Search results matching tags '24hop' and '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

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]

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

New PASS Summit speakers that deserve votes

rob_farley — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:35:25 GMT

I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting.

Instead, I’m going to pick a few people that I recommend you vote for.

The people I’m going to pick are Paul White, Chris Testa-O’Neill and Erin Stellato. Three very different people, even from different countries. But I don’t think any of them have spoken at the PASS Summit before, and it would be good if they got accepted.

Paul White (NZ) is a fellow blogger at sqlblog.com. If you haven’t read his stuff, you’re seriously missing out. He spends an inordinate amount of time researching the behaviour of SQL Server, and has discovered all kinds of amazing things. He recently gave a presentation at the Boston SQL Saturday, and there was a lot of good feedback about it.

Chris Testa-O’Neill (UK) is one of the organisers of the SQLBits conferences in the UK, and has also appeared on many of the eLearning training for Microsoft. He hails from Manchester but has family living in Adelaide. He visited over Christmas and did an excellent job of speaking at the Adelaide SQL Server User Group.

Erin Stellato (US) blogs at erinstellato.com (I guess that makes sense). I met her briefly at the last PASS Summit, but over recent months have had a few conversations with her about some of the things she writes about on her blog. She submitted an abstract for 24 Hours of PASS event, but didn’t manage to get enough votes to speak. Despite this, I know she knows her stuff, and would do an excellent job presenting.

So there’s three people that I recommend you vote for. You can easily see the abstracts they’ve submitted on the site, to help in your decision. There are plenty of other people you should vote for too, such as the Scottish Jen Stirrup, the Aussie Darren Gosbell, or Seattle’s own Kendra Little (I think they haven’t spoken at the PASS Summit before either) – but please have a look through the names and pick some that are not the usual suspects.

@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.

24 Hours of PASS scheduling

rob_farley — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:44:00 GMT

I have a new appreciation for Tom LaRock (@sqlrockstar), who is doing a tremendous job leading the organising committee for the 24 Hours of PASS event (Twitter: #24hop).

We’ve just been going through the list of speakers and their preferences for time slots, and hopefully we’ve kept everyone fairly happy.

All the submitted sessions (59 of them) were put up for a vote, and over a thousand of you picking your favourites. The top 28 sessions as voted were all included (24 sessions plus 4 reserves), and duplicates (when a single presenter had two sessions in the top 28) were swapped out for others. For example, both sessions submitted by Cindy Gross were in the top 28. These swaps were chosen by the committee to get a good balance of topics.

Amazingly, some big names missed out, and even the top ten included some surprises. T-SQL, Indexes and Reporting featured well in the top ten, and in the end, the mix between BI, Dev and DBA ended up quite nicely too.

The ten most voted-for sessions were (in order):

Jennifer McCown - T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code and Why
Michelle Ufford - Index Internals for Mere Mortals
Audrey Hammonds - T-SQL Awesomeness: 3 Ways to Write Cool SQL
Cindy Gross - SQL Server Performance Tools
Jes Borland - Reporting Services 201: the Next Level
Isabel de la Barra - SQL Server Performance
Karen Lopez - Five Physical Database Design Blunders and How to Avoid Them
Julie Smith - Cool Tricks to Pull From Your SSIS Hat
Kim Tessereau - Indexes and Execution Plans
Jen Stirrup - Dashboards Design and Practice using SSRS

I think you’ll all agree this is shaping up to be an excellent event.