Rob Farley : sqlpass, community

Portfolio changeover time for the PASS board

Rob Farley — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:13:33 GMT

The last PASS board meeting for the year has happened, and the portfolio handovers are well under way.

Sadly, having new board members elected means having existing board members step down, and this last board meeting was the last one for both Allen Kinsel (@sqlinsaneo) and Kendal van Dyke (@sqldba). In 2012, these guys had the portfolios of local chapters and SQL Saturdays, respectively.

Newly elected board member Wendy Pastrick (@wendy_dance) is taking over from Allen on local chapters, while I’m taking over SQL Saturdays from Kendal. In 2012, my portfolio was 24 Hours of PASS, which is being rolled into the Virtual Chapters portfolio, headed still by Denise McInerney (@denisemc06).

I have to admit that I’m really excited that the 24HOP portfolio is being merged with Virtual Chapters, as the two are so linked. I had been on the 24HOP committee before I joined the PASS board, and had recommended that the two portfolios be merged around the time I was elected to the board. During my term I even recruited Virtual Chapter leaders to be on the committee for 24HOP, as I believe their experience in the online experience makes them best suited to influence PASS’ premier online event – the semi-annual 24HOP.

2012 was a good year for 24HOP, although it was the riskiest for some time as well.

Two of the more obvious changes that we made were to look at a new platform, and to return to the 24-hours straight format (rather than two 12-hour blocks). This more continuous format meant that numbers dropped (the largest audience is in the US, so any sessions that are overnight for the US are obviously going to have smaller attendance). However, this format meant we reached over 100 different countries, which I think was really significant. Comparing the first 2012 event with the first 2011 event (which used the 2x12 format), we jumped from reaching 54 countries in 2011 to 104 in 2012.

While I was still on the committee, we had discussed the need for a new platform, as the LiveMeeting platform wasn’t coping well with the numbers we were seeing. A number of options had been considered, some too expensive, some not capable of scaling sufficiently, and a decision had been made to use a platform called IBTalk. It was obviously more expensive than LiveMeeting (which had been available for free), but looked like it was going to scale much more nicely. We used it for both 2012 events and it will also be used for the next event (on Jan 30). The decision to use IBTalk was very risky, but as an experiment it seemed to work okay. There were both good and bad elements of the platform, which I’m not going to go into in a forum like this, although the second event that we used IBTalk for ended up being much smoother than the first, and I anticipate that the Jan30 event will be event smoother still.

I felt like the first event of 2012 was dominated by the new platform. It was held two weeks after the SQL Server 2012 launch, which had also been a large virtual event using a new platform. I guess experimenting with new platforms was a large topic of discussion that month. One thing that didn’t really work for us was the closed captioning. It turns out that when you have someone providing closed captioning live, any typos that come through, or anything that is misheard by the person providing the service, etc… well, it doesn’t always work for being able to feed a translation service. We tried, and it was good to try – but it didn’t work so well. Despite all that, PASS members can view the session recordings at http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/spring2012/Home.aspx

The main 24HOP event in the second half of the year was the annual Summit Preview event. We didn’t try to pursue the closed captioning again, but we did continue with IBTalk. Going back to LiveMeeting was never going to be an option for us, and we wanted to take a second look at the platform, in light of the various things we’d learned from the experience in Q1. It was a better experience from a number of perspectives, and we certainly got to test the scalability.

Over the course of the day, we had good numbers – only a handful shy of 10,000 attendees across the course of the day (okay, a handful if you count fingers, toes, and were inbred – we had 9979). The lowest attendances were around the 100 mark, but the largest reached 1421 attendees. The highest from any previous events was around the 800 mark, so this was a significant improvement – and the platform handled it just fine. If we’d had that many people trying to access the LiveMeeting platform it simply wouldn’t’ve coped, and the IBTalk platform deserves praise for that.

