Rob Farley : community, professional development

Why I present

Rob Farley — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:09:13 GMT

Louis Davidson just asked me why I write, and now Bob Pusateri (@sqlbob) is asking me why I present, which is his question for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

If you didn’t follow the link to see his actual question, you’ll need to know that he actually posed the question “How did you come to love presenting?”

Well, sometimes I don’t, but on the whole, I have to admit that presenting is part of who I am, and I miss it if I’m not presenting. It’s why despite being a PASS board member (that link will only seem relevant if you’re reading this while I’m still one) and having plenty of reason to NOT present at the PASS Summit in 2013, I’ve submitted the maximum number of abstracts for consideration. It’s why I want to be teaching more, both online and in the classroom, and so on.

It’s not that I think I have anything important to say (although I do only ever teach / present on things that I think are important).

It’s not that I think I’m good at presenting (my feedback scores beg to differ).

It’s not that I’m comfortable presenting (I still get ridiculously nervous most of the time).

I’m just addicted to it.

It’s a drug – it really is.

I spend my time walking around the room, or around the stage, explaining things to people, watching for those moments when the audience gets it, and... well, I’m addicted to it.

If you watch http://www.sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event5/Designing_for_simplification, you’ll see a few things. I was in Wales, and had started with the few words in Welsh that I know (but that’s been edited out – hopefully when I thought I was saying ‘hello’ I wasn’t actually insulting anyone). I nearly fell off the stage. I broke the microphone. I typed some things wrong in my queries. People complained that I didn’t say anything significant…

But around 33:10 in, you hear the audience almost start clapping. IN THE UK (where people don’t clap for presentations). It’s a moment where people see something they weren’t expecting, and (hopefully) realise the potential in what they’ve heard.

Phil Nolan wrote nicely about me on his blog, and said “Those of you who know Rob Farley will know he’s a funny guy with an enormous armoury of shockingly bad jokes.” More importantly though, he wrote “His design tips challenged a number of our ideas and meant I took away many valuable techniques,” which helped me know why I present.

…because it’s not about me, it’s about you. I present because at least one of the people in the audience will benefit from it. And that’s addictive.

@rob_farley

Summit reflections

Rob Farley — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:05:07 GMT

So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other.

My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes.

My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang.

My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all.

Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left.

This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing.

My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably.

Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks.

PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time.

People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not?

So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week.

Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back.

It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

“Fabulous”

Rob Farley — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:46:04 GMT

I don’t tend to find that anything about me gets described as “Fabulous”. It’s not a word I ever use myself, so I was slightly amused to see it here.

It’s going to be an interesting week (in May, Monday 14th to Saturday 19th), in which I have two stints in classrooms (the three day course in downtown Chicago and this pre-con), plus two presentations at the main SQLSaturday event. I’ll be in a room freshly vacated by Jes Borland (I suspect you'll probably be still able to smell the ‘squee’), and from the look of things, I’ll be delivering a solid 2.5 hours of material, with an intermission of 15 minutes. Mind you, with people in the other rooms like Argenis, Ted and Erin, I’m not sure I’ll have much of a crowd. It might be more like “An Intimate Afternoon with Rob Farley” with whoever’s left.

The course will be the highlight of my week. I love teaching this course – it’s a great time to be able to get people in a room for a few days and go through ways to make queries better. More effective. It has “Advanced T-SQL” in the title, but I really try to focus on the “Effectiveness” aspect. Yes, we’ll look at a bunch of advanced features, and your T-SQL arsenal will grow, but the idea is to arm you with the information you need to be able to have more effective T-SQL. Advanced is only better when it’s more effective. It’s going to be a really fun few days, as I stretch your thinking and make you look at T-SQL in a new way.

The pre-con is going to be very different. We’ll be going through the syllabus of the new 70-461 exam, teaching you about all the ins and outs of the various features, leaving you in a position to be able to confidently take the exam. I’ve sat this exam in beta, but of course I can’t use any inside knowledge I gained from that to teach this. There’s a lot of stuff to get through. Each of the four sections has four or five bullet points underneath, and even more sub-points under that. We’ll be pushing through a lot of things, and a lot of the more basic stuff will certainly be skimmed through – but we’ll be looking deeper into a lot of the new things, and making sure that you get all the concepts on the exam. I can’t offer a proper guarantee that you’ll pass – some people just take exams badly. But as we’ll also be looking at a bunch of exam technique aspects, I think you'll be fine.

