Search results matching tags 'PASS', 'Conferences', and 'Career'

PASS Summit 2012, Slide Decks

KKline — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:02:00 GMT

Ok, I have to admit the painful truth. I'm reliably slow to the finish line. This year, I got my slides into PASS HQ by the skin of my teeth, the weekend before the event was to begin. Although I could say with a straight face "I uploaded my slides!". I have to be honest that I wasn't surprised when many of my attendees said that they weren't available for download by the time my session started. OTOH, I also have to say that I really do prefer for attendees to focus on the presentation while it's being presented and that they should grab the slides afterwards. But that's just my personal preference.

Having said all of that, I'm going to post my three session slide decks here so that you can grab them in case PASS has to take a while longer to get them posted. If you don't mind, the PASS program committee has introduced a new electronic feedback system. PLEASE PROVIDE FEEDBACK!

(Click on the session title to download the zip file of the slide deck).

PASS TV - Gaining Executive Support

This brief session is all about convincing your boss to do something you want - telecommute, make a big purchase of hardware or software, bring in a consultant, and so forth. See the PASS TV schedule for other sessions.

Winning Influence in IT Teams

Abstract: Ever wanted to convince the boss to try something new, but didn't know where to start? Ever tried to lead your peers toward an innovative, fresh idea only to fail to achieve your goals? This session teaches you the eight techniques of influencing IT professionals and the means of communicating your ideas upward to management and out to teammates so that you can innovate and achieve change in your organization. You'll learn the fundamental difference between influence and authority and how you can achieve a high degree of influence without explicit authority. You'll also learn the eight techniques of influencing IT professionals, when to apply them, and how to best use them. And you'll discover the communication and procedural techniques that ensure your ideas get a hearing by bosses and peers, and how to best win support for them.

Evaluate Session

Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World

This session rocked the house! We had standing room only probably at 20 to 30 minutes before start time. Our attendance was over 500, but we probably could've filled the biggest 700+ person room. A special thanks to my friend David Klee (blog | twitter) for tag-teaming with my like mega-nerd luchadors.

Abstract: Why are so many organizations implementing VMware, and what does it mean for SQL Server DBAs? In this deep-dive session, you'll see that when configured and managed properly, SQL Server can run just as well in a virtual environment as a physical one. We'll review the benefits VMware provides, including hardware abstraction, easier failover, and simpler capacity planning. We'll also explore key tips to help administer a SQL Server instance running inside a virtual machine. You'll learn the differences in general administration, disaster recovery, and high availability on VMs; get a better understanding of activity and performance trends on VMs; and learn how to ensure effective capacity planning and optimal performance on VMs. If you’ve ever had a virtual deployment go bad, or if you’re struggling to manage the performance of virtualized SQL Servers, be sure to catch this session.

Evaluate Session

Secure Your Spot at the Nashville SQL Saturday!

KKline — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:50:00 GMT

PASS SQL Saturdays are free 1-day training events for IT professionals interested in Microsoft SQL Server, providing a variety of high-quality technical sessions, all happen through the efforts of local volunteers. The leadership team of the local chapter of PASS here in Nashville (Facebook | LinkedIn) have worked hard to make this year's SQL Saturday a day of great training and networking.

The local NashSQL leadership team includes yours truly (blog | twitter), Joe Webb (Twitter | Blog), Louis "Dr SQL" Davidson (Twitter | Blog), Christina Leo (blog | twitter), and Shelton Dickson (website). We also get a lot of operational help from Matt LeBlank (LinkedIn | Twitter).

We think you'll find it's a great way to spend a Saturday!

Register for the free community day with 5 concurrent tracks of hour-hour technical sessions running all day long: www.sqlsaturday.com/145/eventhome.aspx

Also, we are very pleased to announce the SQLSaturday #145 Pre-con event on Friday, October 12th. We have four paid sessions available from established industry experts. Session details are provided in the links below.

Please be aware that each Pre-con is priced at a staggeringly cheap $129.95 + $8.14 processing fee.

Registrations made by August 31, 2012, will receive an EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION rate of an $99.95 + 6.49 processing fee!!!

Don't miss out on this fantastic offer! Register now: SQL Satuday #145 PreCons

A continental breakfast will be served and tea and coffee will be available throughout the day. Lunch will be provided.

Big Data and the Cloud - More Hype or a Real Workload?

BuckWoody — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:57:36 GMT

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”?

There are actually a few definitions for this term, most notably those involving the “Four V’s” Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. Others disagree with this definition. I tend to try and get things into their simplest form, so I’m using this definition for myself:

Big data is defined as a large set of computationally expensive data that is worked on simultaneously.

