQLSaturday #107 and the topic at hand ….

Our actual attendance this year was about 250 – or 73% of those who registered for this FREE training event showed up. We had 60 sessions on the schedule provided by 15 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), several Idera ACEs, and some first-time presenters as well.  

Yes – 60 sessions is quite ambitious! But, because we were using a school facility (YES Prep Public School – North Central Campus – please go read about them!) with an average “comfortable” capacity of 25 students per classroom – we needed to run 10 sessions in each time slot to accommodate the number of attendees that we expected! Thanks to the large number of attendees who used the session builder tool, we were able to move the session with the highest anticipated attendance in each time slot to the Auditorium\Cafeteria. However, I’m acutely aware that in at least two time slots we still had sessions in the regular classrooms which were SRO!  Amazingly – I’ve not found a single complaint about this in the overall event evaluation forms – so THANK YOU for being so understanding of the limitations of the facility!  

I do want to apologize for the break-down in communication during one of the morning time slots. We did not have a volunteer stationed outside the room of the session which had been moved to the Auditorium and we did not have adequate signage about the move. Unfortunately, a room full of people sat waiting on the speaker who was actually in a larger room speaking to an unexpectedly small audience for quite a while before we got the anticipated audience redirected to the correct room for the session they wanted to hear. So, again, my sincerest apologies to both the speaker, Benjamin Nevarez (twitter | blog), and to the attendees who really wanted to hear his session, Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer.

We had a couple of other “issues” that I want to mention in hopes that other event teams take note and don’t have the same oversights. One, provide lots and lots of coffee all day – enough said? Two, ensure any directional signs you plan to put out in the vicinity of the event site are in place well before the scheduled “start” time (and have them onsite ready to go the night before). Three, communicate schedule\room changes as “loudly” as you can – with BIG BOLD BRIGHT signage updates and volunteers stationed to help people adjust. Four, SpeedPASS is great – if the attendees remember to print it out and bring it with them; however, we should have had two laptops and printers for those who didn’t do this ahead of time instead of one. We also experienced a technical glitch such that only if the attendee knew their PASS ID and password to login, then they could print it as opposed to us using the SQLSaturday Admin site to print on-the-fly for them.  PASS has promised to get that issue fixed. Even so, I was amazed (I don’t know why!) at the number of people who did print their SpeedPASS and bring it with them. So, strongly encourage this in all of your communications with your attendees.              

Lots of things did go right thanks to the great team we had this year. On the Steering Team with me were: Jonathan Gardner (twitter | blog), Malik Al-Amin (twitter), and Lynn McKee (twitter).  Core Team members were: Eric Cruz, Ken Goins, Vicky Harp (twitter | blog), Will Howard (twitter | blog), and Amy Muehleman. At the risk of overlooking someone (please comment if I’ve left you out!) – the Friday night setup crew and bag stuffers included Leah Guzman, Martin Mason, Revathi Iswarya Nambi, Brandon Smith (twitter), and Kendal van Dyke (twitter | blog).  Saturday volunteers included Linda Harmes, Allen Kinsel (twitter | blog), Robert McLeroy, and Jenny Yang, plus a whole slew of Idera folks and the previously mentioned Friday night crew.    

But, at the end of the day, how did the attendees feel about the event? Last year, we tried online evals and as techie as we all are – the response was abysmal. So, this year – we killed a few trees in the name of collecting more feedback (data) in the form of an overall event evaluation form, plus speaker session evaluation forms. We asked attendees to rate their experience in the following categories on a scale of 1-5, where 5=great. We had 89 people turn in the event evaluation form and here are the averaged results:

We recognize from the ratings that the bar has been set pretty high. If you have any additional feedback for us to help us provide an even better experience next time – please comment here!

Additionally, we asked the attendees to list their favorite session and the best speaker they heard. The top vote-getters are:

• Favorite Sessions:
  • T-SQL Brush-up: The Best Things You Forgot You Knew (Jen McCown)
  • Avoid Errors on Errors (Rick Morelan)
  • Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning (Mike Fal)
  • SQL Admin Best Practices with DMVs (William Assaf)
• Best Speakers:
  • Kalen Delaney
  • Thomas LeBlanc
  • Jen McCown
  • Sean McCown

Thanks to all the speakers for giving so generously of your time to prepare and present, and in many cases travel significant distances. That high overall event score is due to the value of the content that you provided to the attendees making it worth their while to give up a beautiful Saturday to further their career development.  

