Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of presenting at the London SQL Server User Group meeting. It was a really good evening and I was delighted to meet five people that were making their first visit to the user group - a good sign for the future indeed.
My invite to present was a last minute kinda thing which meant that I didn't have any time to do any real prep so I was faced with the dilemma of what to actually fill my session with. Of late I have been doing quite a bit of investigation into the logging features in the forthcoming version of SQL Server (codenamed Denali) so in lieu of any slides or pre-canned demos I decided to just open up SSMS, execute a package and fire off some queries to explore the log data. It may be my misreading of the situation but the reaction from the audience seemed pretty positive, there were lots of questions being posed, and actually they seemed more engaged than they would have been had I actually done some real prep beforehand. I find this quite enlightening and certainly it was more fun to actually sit down and bash out some code rather than clicking through slideware so maybe I should adopt this approach for future presentations? Any feedback on that would be appreciated (particularly if you attended last night).
Thanks must go to Neil Hambly for organising the meeting and for inviting me to present so fittingly I'll finish up with a photo of Neil doing his thing, presenting his Partitioning session.
@Jamiet