Search results matching tag 'Community'

SQL in the City Event Dates Announced!

andyleonard — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

If you didn’t know that already, you know it now. The latest evidence to support this claim is the publication of the schedule for US SQL in the City events. They are:

9 Oct – Pasadena
11 Oct – Atlanta
14 Oct – Charlotte

Registration for these events opens 24 May.

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Speaking in Chicago Saturday

merrillaldrich — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:03:36 GMT

I’m excited to be offering a beginning PowerShell session at SQL Saturday #211 in Chicago on Saturday, April 13. This time we’re making it a family weekend, bringing our two boys. I haven’t been to Chicago for many years, and it’s, of course, an Architecture dream world, so it should be fun to look at some buildings again!

Emil Bach House, photo © Jeremy Atherton, 2006

The session is intended to help you get started with some PowerShell syntax basics. I try to demystify the Pipeline a bit, help make sense out of all the { curlies } and [ brackets ] and ( parentheses ), and translate some of what you already know about T-SQL into PowerShell. If PowerShell seems cryptic or mysterious, come on down and maybe we can sort it out together.

Should be a great time.

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

24 Hours of PASS - BA Style

RickHeiges — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:04:00 GMT

Tomorrow will mark another chapter in the 24 Hours of PASS series.I am involved once again - this time in a moderator role. The event begins at 8am ET for me. I will be introducing Alberto Ferrari who will be speaking on "Excel 2013 Power Pivot in Action" which is a great self-service BI story.

This 24hop event will be in a different format. 12 hours of Live webcasts followed by 12 hours of on-demand webcasts from the previous 12 hours. All sessions will be available for viewing on Feb 11, 2013. There is also a new hashtag to follow on twitter - #PASS24hop. And there is a new website as well... http://www.24hoursofpass.com/

I am excited about the event tomorrow and hope that you will join me to learn more about Business Analytics and ramp up for the PASS Business Analytic Conference being held in Chicago this April. Check out www.sqlpass.org for more information.

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

T-SQL Tuesday : Reflections on the PASS Summit and our community

AaronBertrand — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:20:00 GMT

Last week I attended the PASS Summit in Seattle. I blogged from both keynotes (Keynote #1 and Keynote #2), as well as the WIT Luncheon - which SQL Sentry sponsored.

I had a fantastic time at the conference, even though these days I attend far fewer sessions that I used to. As a company, we were overwhelmed by the positive energy in the Expo Hall.

I really liked the notebook idea, where board members were assigned notebooks to carry around and take ideas from attendees. I took full advantage when Douglas McDowell stopped by our booth. He had a good explanation for some of my questions/gripes, but definitely walked away with some work items. I think the whole "we are listening" message went over quite well, and PASS continues to demonstrate its commitment to improving the community.

Highlights of the conference, for me, were chatting with Steve Dybing (an MVP lead from the past), attending a Paul White session, and talking briefly with both Conor Cunningham (off-site) and Dr. David DeWitt (on stage).

I had many other great conversations with friends and customers, new and old, far too many to mention. Which brings me to the point of the post: community.

I think we have a fantastic SQL Server community. Is it perfect? No. Do we all want to hang out together all the time? No. Like any family, there are the weird uncles that you just don't see eye-to-eye with on a few or even a lot of issues. And that's okay. Families are supposed to have disagreements, fallouts and other rough times. They make us stronger. And in a roundabout way, remind us that we're all here for each other.

This stage of my career was launched on the backs of the SQL Server community, and I am very thankful for that. And I get the feeling, more and more every year, that folks attend the PASS Summit both for the technical content and, to an even greater degree, the people that are there.

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?

Blogging from the PASS Summit : Nov. 7th keynote

AaronBertrand — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:40:00 GMT

Bill Graziano takes the stage at 8:15. He talks about how 3,894 attendees (and 5,611 total registrants) represent 57 countries at the 14th summit. There are over 127,000 members worldwide.

Note that you can watch the keynotes and many sessions through Pass TV.

PASS serves SQL Server community - expertise, support, commitment. He talks about SQL Saturdays, SQL Rally, 24 Hours of PASS, and the Summit. He announces that there will be a third annual SQL Rally Nordic event next November, and that there will have been 543,000 hours of training delivered to the community in 2012.