The platform decision isn’t over yet. A new search has taken place in light of what we’ve learned in the past year, and including a lot of what people have expressed to us on platforms such as Twitter. There are platforms that are way out of our price range (it can be very expensive to present 10,000 man-hours of content using some platforms), and there are ones that won’t cope with some of the things we would like to do. With some of the Virtual Chapters growing fast, a new platform needs to be able to cope with them too, with a wide variety of attendances needing to be handled. I wish Denise all the best for that, and have been able to happily assure her that the PASS HQ team that does most of the work behind the scenes for 24HOP (particularly Jane and Vicki) is excellent and will make her look brilliant this year.

Another change in 2012 was the sponsorship story. For a long time, Dell had been a major sponsor of 24HOP, and I want to thank them for that. However, 24HOP wasn’t a priority for them in 2012, and new sponsors needed to be found. The first event saw sponsorship come in from Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera, with Idera being replaced by RSSBus for the second event. But what really excited me was to see a second tier of sponsors join the fray, with Melissa Data and Confio joining Idera as ‘Alliance Sponsors’. It was really good to have six fantastic companies sponsoring the event, and providing extra options for them.

I haven’t even mentioned the non-English events that have taken place! PASS has seen 24HOP events in Russian, Portuguese and Spanish this year, although my personal involvement with those events have been somewhat less. Again, the PASS HQ staff have been great in enabling these events, and helping them run smoothly.

So I leave 24HOP in capable hands.

Instead, I pick up the SQL Saturday portfolio – another fast-growing facet of PASS. Already the 200th SQL Saturday event has been scheduled, and I’m finding myself getting onto a moving train. Luckily, I won’t be battling anyone on the roof Bond-style, but there are a lot of things that will need attention to make sure that the SQL Saturday model can continue to be successful.

The PASS HQ staff most responsible for the SQL Saturdays that happen all around the world are Karla and Niko. If you’ve ever met either of these two, you’ll know that they run quickly and are nothing if not achievers. I suspect that I could just tell them to keep doing their thing and the portfolio would be considered successful. This is incredibly useful to me, because I should be able to focus on identifying and solving some of the things that might need to change as these events become larger in both size and number. I’m keen to look into some of the edge cases, such as international events (including non-English), and both the larger and smaller events that are around – but all the time trying to serve Niko, Karla and all the community leaders in what they do.

@rob_farley

SQL Community – stronger than ever

Rob Farley — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:43:08 GMT

I posted a few hours ago about a reflection of the Summit, but I wanted to write another one for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Chris Yates.

In January of this year, Adam Jorgensen and I joked around in a video that was used for the SQL Server 2012 launch. We were asked about SQLFamily, and we said how we were like brothers – how we could drive each other crazy (the look he gave me as I patted his stomach was priceless), but that we’d still look out for each other, just like in a real family.

And this is really true.

Last week at the PASS Summit, there was a lot going on. I was busy as always, as were many others. People told me their good news, their awful news, and some whinged to me about other people who were driving them crazy. But throughout this, people in the SQL Server community genuinely want the best for each other. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I don’t see much of this.

Australians aren’t big on cheering for each other. Neither are the English. I think we see it as an American thing. It could be easy for me to consider that the SQL Community that I see at the PASS Summit is mainly there because it’s a primarily American organisation. But when you speak to people like sponsors, or people involved in several types of communities, you quickly hear that it’s not just about that – that PASS has something special. It goes beyond cheering, it’s a strong desire to see each other succeed.

I see MVPs feel disappointed for those people who don’t get awarded. I see Summit speakers concerned for those who missed out on the chance to speak. I see chapter leaders excited about the opportunity to help other chapters. And throughout, I see a gentleness and love for people that you rarely see outside the church (and sadly, many churches don’t have it either).

Chris points out that the M-W dictionary defined community as “a unified body of individuals”, and I feel like this is true of the SQL Server community. It goes deeper though. It’s not just unity – and we’re most definitely different to each other – it’s more than that. We all want to see each other grow. We all want to pull ourselves up, to serve each other, and to grow PASS into something more than it is today.

In that other post of mine I wrote a bit about Paul White’s experience at his first Summit. His missus wrote to me on Facebook saying that she welled up over it. But that emotion was nothing about what I wrote – it was about the reaction that the SQL Community had had to Paul. Be proud of it, my SQL brothers and sisters, and never lose it.

