Programmer's Edge

Well, another successful SQL Saturday has been logged in the books. I had a single session for this one for Change Data Capture and went out of my way to ensure that it was crammed packed with information for the people attending….even to the point that when the volunteer monitor in the room exclaimed  “I guess you know you have less than 10 minutes left.” . I politely replied

I possess an advanced degree in

Computation Physics.

I am the Master of Space and Time.

For those of you that would like to see the presentation along with the script files you can pick them up here.

So now I would like to share some of my thoughts on how it all went. First off, what was great was that I received the feedback from my attendees before then end of the DAY! Yep, that’s right! Not a week later ….the same DAY! Just to let you know, I believe this is the first SQL Saturday that I have actually received my speaker feedback at all. How cool is that! For those of you that are wondering, here are the ole’ resultos:

• 5 (Excellent)  =  57.14 %
• 4                        =  35.57 %
• 3                        =  7.14 %
• 2                        = 0 %
• 1(You suck)    =  0 %

So overall, really good. I only had 1 person give me less than a 4 but since I will be giving the presentation again in SQL Saturday #50 East Iowa, I will brush it up a little to see if I can max it out.

Now on to some specific areas of the event that those  of you planning or thinking about planning can take to heart.

Slide Templates

The 2 sets of slide templates that were provided to us prior to the event were great. I think that the other SQL Saturday’s should definitely follow suite. Maybe even put forth the effort to have one of the peeps in you local group brand them specifically for you event. Here are some examples to show you what I mean:

You win over a lot of IT people when you show Sneaky Ninja DBA Tips ala Naruto!

Event Venue

The venue was great. I talked with Kevin Kline and Joe Webb and they saved a lot of money by having the event at Nashville State Community College. The rooms were more than adequate in size and had all of the AV equipment needed. They even had one of the college technicians on hand to address any of the difficulties we had. I know of at least a couple of instances where that came in handy.

Sponsor Area

This was one of the best setups for the sponsors that I have been at for a non-paid user group event EVER! We each had a a seperate area along the main drag with not only a extra long table but also a couple of comfy chairs with small tables. If we wanted to we could have pulled people in to have in depth conversations or show them something else that they were wanted to ask questions on. Definitely not the cramped quarters off in a separate room that I am used to.

I know that these events are for the users but we have to make sure that there is something in it for the sponsors because they are ultimately the ones that are fronting the money to put these on. I am lucky enough that my employer wants me to go and speak at these and they also frequently pony up the money for sponsorships.

Women in Technology

Who woulda thunk it? But there are women in IT. All kidding aside, there were three high caliber women presenters in attendance. Hopefully, this is a continually growing trend as I believe this is a good thing for the community. I will probably be writing more on this in the future.

Volunteers

Not only did this event have a great cast of volunteer help but it was executed flawlessly. You had a volunteer in the room with you while your talk was going to do things like…get you water, keep track of time, address issues with AV, collect the feedback as people leave. This not only ensured that everything ran smoothly but that the feedback was collected from everyone. What a great idea!

Overall

Overall, I give this event an A+! Big kudos go out to Kevin Kline, Joe Webb, Christina Leo, Louis Davidson  and everyone else involved. I will definitely plan on coming down next year!

Cheers!

AJ

Well, I will be seeing everyone in Nashville at the SQL Saturday #51. My session will be on Monitoring Data Changes With Change Data Capture so I am already checking into trying to do some kind of really crazy type of demo to really underpin the technology and the speed and resourcefulness that it brings to the DBAs arsenal…Mwahahahahaha!..(cough)..excuse me. Anywho, Perpetual Technologies, Inc (PTI), my employer is also a sponsor of the event so look for me to be by the table at least part of the day….I am thinking that I will maybe blog all day about the event in a series of miniblogs …..have to tie that in to twitter maybe by using the hashtag in the title…Hmmmm….

Or maybe the lunch room will be free and I will just do some ad hoc stuff…..that would be pretty cool as well….in any case, it should be a really good time….So if you haven’t signed up yet then be sure to do so or risk being labeled a LAMO!