The two sessions that I’m doing at the SQLSaturday #119 are two of my favourite talks.

One of them is on SARGability. I remember doing this talk with a bunch of MVPs in the room (and a certain cloudy Microsoft employee), and even they said “Ooh – I didn’t know that” afterwards. SARGability – the ability to use indexes effectively – is such a significant aspect of querying, and a pet topic of mine (as regular readers will realise). SQL Server even provides a bunch of methods you can use to improve the SARGability, even if you can’t tweak the queries themselves. Very cool stuff. And did I mention I won’t have slides?

The other is on Analytic Functions (a talk which I’m currently doing around Australia and New Zealand at SQLSaturday 135, 136, 138, 139 and 140). There are eight new Analytic Functions in SQL 2012, plus some new enhancements to the OVER clause. I’ll be running through these, and I’m sure you’ll leave the room with new ideas to try to enhance your reporting and data analysis.

See you there?

Adelaide's SQL Tuesday

Rob Farley — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:36:42 GMT

This coming Tuesday sees a midweek SQL Saturday hit Adelaide. LobsterPot’s a sponsor, as are a bunch of other companies.

An all day event, with two tracks featuring some of the best material you’ve ever seen presented. I’m presenting too.

The thing I really want to draw your attention to is that we have two sessions from Paul White. If you haven’t heard of Paul, click the link to have a look at his blog. When you’ve picked your jaw up and some of the mind-blowing information he likes to write about, imagine yourself sitting in sessions by him. I’ve just got back from Wellington where I heard him for an hour, and knew that giving him two sessions was completely the right choice. Everyone left the room wishing that he could’ve gone on longer, and I suspect Paul will be somewhat caught up for questions for the rest of the day, as people try to pick his brain about some of the Query Optimizer things he can teach. He’s been scheduled for the morning so that attendees can have plenty of opportunity to see him around for the rest of the day. It’s his first time ever to Australia, so it’s completely brilliant to have him come to Adelaide for this event.

I shouldn’t suggest that the other sessions won’t be excellent though. Peter Ward’s session about the $10000 question has been very well received at SQLSaturday events so far, as have the sessions by Roger Noble and Paul te Braak. Combining these with Microsoft’s Raja N presenting about the Database Consolidation Appliance, some excellent local speakers, a terrific sponsor-session from Fusion-io (and a couple of spots from me), and I’m sure you’ll agree that this event is definitely worth getting to.

Numbers are limited and being a free event it may well sell out. So get yourself registered (but I’d recommend joining PASS first, which gives you a bunch of extra benefits and there’s no extra effort involved), and I’ll see you there.

It’s in less than a week!

24 Hours of PASS – first reflections

Rob Farley — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:03:21 GMT

A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it.

I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait for it to appear in a more flexible format, I’ve pushed the 24 attendee numbers into Excel.

This chart shows the numbers by time. Remember that we started at midnight GMT, which was 10:30am in my part of the world and 8pm in New York. It’s probably no surprise that numbers drooped a bit at the start, stayed comparatively low, and then grew as the larger populations of the English-speaking world woke up.

I remember last time 24HOP ran for 24 hours straight, there were quite a few sessions with less than 100 attendees. None this time though. We got close, but even when it was 4am in New York, 8am in London and 7pm in Sydney (which would have to be the worst slot for attracting people), we still had over 100 people tuning in.

As expected numbers grew as the UK woke up, and even more so as the US did, with numbers peaking at 755 for the “3pm in New York” session on SQL Server Data Tools. Kendra Little almost reached those numbers too, and certainly contributed the biggest ‘spike’ on the chart with her session five hours earlier. Of all the sessions, Kendra had the highest proportion of ‘Excellent’s for the “Overall Evaluation of the session” question, and those of you who saw her probably won’t be surprised by that. Kendra had one of the best ranked sessions from the 24HOP event this time last year (narrowly missing out on being top 3), and she has produced a lot of good video content since then.

The reports indicate that there were nearly 8.5 thousand attendees across the 24 sessions, averaging over 350 at each one. I’m looking forward to seeing how many different people that was, although I do know that Wil Sisney managed to attend every single one (if you did too, please let me know). Wil even moderated one of the sessions, which made his feat even greater. Thanks Wil.