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?

Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed...

Rob Farley — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:26:00 GMT

PASS Summit is coming up, and I thought I’d post a few things.

Summit Old...

At the PASS Summit, you will get the chance to hear presentations by the SQL Server establishment. Just about every big name in the SQL Server world is a regular at the PASS Summit, so you will get to hear and meet people like Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen) (who just recently got awarded MVP status for the 20th year running), and from all around the world such as the UK’s Chris Webb (@technitrain) or Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) from India. Almost all the household names in SQL Server will be there, including a large contingent from Microsoft. The PASS Summit is by far the best place to meet the legends of SQL Server. And they’re not all old. Some are, but most of them are younger than you might think.

...Summit New...

The hottest topics are often about the newest technologies (such as SQL Server 2012). But you will almost certainly learn new stuff about older versions too. But that’s not what I wanted to pick on for this point.

There are many new speakers at every PASS Summit, and content that has not been covered in other places. This year, for example, LobsterPot’s Roger Noble (@roger_noble) is giving a presentation for the first time. He’s a regular around the Australian circuit, but this is his first time presenting to a US audience. New Zealand’s Paul White (@sql_kiwi) is attending his first PASS Summit, and will be giving over four hours of incredibly deep stuff that has never been presented anywhere in the US before (I can’t say the world, because he did present similar material in Adelaide earlier in the year).

...Summit Borrowed...

No, I’m not talking about plagiarism – the talks you’ll hear are all their own work.

But you will get a lot of stuff you’ll be able to take back and apply at work. The PASS Summit sessions are not full of sales-pitches, telling you about how great things could be if only you’d buy some third-party vendor product. It’s simply not that kind of conference, and PASS doesn’t allow that kind of talk to take place. Instead, you’ll be taught techniques, and be able to download scripts and slides to let you perform that magic back at work when you get home. You will definitely find plenty of ideas to borrow at the PASS Summit.

...Summit Blue

Yeah – and there’s karaoke. Blue - Jason - SQL Karaoke - YouTube

Calling home, receiving calls and smartphone data from the US

Rob Farley — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 01:16:59 GMT

I got asked about calling home from the US, by someone going to the PASS Summit. I found myself thinking “there should be a blog post about this”...

The easiest way to phone home is Skype - no question. Use WiFi, and if you’re calling someone who has Skype on their phone at the other end, it’s free. Even if they don’t, it’s still pretty good price-wise. The PASS Summit conference centre has good WiFI, as do the hotels, and plenty of other places (like Starbucks).

But if you’re used to having data all the time, particularly when you’re walking from one place to another, then you’ll want a sim card. This also lets you receive calls more easily, not just solving your data problem. You’ll need to make sure your phone isn’t locked to your local network – get that sorted before you leave.

It’s no trouble to drop by a T-mobile or AT&T store and getting a prepaid sim. You can’t get one from the airport, but if the PASS Summit is your first stop, there’s a T-mobile store on 6th in Seattle between Pine & Pike, so you can see it from the Sheraton hotel if that’s where you’re staying. AT&T isn’t far away either.

But – there’s an extra step that you should be aware of.

If you talk to one of these US telcos, you’ll probably (hopefully I’m wrong, but this is how it was for me recently) be told that their prepaid sims don’t work in smartphones. And they’re right – the APN gets detected and stops the data from working. But luckily, Apple (and others) have provided information about how to change the APN, which has been used by a company based in New Zealand to let you get your phone working.

Basically, you send your phone browser to http://unlockit.co.nz and follow the prompts. But do this from a WiFi place somewhere, because you won’t have data access until after you’ve sorted this out...

Oh, and if you get a prepaid sim with “unlimited data”, you will still need to get a Data Feature for it.

And just for the record – this is WAY easier if you’re going to the UK. I dropped into a T-mobile shop there, and bought a prepaid sim card for five quid, which gave me 250MB data and some (but not much) call credit. In Australia it’s even easier, because you can buy data-enabled sim cards that work in smartphones from the airport when you arrive.