And, finally THANK YOU to our sponsors! Platinum sponsor Idera provided not only funds at the highest level, but man-power to assist with the event as well. Idera was also the sponsor for the precon with Kalen Delaney (twitter | blog) on Friday. I can’t thank Amy Muehleman enough for all of her hard work coordinating the precon, speaker dinner, breakfast catering, and after party for us.  Red-Gate and HP were Gold-level sponsors and provided lots of great swag.  Silver sponsors were Confio, Texas Memory Systems, Joes2Pros (who also provided books and training DVDs as swag), Fusion-IO, Insource Technology, New Horizons, and PASS. Bronze sponsors were CozyRoc (who also provided pens & notepads for attendees) and SQLWatchmen (also the proud sponsor of the precon VGA cable). The publishers McGraw-Hill, Morgan Kaufman, and O’Reilly generously provided technical books for swag. Sponsors, your generosity to the SQL Server community enables us to provide SQLSaturday free of charge to attendees.  Thank you for partnering with us.

In wrapping up, I must share my favorite feedback on the day (which someone told me at lunch) – “Oracle has nothing like this!”  

Thank you SQL Server Community!

SQLSaturday #107 – Schedule Posted!

The session schedule for SQLSaturday #107 is now posted!  We have several MVPs as well as local speakers who will be presenting in Application Development, Business Intelligence, Database Administration and Professional Development tracks. Take advantage of this FREE day of training in Houston, April 21, 2012.  Lunch will be catered again this year by Hinze’s BBQ (and we have a vegetarian option) – for which we are requesting attendees pay $10 via Paypal when registering.  Space is limited, so register soon! Then click on the Schedule option and choose the Schedule Builder to plan your day (and help us determine which sessions will require the auditorium!).

See you there!  And plan to attend the “after party” networking event Saturday evening – more info coming soon!

SQLSaturday #107 – Sessions Announced

Schedule is now proposed (http://www.sqlsaturday.com/107/schedule.aspx) and speakers have been notified that the following sessions (updates in bold below) have been selected for presentation at SQLSaturday #107 in Houston, April 21!  Register soon as seating is limited for this event! http://www.sqlsaturday.com/107/register.aspx

AD Sessions

Boles, Kevin: SQL Server 2012 TSQL Enhancements and Additions

Boles, Kevin:  Windowing Functions: THE Reason to Upgrade to 2012

Corbett, Jack:  Introduction to Triggers

Harp, Vicky:  Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional

Hokanson, Kris:  Beyond the Where: Full Text Search tips and trick

Loski, Russel:  Introduction to the XML source

McCown, Jennifer:  Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale

McCown, Jennifer:  T-SQL Brush-up:The Best Things You Forgot You Knew

Morela, Rick:  Avoid Errors on Errors

Pastrick, Wendy:  Read Dirty to Me – Isolation Levels/User Impact

Rosenberg, Mark:  Optimizing Stored Procedures

Van Dyke, Kendal: Working with XML in SQL Server

Warren, Andy:  SQL Server Security for Developers

BI Sessions

Costello, Tim:  Data Visualization primer:  What you need to know

Hotek, Michael:  Build a Data Warehouse in Less than 1 Hour

LeBlanc, Thomas:  Dimensional Modeling 101

Mitchell, Tim:  Top 10 New Features of SSIS in 2012

Mitchell, Tim:  Parent/Child Structures in SSIS

Newby, Michael D.: EXCEL @ SQL Reporting

Pearson III, William E.:  Becoming DAX: An Introduction …

Pearson III, William E.:  Many-to-Many: Multiple Calendars in a Single Cube

Serra, James:  Scaling SQL Server to HUNDREDS of Terabytes

Smith, Bryan:  Implementing Columnstore Indexes

Smith, Bryan:  An Introduction to Big Data for BI

Stein, David:  Data Warehousing – How to Convince “The Bobs”

DBA Sesssions

Assaf, William:  SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV’s

Brown, Wesley:  Benchmarking, Baselines and Monitoring Storage

Brown, Wesley:  Solid State Storage Deep Dive

Cook, John:  SQL Server Tips and Tricks

Davis, Robert:  Replication Magic: Initializing From Backups

Davis, Robert:  Strategies for Working with VLDBs

Delaney, Kalen:  Costs of Concurrency

Fal, Michael:  Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning

Fal, Michael: The Fabulous Query Plan Primer

Fernandez, Argenis:  Rolling Upgrades Leveraging Database Mirroring

Fernandez, Argenis:  Troubleshooting SQL Server with SysInternals Tools

Griffin, Janis:  Don’t Panic, DBAs!  Databases on VMware made easy.