I also want to send massive thanks to Dave Dustin. Dave probably would have attended all of the sessions, if it weren’t for a power outage that forced him to take a break. He was also a moderator, and it was during this session that he earned special praise. Part way into the session he was moderating, the speaker lost connectivity and couldn’t get back for about fifteen minutes. That’s an incredibly long time when you’re in a live presentation. There were over 200 people tuned in at the time, and I’m sure Dave was as stressed as I was to have a speaker disappear. I started chasing down a phone number for the speaker, while Dave spoke to the audience. And he did brilliantly. He started answering questions, and kept doing that until the speaker came back. Bear in mind that Dave hadn’t expected to give a presentation on that topic (or any other), and was simply drawing on his SQL expertise to get him through. Also consider that this was between midnight at 1am in Dave’s part of the world (Auckland, NZ). I would’ve been expecting just to welcome people, monitor questions, probably read some out, and in general, help make things run smoothly. He went far beyond the call of duty, and if I had a medal to give him, he’d definitely be getting one.

On the whole, I think this 24HOP was a success. We tried a different platform, and I think for the most part it was a popular move. We didn’t ask the question “Was this better than LiveMeeting?”, but we did get a number of people telling us that they thought the platform was very good.

Some people have told me I get a chance to put my feet up now that this is over. As I’m also co-ordinating a tour of SQLSaturday events across the Australia/New Zealand region, I don’t quite get to take that much of a break (plus, there’s the little thing of squeezing in seven SQL 2012 exams over the next 2.5 weeks). But I am pleased to be reflecting on this event rather than anticipating it. There were a number of factors that could have gone badly, but on the whole I’m pleased about how it went. A massive thanks to everyone involved.

If you’re reading this and thinking you wish you could’ve tuned in more, don’t worry – they were all recorded and you’ll be able to watch them on demand very soon. But as well as that, PASS has a stream of content produced by the Virtual Chapters, so you can keep learning from the comfort of your desk all year round. More info on them at sqlpass.org, of course.

24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

Rob Farley — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:03:18 GMT

There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it.

Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21^st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one.

Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience.

One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window.

What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service.

But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry!

Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers?

If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal.

Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world.

See you tomorrow!

@rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

More free training from PASS

Rob Farley — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:26:52 GMT

Yeah, alright. I know PASS puts on heaps of free training all the time. There are meetings around the world all the time, as held by hundreds of chapters.

Seriously, there’s over 240 chapters in the world. If you figure that they typically have a 2 hour meeting once a month, that makes over 480 hours of training per month. That’s an average over 16 hours per day – leaving just enough time to sleep. Good thing most of these chapters provide food!

But next week, there’s a 24 hours of PASS event. This is the chance to get a huge amount of content into you, and seriously get you into the frame of mind for the PASS Summit. This is a Summit Preview event. Almost all the pre-conference seminar speakers (including me) are going to be represented, so if you haven’t decided which pre-con sessions to get to, this will help you decide (tip: mine! – actually, you could learn plenty from any of them).

Have a look through, and block out several hours next week to tune in. It’s worthwhile, even if only to evaluate how interested you are in some of the Summit material. You could even use it to persuade your boss to let you go.

My session is on in the second day. 8am in Chicago, 2pm in London, 10:30pm where I live in Adelaide. Sept 8th everywhere except New Zealand.

See you there.

@rob_farley

LobsterPot submissions for SQLPASS

Rob Farley — Fri, 06 May 2011 04:05:32 GMT

My guys are great! When PASS started accepting abstract submissions for their Summit (in October this year), some of the LobsterPot employees immediately started looking into ideas for talks they could do. We rate communication as one of our key values at LobsterPot, and all my staff are keen presenters.

Roger Noble was at the PASS Summit with me last year, and has since spoken at both the Adelaide SQL Server User Group and Adelaide SharePoint User Group. Considering the work he’s done in data visualisation with PivotViewer over the past year, he was keen to be able to submit a session on that. This technology is seriously cool stuff – quite a few of our clients have been very interested in it and are now using PivotViewer to get at their data in new ways. You can see examples of Roger’s work at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au

Get even more from PivotViewer (Roger Noble)

With the release of the Silverlight PivotViewer control from Microsoft in June 2010 we saw the beginning of a new direction for data visualisation and interactivity, allowing data to be browsed and filtered in ways that highlighted information that could have easily been missed. This session will show you how to take the PivotViewer control and enhance it even further to provide even more ways to display your data, including placing information on maps, and showing extra information in the PivotViewer tiles according to the zoom level. From sourcing data from PowerPivot and SharePoint 2010, using Visual Studio 2010 to add new functionality and improvements in future versions this session will show the range of ways that PivotViewer can effectively be used in your organisation.