I think having access to data really helps you feel at home in a different place. It means you can pull up maps, see what your friends are doing, and more. Hopefully this post helps, but feel free to post comments with extra information if you have it.

@rob_farley

“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

24 Hours of PASS

Rob Farley — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:32:47 GMT

Hooray – we’re ready to announce the details of the 24 Hours of PASS event that’s coming to an internet connection near you on March 21st! Read on for the day’s schedule, some of my thoughts on the 24 Hours of PASS concept, information about the platform, and an announcement which I think is really quite a big deal and worth making a fuss over.

24 Hours Straight

So – March 21st. No overlap with any other days, just 24 Hours of PASS, squeezed back into a single day. The last few events have been split over two days, running from noon to midnight (GMT), which conveniently fits in daylight hours of the Eastern United States. To help with the current push for internationalisation (and there’s more on that later in this post), we’re starting at midnight GMT (which is a perfectly reasonable 7pm in New York), and running through to the following midnight GMT (which is the next 7pm in New York, strangely enough). I’d like to be able to give prizes to people who attend all twenty-four, but I’m not quite that keen. Tell you what though – I’ll cheer on Twitter and my blog for anyone who tells me they’ve made it through all of them. I know people have done it before, and hopefully plenty will again.

VC involvement

The Virtual Chapter portfolio isn’t mine. It’s Denise McInerney’s. She’s doing a brilliant job, and we both see a strong correlation between 24HOP and the VCs. There are likely to be lots of people who tune in to 24HOP who haven’t really noticed that there are virtual chapters that meet, providing excellent online meetings, several times every month! We’ve roped in many of the VC leaders to help choose the sessions, host the sessions, and more. In fact, I suspect that many of the sessions that were submitted but not chosen could well be getting selected for the Virtual Chapters in the weeks and months to come. The Virtual Chapters are one of the best things about PASS, and it’s great that 24HOP can be showcasing them this time around. Most of the VCs are represented, including Performance, Data Architecture, PowerShell, Professional Development, and the larger ones like BI and AppDev. Even the newly forming BigData VC. The Oracle VC isn’t. Sorry, Scott.

Platform

LiveMeeting is such a great product. If you haven’t tried it out, you really should. It’s been our platform of choice here at 24HOP for ages now. Unfortunately, 24HOP seems to have outgrown it. People who have tuned in to recent events will have noticed that the video hasn’t always streamed as nicely as we’d like, and although we really do love LiveMeeting, we’re going to try a different platform – called IBTalk. This thing looks really impressive, and has some really cool features too. Most importantly, it should scale well. And record nicely. And allow eval forms nicely. And make coffee* (*feature list may not be completely accurate).

Internationalisation

I know you’ve already read about how the event is going to be 24 hours straight, ignoring the fact that numbers may well be lower while the US sleeps. But that’s not the only way in which 24HOP is becoming more international...

During the event, the IBTalk people are going to provide Live Closed Captioning. So you can get subtitles during the event!

But there’s more...

This captioning will be available in fifteen different languages!

English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. You want subtitles in Thai? No problem. Watching with a Turkish friend? Sure, no worries. Even if you’re just more comfortable in Dutch than English...

PASS is serious about trying to reach people around the world. With these languages, I think most people are covered. There are a few gaps, such as not having Swedish or Bangla – but apparently just about everyone in IT in those areas speaks English anyway (so I’m told).

The platform also has an amazing feature that translates questions, so if you're more comfortable asking a question in Russian or Portguese, you can do that. The presenter will see the question in their own language, and the attendee will read the answer in theirs.

The Schedule!

As well as what you can see below, the schedule is live over at http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/spring2012/SessionsbySchedule.aspx and http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/spring2012/SessionsbyTrack.aspx. Please head over to the PASS site to register for the sessions you’re interested in. But in the meantime, check out this list! I’m sure you’ll recognise plenty of the names, but probably not all. You’ll also notice there are plenty of speakers from different parts of the world, including the UK (like Mark and Neil), Australia (like Julie), and Israel (like Ami).