Hotek, Michael:  Knowledge from Data–FileTable and Semantic Search

Hotek, Michael:  Recover from a Disaster–What to do When All Fails

Humphrey, Eric:  .NET Powers Activate! Form of PowerShell!

LeBlanc, Thomas:  Execution Plan Basics – Beginners

Leo, Christina:  SQL Server Internals:  It’s What’s for Dinner!

Mendo, AJ:  Standardize Your Environment With Best Practices

McCown, Sean:  Beginning Powershell for DBAs 1.0

McCown, Sean:  Understanding Backups

Murphy, Jim:  AlwaysOn – Finally, A usable ‘mirror’!

Nevarez, Benjamin:  Top Query Optimizer Topics for Better Performance

Nevarez, Benjamin:  Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer

Ormrod, Steven:  SQL Server Amnesia

Pastrick, Wendy:  Transactional Replication 101

Radney, Tim:  It is TEMPDB, Why Should You Care?

Radney, Tim:  You Inherited a Database, Now What?

Saleme, Mike:  A consolidation architecture to host 1000s of DBs

Sterrett, John:  Evaluate your daily Checklist with PBM and CMS

Professional Development Sessions

Wilson, Nancy Hidy:  WIT Discussion Panel (Kalen Delaney, Janis Griffin, Jen McCown, Wendy Pastrick, Christina Leo)

Warren, Andy:  Building Your Professional Development Plan

McCown, Sean and Jen:   Mouth Wide Shut: Coherent Interviewing

Van Dyke, Kendal:  Building Your Own SQL Server Virtual Playground

Moreign, Anthony {Tex}:  The {Microsoft} Cloud and I

Wong, Jason:  A Comparison of SQL Server and Oracle

 

SQLSaturday #107 – Houston – Wanted: Sponsors! Speakers! Attendees!

SQLSaturday #107 is scheduled April 21, 2012, in Houston at YES Prep School – North Central Campus. We (Houston Area SQL Server User Group) are currently still accepting sponsors, speakers, attendees and volunteers for this event! 

Sponsors, click sponsors to find out how you can engage with us. This is a great way for you to interact with SQL Server professionals from the Greater Houston area and surrounding environs. At our previous SQLSaturday in January 2010, we had over 200 attendees from all over Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, plus a few visitors from other states as well. We are expecting at least 300 attendees this year.

The Call for Speakers is open until March 15. We already have over 90 sessions submitted, so we have a lot of great sessions to choose from already, but we want more! We are looking for sessions in the “track” areas of Database Administration, Database Application Development, Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), and Professional Development. Additional topic areas to consider when submitting sessions are: PowerShell, SQL Azure, and SQL Server 2012.

Attendees, please register as soon as possible – this is a FREE event (although we request $10 to help cover lunch/snack costs), but it really helps us with our planning if you all don’t wait until the very last minute to sign up!  We have a lot of great speaker submissions already, so we expect the content provided to exceed last year’s SQLSaturday #57 event.  Seating will be limited and you don’t want to miss out on this great training event. And, when you are signing up, consider volunteering. We have several committees which will need additional volunteers to perform tasks leading up to and on the day of the event. If you already registered and didn’t check the volunteer box and would now like to volunteer, please email the steering team.

If you are attending from out of town (or across town), the recommended hotel is the Hilton Garden Inn Houston / Bush Intercontinental Airport.  Mention “PASS” when registering for the discount rate.

Finally, don’t forget to register separately for the all-day preconference seminar, SQL Server Query Plans: Tuning & Management with Kalen Delaney, to be held on Friday, April 20, 2012. Details here! Early bird registration is available through February 29, 2012.  

SQLSaturday #107 – Pre-Conference Seminar Announced!

In conjunction with SQLSaturday #107, scheduled April 21, 2012, in Houston, the Houston Area SQL Server User Group will be hosting a full-day pre-conference seminar, SQL Server Query Plans: Tuning & Management by Kalen Delaney, on Friday, April 20, 2012. The seminar is sponsored by Idera, provider of SQL Server management solutions, helping us to provide this seminar at a low cost to you.