Here’s the whole schedule below….A little messy but hey you can only do so much with cut and paste:)

Start Time
Business Intelligence
Cafeteria
Database Administration
Database Development
Professional Development
Session Mix

08:30 AM
Rafael Salas
Planning your ETL architecture with SSIS
Thomas LaRock
DBA Survivor
Aaron Nelson
The Dirty Dozen: PowerShell Scripts for Busy DBAs
Daniel Evans
EPM using R2 and SharePoint 2010
John Welch
Creating Custom Components for SSIS
Alan Brewer
SQL Server 2008 R2 Utility and Data-tier Apps

9:45 AM
Douglas McDowell
Realizing ROI for Business Intelligence Projects
Allen White
Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell
William Pearson
Design and Implement Like Edison!
Stuart Ainsworth
The Social DBA: Resources for Career Building
Andy Leonard
Database Design for Developers

11:00 AM
Wayne Snyder
Information Visualization – Designing great Charts
Jason Strate
Are You Following Your Own Best Practices?
Hope Foley
Working with Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008
Mark Tabladillo
Data Mining with PowerPivot 2010
Jeremiah Peschka
Fundamentals of SQL Server Internals

12:15 PM
Kevin Kline
Keynote

01:00 PM
Craig Utley
Analysis Services 2008 End-to-End
Arie Jones
Monitoring Data Changes with Change Data Capture
Dan Crawford
SQL Server Service Broker
Jack Cannon
From Access To SQL Server
Glenn Berry
DMV Emergency Room!

02:15 PM
Jessica Moss
Make Reporting Services Work For You
Kendra Little
Take the Awesomeness Home: the Data Collector
Kevin Boles
Common TSQL Mistakes
Andy Warren
Building a Professional Development Plan
Brian Kelley
Fortress SQL Server

03:30 PM
Barry Ralston
Introduction to MDX for SQL Programmers
Thomas LaRock
What Are You Waiting For?
Robert Cain
Data Dude – Making DB developers more productive
Drew Minkin
Data Mining in Action: A case study
Andy Warren
Introduction to SQL Server Statistics

4:45 PM
Experts Panel
Stump the "Experts"

Cheers,
AJ

Louis Davidson has put together an interesting post on some of the issues that he had encountered with one of his talks at the recent SQL Saturday in Columbus,OH (#sqlsat42). It’s almost too bad…..I have run into the same types of initial crowds too…unresponsive…no one awake. God! How I dread them….after all , aren’t we there to have a ‘little’ fun!

That’s normally why for my presentations, I tend to focus on demos and showing people ‘how’ something works. Another thing I like doing is polling my audience at the beginning of the presentation and then depending on who is there, I tailor it to the occasion. This might not work for everyone as a lot of people are not like me and tend to want to ‘stick to the script’. But I can think of 2 occasions where it really paid off well.

• SQL Saturday Chicago : Reporting Services 2008 talk. Got a lot of people talking to me after the presentation…telling me how good it was. The thing I remember though is that one older gentleman came up to me and said “I haven’t been this excited about reporting since RPG.”. What was sad is that I know what he is talking about but nonetheless this made it a successful presentation.
• Indy Microsoft/Oracle Back-to-School Event: I gave what was supposed to be an intermediate presentation on the new features of Silverlight 2.0 except when I did my poll ……NO ONE WAS USING IT! Anyhow, I changed the presentation into an introductory Silverlight course and actually during one of the demos…doing 2-D perspective rendering….I used the movie intro to WoW Burning Crusade and rotated it around the screen with some sliders while it continues playing. They loved it and I actually got a round of applause.

So I have to say to Louis though ‘I fell for you brother’ but he can’t let it bring him down too much. Check out his article here for the specifics of how it went for him….

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/louis_davidson/archive/2010/06/27/a-problem-i-must-solve-about-speaking.aspx

Cheers,
AJ

I will be getting ready to post abstracts for SQL Saturday Nashville here in the next day or so. If you have anything cool or interesting that you would like to see then send me your ideas now and I will try to get them incorporated! Heck, I could speak all during the day if Kevin Kline and crew would let me…there is a lot of interesting stuff coming in SQL Server 2008 R2!

Make sure that if you are in the area…AKA as close as Indianapolis at least, which is a 5 hour drive  LoL…that you sign up and support this event! Think of it as helping out the Nashville community after the horrendous flooding that they have gone through. I have my company sponsoring the event so help spread the word and let me know if you are going!

http://www.sqlsaturday.com/51/eventhome.aspx

Also check the tag in twitter #sqlsat51 !

Cheers!
AJ

I had a great time presenting at the SQL Server Saturday event in Louisville over the weekend. Thanks to all of the people whom volunteered their time to put it on as I think that everyone there generally enjoyed themselves. Attendance was good and the crowd seemed to be fairly attentive. I did hear a couple of people saying that their brain hurt so maybe the session could have been a little longer to allow everyone’s brain to expand slowly:)

For everyone that wanted to grab my slides and samples there are attached below…

Cheers!

AJ