Time	Title	Speaker	Track / VC
00:00 - 01:00 GMT	SSIS Tips & Tricks	Josef Richberg	AppDev
01:00 - 02:00 GMT	Persistence In The Cloud: How to use Azure Storage	David Giard	Azure
02:00 - 03:00 GMT	Tier-1 BI in the Age of Bees and Elephants	Denny Lee	BigData / BI
03:00 - 04:00 GMT	Performance Tuning for Pirates!	John Sterrett	Perf
04:00 - 05:00 GMT	Integrating DQS, MDS and Your Data Warehouse	Christopher Price	BI
05:00 - 06:00 GMT	High Volume Data Processing Techniques Without Driving Your DBA Crazy!	Julie Koesmarno	Perf
06:00 - 07:00 GMT	Upgrading and Overhauling Your SSIS Packages for 2012	Jessica Moss	BI
07:00 - 08:00 GMT	A Window into Your Data: Using Window Functions in T-SQL	Steve Hughes	AppDev
08:00 - 09:00 GMT	VertiPaq under the hood	Marco Russo	BI
09:00 - 10:00 GMT	STOP! Consolidate and Listen!	Jorge Segarra	Virtualization
10:00 - 11:00 GMT	Where are my (primary) keys?	Ami Levin	Data Architecture
11:00 - 12:00 GMT	SQL Server 2012 Memory Management	Neil Hambly	DBA
12:00 - 13:00 GMT	Enterprise Data Mining with SQL Server	Mark Tabladillo	BI
13:00 - 14:00 GMT	Automate Policy-Based Management using PowerShell	Allen White	PowerShell
14:00 - 15:00 GMT	SQL Server First Responder Kit	Kendra Little	DBA
15:00 - 16:00 GMT	Fitting Microsoft Hadoop into your Enterprise BI Strategy	Cindy Gross	BigData / BI
16:00 - 17:00 GMT	Implementing SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core	Edwin Sarmiento	PowerShell
17:00 - 18:00 GMT	A Deep Dive in SQL Server 2012 Data Warehousing	Dejan Sarka	BI
18:00 - 19:00 GMT	Panel: I Was Young and Didn't Know Any Better	Karen Lopez	ProfDev
19:00 - 20:00 GMT	Introducing SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT)	Nabeel Derhem	AppDev
20:00 - 21:00 GMT	Moves Like Jagger - Upgrading to SQL Server 2012	Mark Broadbent	DBA
21:00 - 22:00 GMT	What to Look For in SQL Server 2012 Execution Plans	Grant Fritchey	AppDev
22:00 - 23:00 GMT	SQL 2012 - HA and DR Lots of New Options	Joseph D’Antoni	DBA
23:00 - 00:00 GMT	Improving the Performance of your Data Warehouse Queries with Columnstore Indexes	Benjamin Nevarez	Perf

It’s going to be a massive event. Get registering soon!

[Edit: Most of this post also appears at: http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog/entryid/410/24-Hours-of-PASS.aspx]

SQLRally Nordic gets underway

Rob Farley — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:56:01 GMT

PASS is becoming more international, which is great.

The SQL Community has always been international – it’s not as if data is only generated in North America. And while it’s easy for organisations to have a North American focus, PASS is taking steps to become international. Regular readers will be aware that I’m one of three advisors to the PASS Board of Directors, with a focus on developing PASS as a more global organisation.

With this in mind, it’s great that today is Day 1 of SQLRally Nordic, being hosted in in Sweden – not only a non-American country, but one that doesn’t have English as its major language.

The event has been hosted by the amazing Johan Åhlén and Raoul Illyés, two guys who I met earlier this year, but the thing that amazes me is the incredible support that this event has from the SQL Community.

It’s been sold out for a long time, and when you see the list of speakers, it’s not surprising.

Some of the industry’s biggest names from Microsoft have turned up, including Mark Souza (who is also a PASS Director), Thomas Kejser and Tobias Thernström. Business Intelligence experts such as Jen Stirrup, Chris Webb, Peter Myers, Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari are there, as are some of the most awarded SQL MVPs such as Itzik Ben-Gan, Aaron Bertrand and Kevin Kline. The sponsor list is also brilliant, with names such as HP, FusionIO, SQL Sentry, Quest and SolidQ complimented by Swedish companies like Cornerstone, Informator, B3IT and Addskills.