Let me flesh that out a little. To be sure, “Big Data” has a larger size than say a few megabytes. The reason this is important is that it takes special hardware to be able to move large sets of data around, store it, process it and so on. (large set)

If you store a LOT of data, but only use a small portion of it at a time, that really isn’t super-hard to do. It’s mainly a storage issue at that point. But, if you do need to work with a large portion of the data at one time, then the memory, CPU and transfer components of the system have to adapt to be responsive - new ways to work with that data (game theory, knot-algorithms, map-reduce, etc.) need to be brought into play. (computationally expensive)

Once that data is loaded into the processing area (memory or whatever other mechanism is used) it must be worked on in parallel to come back in a reasonable time. You have two options here - you can scale the system up with more internal hardware (CPU’s, memory and so on) or you can scale it out to have multiple systems work on it at the same time using paradigms such as map/reduce and so on. Actually, when you lay this out in an architecture diagram, scale up or out doesn’t actually change the logical structure of the process - in scale out the network becomes the bus, and the nodes become more RAM and computing power. Of course, there are changes in code for how you stitch the workload back together. (worked on simultaneously)

So back to the original question. Is Big Data, as I have defined it here, a workload for Windows and SQL Azure? Absolutely! In fact, it’s probably one of the main workloads, and I believe it represents the latest, and perhaps also the earliest frontier of computing. Jim Gray, a former researcher here at Microsoft and a hero of mine, was working on this very topic. I believe as he did - all computing is simply an interface over data.

Microsoft has multiple offerings on the topic of Big Data. In posts that follow from myself and my co-workers, we’ll explore when and where you use each one. Whether you are a data professional or a developer, this is the new frontier - don’t wait to educate yourself on how to leverage Big Data for your organization.

Hadoop on Windows Azure and SQL Server - Microsoft’s partnership to include Hadoop workloads on Windows Azure and SQL Server/Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW)

LINQ to HPC - Microsoft’s High-Performance Computing SKU of HPC is now in Azure

Windows Azure Table Storage - A key/value pair type storage with full partitioning that is immediately consistent, able to handle huge loads of data and works with any REST-compatible language

Other offerings - Including the new Data Explorer, Project Daytona (with a Big Data Toolkit for Scientists and researchers), Power View and more.

The era of Big Data is here. And you can use Windows and SQL Azure to bring it to your organization.

Here, There, and Everywhere; Speaking in Fall 2011, Part 1

KKline — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:33:00 GMT

The last quarter of the year is usually my busiest due to the fantastic PASS Summit and SQLBits events. The fall looks a little different ... BECAUSE IT WILL BE EVEN BUSIER! Here's a rundown of where I'll be this fall through mid-October:

BASTA! SQLCON.NET

September 26 to 29; Mainz, Germany

This big developer and admin conference runs from September 26 to 29 in Mainz, Germany. I'll be delivering at least one session and hobnobbing with Quest customers, friends, and in a very weird twist, my oldest daughter Emily, who will be in the Rhineland at the exact same time on a graduation present I'd been planning for her since graduation in June.

SQLBits - Query Across the Mercy

September 29 to October 1; Liverpool, United Kingdom

One of my favorite conferences of the year! The organizers are great. The speakers are great! The attendees are great!! The venues are great!!! The lunches are ... um ... adequate. I'm doing all an new session on SQL Injection attack, this time with LOTS of demos kindly written by an attendee at one of my sessions in Cologne. He like the session so much, he decided to build demos to go along with it. (Thanks again, Volker!) And if you've attended before, you know how much fun our now traditional IT Horror Stories and IT Bingo Trivia sessions are. Make plans to attend these standing-room only sessions, before the fire marshal kicks us all out of the room for overfilling it.

The PASS Summit

Seriously. This is the one. If you can attend only one SQL Server training and community event in a given year, this is the one. Over 150 sessions and pre-conference seminars. Most everyone who is on the list of "who's who" in the world of SQL Server and Microsoft-related data management and development will be in attendance. And a large number of the Microsoft R&D team that builds, documents, and supports SQL Server will also be there.

Plus, more details to come on these events: Netherlands SQL Saturday, Belgium SQL Server Days, and SQLRally Nordic.

I hope to see you there in person!

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter!

Leadership, Management, and SQLRally

KKline — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:55:00 GMT

Transparency - A Great Leadership Quality

I've always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy's latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.

Learn from My Mistakes

Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you're at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here's a quick run-down of the topics we'll cover in my pre-con:

Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
- Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
- Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
- Promoting communication within the team and with management
- Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
- Dealing with difficult team members
- Practicing good team time management techniques

Read all about the goals of the session here. If you're coming to my session, I'd love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you're facing!

Personal Experience, Personnel Experience

Also, just a word about my bona fides. I've had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable. On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor's degree in the school of management back in the 1980's. I've also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership's leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin's not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990's. In the late 1990's, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000's, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.

A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8

The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn't very flattering, but here's a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EjZ-FutLQ Enjoy! -Kev Twitter at kekline More content at http://KevinEKline.com

SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

BuckWoody — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:49:00 GMT

I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.

I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?

Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.

So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.

See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.