PASS is delivering its first Business Analytics Conference, April 10-12, 2013, in Chicago.

A lot of people think PASS Summit is about a bunch of sessions. There are also other resources here, such as the SQL Server Clinic (4C3), Developer Chalk Talks (4C4), Hands-On Labs (304), Focus Groups, a Solutions Theater, and even on-site MS Certifications. And don't forget about all of the social interaction and conversations that happen outside of these formal settings.

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1

Ted Kummert takes the stage. He talks about SQL Server 2012 and announces the general availability of Service Pack 1. (You can download SP1 here - it's build # 11.0.3000.) There is already a "What's New" article on MSDN.

Hekaton - In-Memory for OLTP

He finally let the cat out of the bag about Hekaton (greek for "100x" - implying 100x performance improvement), an in-memory transactional engine that will ship in the next major version of SQL Server. We've known about this technology for at least 18 months, but were sworn to secrecy (though there were a few slips, e.g. on Connect and this blog post). Shawn Bice demonstrates a tool that identifies tables that are great candidates for in-memory optimization (trading CPU for latches), and helps you migrate them to in-memory tables with no changes to applications.

Anyone remember <code>DBCC PINTABLE</code>? This is NOT that. Paul Randal liked <code>DBCC PINTABLE</code> about as much as he likes shrinking databases.

The tool will also identify stored procedures that can be memory-optimized - essentially re-compiling the procedure so that it runs natively in memory. The big thing here is there is no re-learning and no re-writing of application code to take advantage of this in-memory technology. Very exciting stuff.

ColumnStore Improvements

Shawn also shows a demo of ColumnStore (which they're going out of their way to label "xVelocity ColumnStore"), which we've all seen, but he talks about two great enhancements in SQL Server vNext: ColumnStore being updatable (finally!), and the clustered index on a table being eligible for ColumnStore.

My take: If you weren't excited about SQL Server 2012, you should certainly be excited about the next version of SQL Server.

SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse

The new version, scheduled for H1 2013, will use Windows Server 2012 (Storage Spaces), updateable and clustered xVelocity Columnstore indexes, an updated distributed query processor, and offers totally redundant appliances with up to 40 nodes.

Christian Kleinerman comes up and demonstrates the new admin console and "insanely fast" queries. He does a COUNT(*) query over 294 billion rows (over 1 Petabyte) sub-second, and a much more complex query using the ColumnStore clustered index over the entire table returns in less than 2 seconds. Space savings with ColumnStore clustered index is 5x-15x.

PolyBase

New technology allowing users to query over both relational and Hadoop data through PDW. New syntax: <code>CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE ... WITH (LOCATION = 'hdfs://.../whatever.tbl');</code> Then you can join against this Hadoop source just like you would any other table. More info at http://gsl.azurewebsites.net/Projects/Polybase.aspx

Excel 2013

Amir Netz comes up and talks about movies. Shocking. He demonstrates the ease of using PowerView, PowerPivot and insightful visualization within Excel. The first demo to get applause was turning the data into a map - a scrolling, zoomable map, with pie charts, tooltips and legends - again entirely inside Excel.

Ted's high-level blog post about these announcements:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/07/accelerating-insights-in-the-new-world-of-data.aspx

Also see Jen Stirrup's great overview post here:

http://www.jenstirrup.com/2012/11/microsoft-sql-server-2012-latest.html

Want to Learn SQL Server 2012?

andyleonard — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Or SSIS 2012? SSRS 2012? SSAS 2012? There’s no substitute for getting your hands on the product, in my opinion.

I can hear you thinking, “But Andy, I can’t afford to purchase a copy of SQL Server 2012.” Are you sure? What if I told you that you can get a full-feature version of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition for $50? Well, you cannot… it’s actually less than $50! SQL Server 2012 Developer Edition is available at Amazon on the day of this writing for $41.24USD. That’s about the price of eight cups of fancy coffee.

SQL Server releases follow a cycle. SQL Server 2005 was a major release with big changes from SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 were not drastic departures from SQL Server 2005. Take it from me: SQL Server 2012 is a major release.

Is taking your career to the next level worth the price of eight cups of coffee?

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