As someone who is interested in PASS becoming global, I’m really excited to see this event happening, and I hope it’s a launch-pad into many other international events hosted by the SQL community.

If you have the opportunity, thank Johan and Raoul for putting this event on, and the speakers and sponsors for helping support it. The noise from Twitter is that everything is going fantastically well, and everyone involved should be thoroughly congratulated!

@rob_farley

Highlights and Lowlights of PASS Summit 2011

Rob Farley — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:23:07 GMT

This was a proper big week.

The PASS Summit ran from Tuesday night to Friday, but I’d arrived in America the Friday before. So by the time it actually started, I had that strange feeling that things were wrapping up. My calendar was ridiculously full. The stuff that I was aware of ahead of time looked like this:

Friday 7th: Arrive in America. Travel to Portland. Speaker Dinner.

Saturday 8th: SQL Saturday #92 (two sessions to give, plus a song performance with Buck during the morning break). Charity dinner for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (whom LobsterPot sponsor).

Sunday 9th: Walk the Portland Half Marathon. Travel to Seattle. Collect my kilt. Register for the Summit.

Monday 10th: Early morning prayer meeting. Deliver a pre-conference seminar. Insiders Dinner in evening.

Tuesday 11th: Early morning prayer meeting. Meeting about SQL Saturday. PASS Board Meeting. Insiders Day at the Microsoft Campus. Opening Night Party, including being a Quiz Bowl contestant. Speaker/Volunteer Dinner.

Wednesday 12th: Early morning prayer meeting. Chapter leaders’ meeting. Chapter lunch. Book signing. Lightning Talk to deliver (my song). Global Growth meeting. Exhibitors’ party. Parties for SQL People, SQL Sentry, SolidQ and SQLKaraoke.

Thursday 13th: Early morning prayer meeting. WIT Lunch. Spotlight session to deliver. Redgate Dinner. Party at Gameworks.

Friday 14th: Early morning prayer meeting. More book signing. Board Q&A session. Board photos.

Saturday 15th: Sleep in and fly home.

That’s the short version. Really. There were a lot of other things that were squeezed in – in particular, the fact that I had promised Audrey Hammonds about six months ago that I would run through her presentation with her, and one other thing that became somewhat significant: THE FACT THAT ALLEN KINSEL ARRANGED FOR ME TO PERFORM MY SONG DURING THE FRIDAY KEYNOTE.

Readers of my blog (and plenty of other blogs) will know by now that I played my guitar and sang at the start of the Friday Keynote. Buck Woody accompanying me with his guitar and backing vocals. What you might not know is that this only got arranged late on Wednesday night. Allen had seen me perform it (again with Buck) during the Lightning Talks on Wednesday afternoon, and by the time the night was over, Buck and I were booked in to perform it in front of the three and a half thousand delegates at the biggest keynote of the week. I’ve played and sang before a couple of hundred before, but never even close to that many. To say I had mixed emotions would’ve been an understatement. I didn’t hesitate to say yes, and was excited, but was also phenomenally nervous.

As a late entry to a tight schedule, we got two minutes only and had to cut the song short. We didn’t sing the bridge section, so stopped after just Verse Chorus Verse Chorus. It was tremendous fun, and I loved seeing faint glows of phones being waved around in the crowd. I desperately wanted to look into the crowd as I was walking off stage, but my nerves and the fear of tripping on the guitar lead froze me completely and I didn’t turn my head at all. I was told later that there was a standing ovation – but I was just full of emotion, and so tired. So tired. It was my own fault – I’d gone out with Microsoft people after the various parties, and when they’d all gone to bed for a couple of hours around 5:30am, I’d got myself ready to lead a quick song at the 6am prayer meeting head off to my 6:15am sound check, prior to the 7:15am book signing. I got through the day (although I fell asleep for a few minutes during Audrey’s session, which I will need to watch to see how she did). I eventually got to bed around 10:30pm Friday night, and about twelve hours later managed to get up with just enough time to pack and check out of the hotel for noon.