Kalen is a long-time Microsoft SQL Server MVP, author, consultant, and trainer. She is generally recognized as the foremost authority on SQL Server internals per her series of “Inside SQL Server” books, articles in SQL Server Magazine, training classes and conference presentations.

This low-cost single-day seminar will be held at the Hilton Garden Inn near Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport which is also very convenient to the SQLSaturday #107 event location for those attending both events from out of town.  A continental breakfast and boxed lunch will be provided on Friday to pre-con seminar attendees.

To find out more information about the pre-con seminar agenda, hotel information, and to register, please click: SQLSaturday #107 Pre-Con Registration. There is an early bird registration rate ($88) available through the end of February and seating is limited, so sign up now and save!  The regular rate of $99 will be charged starting March 1.  

If you have already registered for SQLSaturday #107 and want to attend the pre-con, that is great!  If you want to attend both events, please realize that there are two separate registrations…

SQLSaturday #107 Pre-Con Registration (April 20)

SQLSaturday #107 (April 21)

If you need to take your performance tuning skills to the next level, then Kalen Delaney’s Query Plan seminar will be invaluable in developing your knowledge of how SQL Server works and how you can impact (for better or worse) its performance. This is your opportunity to get that knowledge from one of the gurus in our industry!

 

SQLSaturday #97 – It’s a Wrap!

On Saturday, October 1, 2011, CACTUSS – The Capitol Area Central Texas Users of SQL Server – hosted their first SQLSaturday in Austin.  CACTUSS is led by my good friend and fellow PASS Chapter Leader, Wes Brown (twitter | blog). Saturday was a big day for Wes. In addition to pulling off a successful SQLSaturday event – Wes was finally named a SQL Server MVP by Microsoft on Saturday as well. In view of Wes’s many years of contribution to the SQL Server community many of us were shocked to realize that he had not previously received this well-deserved designation. So there was much to celebrate at the end of the day.

A big thank-you goes to the key volunteers on the SQLSaturday #97 team – AJ Mendo (twitter), Jim Murphy (twitter | blog), Richard Heim, Mike Byrd, and Amy Muehleman. Another big thanks goes to the sponsoring vendors and especially to Idera for providing not only Platinum level funding, but manpower too!

The SQLSaturday #97 team did a really good job of focusing on one of the original key tenets of SQLSaturday – providing opportunities to grow new, local speakers. Of the 5 sessions I attended, 3 were presented by “new” speakers – AJ Mendo, Rudy Rodarte (twitter | blog), and Jim Murphy (all from Austin). All three did a really good job and I hope they continue to get opportunities to share their passion for SQL Server with the community. There were other new speakers as well, plus some of the “usual suspects” and high profile speakers like Jennifer and Sean McCown (aka the Midnight DBAs), Thomas LaRock (aka SQLRockstar), Conor Cunningham (from the Microsoft SQL Server Dev team), and, of course, being in Austin – Joe Celko.  From what I heard, the overall program selection and speaker ratings were a hit with the 200+ attendees.

While I didn’t get everyone’s story, I did visit at length with another new speaker at the networking after event held at Iron Works BBQ. Steven Ormrod (twitter | blog) is an excellent example of what SQLSaturday is all about. With this conference, Steven completed the 2011 Texas SQLSaturday Trifecta. It started with his attending PASS Summit in November 2010 and learning about the SQLSaturday concept. He attended SQLSaturday #57 in Houston in January; followed that up in April by attending and volunteering for SQLSaturday #63 in Dallas; then he took the big plunge and submitted to speak at SQLSaturday #97 in his current hometown of Austin. While I did not witness his presentation, I did hear the praise he received from a couple of folks sitting with us as they rehashed his session.

So, it appears that the two main tenets of SQLSaturday (providing free training and growing local speakers) were definitely accomplished by the organizers of SQLSaturday #97.  Well done!

For those who are looking for session slides for my presentation “Managing SQL Server in the Enterprise with TLAs”, they are available on the SQLSaturday #97 Schedule session link here. Thanks to all who attended my session and for being an engaged audience with my topic. I enjoyed sharing my passion for SQL Server with you.

And, finally, before you start asking – yes, we will have a SQLSaturday in Houston in 2012 – hopefully, we’ll be announcing a date very soon.