Like most of the team, Ashley Sewell has been doing a bunch of work with clients implementing cubes and reports. The talk he’s put in reflects a very common emotion that he gets from clients when they first start talking about Business Intelligence. They want to know that they’re not just getting their data in a different format, but that they’re going to be able to reach into the data themselves and realise that ‘Analysis’ aspect of SSAS. Ashley used to be tertiary lecturer, and understands the importance of giving presentations that are useful as well as at an appropriate technical level. This talk will be excellent, and I really hope it gets picked.

So you've got a Cube. What's Next? (Ashley Sewell)

Did you ever get to the end of an Analysis Services session thinking "Cubes sound great but what can I show the analysts and execs back at work to woo them?". If your answer is yes then this session is for you. You will be taken through some of the Business Intelligence reporting and dashboarding available using a combination of PerformancePoint Services 2010 and Reporting Services 2008 R2 with particular emphasis on combining the best of each offering to maximise the impact of your dashboards. You can expect to leave this session with a deep enough understanding (and a list of gotchas) to enable you to create your own dashboards and data visualizations that bring the data within your cube to life on the web.

As expected, I’ve put a few submissions – a pre-conference seminar and two regular sessions.

The pre-con is an enhanced version of the one I did at SQLBits 7. In that, I go through a bunch of T-SQL queries that could have been fixed using T-SQL that most people aren’t aware of. For example – many people would shy away from something like ORDER BY MAX(OrderDate) DESC, but if you understand what’s going on there, when it’s good and when it’s bad, then it can be just fine. This pre-con got excellent feedback at SQLBits, and I think it will please PASS Summit delegates as well.

Fixing Queries With Advanced T-SQL Constructs (Rob Farley)

Have you inherited queries that are not your own, and are finding that performance isn’t so great? Removing cursors in favour of set-based queries is useful, but even set-based queries can perform poorly. Understanding the impact that various constructs can have on a query plan could be key to resolving many of these issues. In this seminar, irrepressible SQL MVP Rob Farley will take a look at some real-life queries and take the audience through examples of constructs that can have significant effects on tuning. This will include complex nested joins, join simplification, procedural functions, SARGability v residuality with predicates, better execution plan reading, start-up parameters, force hints, complex sorting, ORs, effective Dynamic SQL, GROUP BY v DISTINCT, unique indexes, temporary tables, APPLY considerations, and more. You'll discover profoundness in things you thought you knew, and you'll even see when a covering index that returns a single row can be a bad thing. This will be a day spent in Management Studio, not PowerPoint. If you want to know how to persuade the Query Optimizer to do a better job of running your query, this day is for you. The examples will apply to a variety of versions, with most of it being useful even in a SQL 2005 environment.

Another talk that I’ve done in the past is one called “Understanding SARGability (to make your queries run faster)”. In fact, last year this talk was a ‘stand-by’ for the PASS Summit. I also gave it at SQLBits 7, with Brent Ozar (@BrentO) and Buck Woody (@BuckWoody) heckling me from the back. Brent tweeted “Okay, wow, @robfarley is a seriously good presenter”, and although he got my Twitter handle wrong (it’s @rob_farley), I was very flattered. It’s one of my second-favourite tweets still.

Over recent times, I’ve found that people really don’t seem to understand the significance of having predicates fall into the category of “Residual”. I wrote about it recently, and was quite interested to see some of the reactions that people had when they talked about it with me. Jack Li wrote a post last week about a query which took longer than expected because a Hash Match was putting a lot of data into a single bucket. This is a common problem that gets missed, because of the impact of having the selective predicate treated as residual. I’m going to write more posts on that in the coming weeks, and a lot of that will be covered in one of the talks I’ve submitted this year. Residualiciousness isn’t a real word, but I figure that shouldn’t stop me.

Joins, SARGability and the Evils of Residualiciousness (Rob Farley)

You wouldn't believe how often people just aren't using their indexes effectively, whether it be searching for data, or joining tables. Quite often, this comes down to predicates becoming residual. Yes, residuality is a problem, and once a predicate has become residualicious, you may as well be scanning instead of seeking. There’s so much more to SARGability than people think, and people can often miss out on significant performance benefits by not appreciating this – particularly with new and improved query hints becoming available in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali. SARGable means Search ARGument Able and relates to the ability to search through an index for a value. Unfortunately many database professionals don’t really understand it – especially in regard to joins – leading to queries which don’t run as well as they should. In this talk, you'll learn how to tell whether a predicate is being used correctly, and to evaluate what's really going on in your Seek or Join. You'll even learn to use new features in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali to affect the residuality of your predicates. This is a talk involving lots of demos, showing plenty of queries and execution plans.