But this wasn’t the highlight for me.

Nor was the highlight the fact that my level of involvement was so much greater, now that I’m a Board Member. I have to admit that I always get so much more out of events like this if I’m involved. I appreciate that I can get to more sessions if I’m not already laden with other entries on my calendar, but I would rather serve others wherever possible. I’m still new on the board, but as an advisor, I’m hoping to be able to influence things like the Summit more and more next year, and maybe there will be a few areas in which we can find opportunity to improve it still.

Serving is great – but wasn’t the highlight.

The highlight was the people. It always is, and it always will be. Right from the moment I arrived in America and tracked down John & Yanni Robel and Jes Borland. Arriving in Portland and seeing Jeremiah & Kendra, Buck Woody, Tim Ford, Erin Stellato and many more at the SQLSaturday events. Participating in the Portland Half Marathon with Erin, Jes, Yanni, Brent Ozar, Karen Lopez, Doug Lane (who did 10km) and Allen White (who did the full marathon), and a lots of people wearing the LobsterPot logo on their shirts. And despite not being able to run (I physically can’t run because of an old back injury, so I just walked it), I didn’t even finish last of the half marathoners! For all the extra pain I felt because my back isn’t really up to walking 21km in 3 hours, it was worth it. I’m especially proud of Yanni, who has achieved amazing things despite having a nasty blood cancer.

Despite Sunday being a ridiculously early start and a very long day, each day started with 6am prayer meetings. But this gave the opportunity to start each day on a good note, meet even more people (like Matt “Mrs” Slocum), and to figure out some of why I always click so well with friends like Stacia Misner.

Even the time I spent moving from one spot to another was a chance to see people and grow friendships deeper. I think of the night I was heading back to my hotel after the walk back from one of the parties had gone past the other hotels, and I bumped into the “Damn Strates” (Jason & Sarah), only to spend an hour talking with them about a number of different things. Or the time spent talking with one of the industry’s newest and brightest lights Jes Borland, who thinks she can out-talk me. Or the time with fellow board members JRJ, MarkS & Lara, which is time I can’t help but enjoy as the conversations switch over and over from flippant to serious and back again.

Oh, and the lowlight was losing my prescription sunglasses. That’s a real pain.

The SQL community has something very special, that other communities should be jealous of. These people genuinely love each other, and it’s really good to see and to be part of it. I’ve seen the same at SQLBits, but not in many other contexts.

@rob_farley

PS: Apologies to everyone for not having links on your names. I wrote this on a plane without connectivity.

I should've looked the other way

Rob Farley — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:08:00 GMT

The words for that song I did at the PASS Summit 2011 are as follows. On the Friday, I stopped where the bridge starts. Various recordings of it are making it to YouTube, such as here, where the song starts around 2:20 in.

I should've looked the other way

Verse 1:
My query sucks - it takes too long
So long I wrote this song
The plan's not big - it ain't a giant
And yet I have an angry client
Performance now has made her weary
So I've come in to fix her query
I promise I won't ever fail her
Say "Trust me, love, I'm from Australia!"

Chorus:
I need to find you
But I don't want to search every row
My predicate's residual
My seek just runs too slow
I thought I'd caught a glimpse of you
Been searching for all day
But all along, I'd done it wrong
I should've looked the other way

Verse 2:
A trace is on, I know the reads
That fetch the bytes the query needs
There's spooling from a CTE
They've got recursion needlessly
I need to dig a little further
I worry there might be a cursor
The DBA has the plan_handle
He says it's not corrupt, he knows Paul Randal!

Repeat chorus

Bridge:
There is an index covering predicates with keys
But my developer has used inequalities
There is a range scan
Hiding truth
Hiding cost
Hiding you...

Repeat chorus x2

I should've looked the other way

@rob_farley

Data, Information and Knowledge

Rob Farley — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:50:43 GMT

Hopefully my connection is slightly better during today’s keynote than it was during yesterday’s, when “Live Blogging” didn’t really cut it. The PASS staff saw the problem and have resolved it (thanks guys!).

Quentin Clark has jumped on stage to talk some more about SQL Server 2012, and he started with the expression “Data, Information and Knowledge”. I love this – I see Business Intelligence about extracting information from data, and it’s good to have Microsoft see this priority across the whole SQL platform.

He’s also talking about the 12 biggest features of SQL Server 2012, which he says has more new features than any release of SQL Server yet.

1. Required 9s

Integration Services as a Server
HA for StreamInsight
SQL Server AlwaysOn.

SQL Server has seen uptime as a key component for a long time, but to provide High Availability for StreamInsight is particularly significant. StreamInsight involves being able to consume data at significant rates, being able to run queries against that data while it’s still on the move – before it’s even reached the relational database. High Availability for StreamInsight should be able to better provide strategies to ensure that streaming data need not be lost. Businesses suffer badly when they lose data. SQL Server 2012 should be able to reduce this problem almost completely.

2. Blazing-Fast Performance

Performance Enhancements – RDBMS, SSAS, SSIS
ColumnStore Index

3. Rapid Data Exploration
4. Managed Self-Service BI

Power View + PowerPivot
Administration from SharePoint
Reporting Alerts

Yes, “Power View” has a space in it. It’s the new name for Crescent, which is about self-service reporting using a Silverlight experience. I’m all for allowing users to interact with the data in powerful ways, but I’m also concerned about how to manage this. SharePoint seems to continue as the main platform for this, and although I’d love to see the administration of these reports be done inside SQL itself (instead of SharePoint), I get that SharePoint is currently the platform of choice.

5. Credible, Consistent Data

BI Semantic Model
Data Quality Services
Master Data Services

I’m not going to comment on this stuff right now – it’s been talked about plenty already, but the enhancements definitely look good. The new stuff around DQS lets you fix up data at a number of extra points and have it pushed back into the underlying warehouse.

6. Organisational Compliance

Expanded Audit – User-defined, Filtering
User-defined Server Roles

This is useful. Audit is one of the massive things, and yet an administrator has always been able to turn it off. With the ability to have user-defined server roles, auditing turns into a much more real option.

7. Peace of Mind

Production-simulated Application Testing
System Center Advisor & Management Packs
Expanded Support – Premier Mission Critical

The Replay tools have become Distributed Replay, which is introduces a ton of really good options.

8. Scalable Data Warehousing
9. Fast Time to Solution

SQL Server Appliances – Optimised and Pre-tuned
HW + SW + Support – Just Add Power
Choice of Hardware

Appliances are stepping up. Buying an appliance, adding the network connection and electricity, and it’s ready to accept data in twenty minutes. The number of new options available suggests that the future of hardware buying will be even more focused on the appliance concept.

10. Extend Any Data, Anywhere

Greater Interoperability – new drivers for PHP, Java & Hadoop
ODBC Drivers for Linux & Change Data Capture for SSIS & Oracle
Beyond Relational: FileTable, 2D Spatial, Semantic Search

I really like the idea of CDC for Oracle, although I doubt there will be any

11. Optimised Productivity

SQL Server Data Tools (formerly “Juneau”)
Unified Across Database & BI
Deployment & Targeting Freedom

12. Scale on Demand

AlwaysOn
Deployment Across Public & Private
Elastic Scale

And of course, many of these items contribute to make a much more cloud-ready platform. Cloud isn’t for everyone, but Microsoft are certainly making steps to make it a more feasible option.

And we’re over – hitting publish now.

@rob_farley

SQL + Hadoop news

Rob Farley — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:07:38 GMT

I’m at the PASS Summit, and announcements are coming out nice and fast. One of the big ones that has just been made is that SQL Server will work much more closely with Apache Hadoop. Amazing stuff, that I think helps people realise that Microsoft is very much about providing platforms, and isn’t trying to stop you from using your other platforms either.

So in the “coming soon”, there were:

Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure
ODBC Driver and Add-in for Excel, both for Apache Hive
JavaScript Framework for Hadoop

I’m not doing anything with Hadoop myself, but I know plenty of people do, and this is really good news!