The other talk I’ve submitted was inspired by a conversation with my friend Jamie Thomson (@jamiet), who unfortunately won’t be at the PASS Summit this year (he does have an excellent reason though). I happened to mention something which I considered an important consideration about queries used for SSIS, and he told me I had to write a blog post about it. I eventually did, and it got me thinking about a bunch of things that SSIS Tuning Talks (like those that Jamie gives) which are very relevant to tuning T-SQL, but yet almost never get mentioned by standard talks. Some of them get covered in the pre-con seminar too, and I’m sure I’ll have to get blog posts written on some of these things over coming months.

Tuning T-SQL Using Lessons Learned From SSIS (Rob Farley)

We see presentations telling us how to tune T-SQL, looking at things like how a covering index can help avoid an expensive lookup, and the importance of set-based thinking. But there can be a lot more to finding bottlenecks in an execution plan, and there are significant parallels with the kind of concerns we have when tuning SSIS Data Flows. This session will look at some of the things that SSIS gurus explain when in looking at how to make SSIS run faster, and draw strong parallels to things that many query tuners don't realise. If only they paid attention to the SSIS world! There will be a lot of examples in this session, explaining what's happening in query plans and the ways that you can persuade your queries to run more like your SSIS packages, and vice-versa.

Looking at the long list of abstract submissions this year (and right now there’s about three hours for more to come in), I think it’s going to be a great event. With buzz around Denali and a stronger community than ever, I think it’s going to be huge.

There will be handful of LobsterPot employees there, and I hope you will be too!

@rob_farley

How many people will be with you during 24HOP?

Rob Farley — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:58:33 GMT

In less than a week, SQLPASS hosts another 24 Hours of PASS event, this time with an array of 24 female speakers (in honour of this month being Women’s History Month).

Interestingly, the committee has had a few people ask if there are rules about how the event can be viewed, such as “How many people from any one organisation can watch it?” or “Does it matter if a few people are crowded around the same screen?”

From a licensing and marketing perspective, there is value in knowing how many people are watching the event, but there are no restrictions about how the thing is viewed.

In fact – if you’re planning to watch any of these events, I want to suggest an idea:

Book a meeting room in your office with a projector, and watch 24HOP in there.

If you’re planning to have it streaming in the background while you work, obviously this makes life a bit trickier. But if you’re planning to treat it as a training event (a 2-day conference if you like) and block out a bit of time for it (as well you should – there’s going to be some great stuff in there), then why not do it in a way that makes it so that other people can see that you’re watching it, and potentially join you.

When an event like this runs, we can see how many different ‘people’ are attending each LiveMeeting session. What we can’t tell is how many actual people there are represented. Jessica Moss spoke to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group a few weeks ago via LiveMeeting, and LiveMeeting told us there were less than a dozen people attending. Really there were at least three times that number, because all the people in the room with me weren’t included.

I’d love to imagine that every LiveMeeting attendee represented a crowd in a room, watching a shared screen.

So there’s my challenge – don’t let your LiveMeeting session represent just you. Find a way of involving other people. At the very least, you’ll be able to discuss it with them afterwards. Now stick a comment on this post to let me know how many people are going to be joining you. :)

If you’re not registered for the event yet, get yourself over to the SQLPASS site and make it happen.

PASS Summit Feedback

Rob Farley — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 12:05:44 GMT

PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings...

At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well.

Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me.

Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go?

Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking.

Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style. Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it.

Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...

I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk.

Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list. In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor. I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well. Tell me about your scores.

Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials.

Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides. Did they rate your thong?

Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score.

Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites. Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM. As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck. So how did you rank so low?

Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable).

Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then?

Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.”

Brent: Extemporaneous, eh?

Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt.

Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits. As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material. It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is. People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun.

Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound.

Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way? It seems so simple and logical." Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept. I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes.

Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened.

Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right? From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen.

Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me.

My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe.

I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess).

Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory. It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service. I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting. Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures. On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that. It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you?

Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still.

Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food.

Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone?

Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different.

Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir. Where can we see you next?

Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example.

Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation.

Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?