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

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.

A Fond Farewell to Quest Software

KKline — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:01:00 GMT

The week of the 4^th of July is a happy week for Americans. Most families get out for a parade, a fireworks display, a picnic in the park, a movie where Will Smith puts the beat down on a bunch of aliens, or an afternoon at the pool or lake. We celebrate the contributions of our service men and women. We honor veterans. We drink a lot of beer. We reflect on the founding of our nation and the meaning of “Independence Day”.

My own reflections over the Independence Day holiday took me in a new and rather unexpected direction. After ten-and-a-half immensely rewarding years at Quest Software, I have decided to seek new opportunities.

Today, I wanted to publicly reflect on my time at Quest Software, saving my next blog post for some thoughts about my new endeavors. I could probably write a short novel about all of the great experiences and learning opportunities I had over the last ten years. Part of the reason it might make a good novel is because my memory is notoriously weak and my creativity is equally strong. I might just make up details to fill in the fuzzy recollections. Just sayin'... But just to give you a taste, here’s a brief timeline of my ten years at Quest, highlighting some of my favorite experiences:

I joined Quest on January 2^nd of 2002 as Senior Product Architect to design the tools that would become Quest’s first foray into the SQL Server database market. Quest dominated the Oracle tools market but was at square one for tools in the SQL Server space. I’m grateful to Eyal Aronoff, CTO in those days, and Guy Harrison (blog | twitter), current leader of the Melbourne office, for mentoring me through the near-comically hard process of designing and building software products that can sell. Dax French, then product manager, taught me about the concept of salability. Oh, it’s easy to put requirements down on paper. But that’s about as close to a finished and sellable product as a laptop is to an abacus. I also learned a whole heck of a lot about software development from Patrick O'Keeffe, and about corporate politics in a worldwide development organization, especially from Julie Ackerman, then VP of Operations.
In late 2003, I became the Director of Technology for the SQL Server Solutions Group. (Yeah! We had a team name and a few products!) Hiring your own team is a dream for many leaders in IT. And I have to say with more than a little pride that the organization we built included the most intelligent, energized, and fun people I’ve ever known. Being empowered to hire a team, set goals, and deliver on them was a fantastic, though demanding experience. . I’m thankful to the team for their incredibly hard work and unsinkable ethics: John Theron, Johnny Ortez, Lee Grisson, Joe Motley, Hassan Fahimi, Israel Kalush, and so many others. I’m grateful that my more experienced peers on the other major dev teams, Rony Lerner and Steve Rosenberg, enthusiastically taught me how to answer the needs of both a sales-driven corporation and a deadline-driven engineering process.
Throughout this time, I experienced the full support of Quest’s executive leadership as a Microsoft MVP and, even more so, as a founder and eventual president of PASS. I can’t emphasize enough what a big deal this was. The leadership of PASS was an incredibly difficult workload to support, basically equivalent to a second full-time job, and also a difficult period in my life personally. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully thank the top leadership of Quest for allowing me, around 2006, to move some of those PASS hours into my day job at Quest. I literally could NOT have served two terms as president of PASS without this level of support. Yeah! Now I was back down to an acceptable number of hours per week, including the time spent on PASS, blogging, etc with my day job.
In 2005, I again ventured into new territory and new experiences. I never in my wildest dreams anticipated that I’d someday learn about and actually work on M&A deals. I knew Quest did some M&A from our acquisition of Leccotech, bringing in the outstandingly talented Claudia Fernandez and Darren Mallette, among many others, and FastLane, where I learned a lot from David Waugh. But that’s exactly what happened when Quest finally acted on my advice to acquired Imceda, where I got to meet and work with the likes of Douglas Chrystall (twitter), Jason Hall (twitter), and David Gugick (twitter). During this time, I learned an amazing amount about executive leadership from some of the very best in the IT industry – Vinny Smith, Doug Garn, Charles Ramsey, Steve Dickson and John Newsome. I think they’d probably laugh to hear me say this, but I have confess that I was at the level of “barely able to hold my fudge” intimidation whenever I breathed the same air as these guys. But I also watched them closely, tried to absorb their wisdom, and emulate their behaviors that engendered the success of the company.
2006 marked another new adventure for me at Quest because, for the first time, I began to work more heavily on technology evangelism than on product development. We now had several products which needed more attention and focus on campaign-driven marketing efforts. Billy Bosworth joined as our new VP and General Manager. Christian Hasker (twitter) joined as our new Director for Product Marketing, while Heather Eichmann and Andy Grant joined the effort. This team rocked! We became a team of thought leaders that influenced the way the rest of the company did business. I learned an enormous amount from these folks about advertising, marketing, technology evangelism, and community building. I could easily write a book with anecdotes and lessons on how to be an effective technology evangelist. Charles Ramsey, president of Quest during those days, bestowed the title of “Technical Strategy Manager” upon me due to all of the time I was spending on a wide cross-section of activities for sales, marketing, R&D, as well as interfacing with Microsoft’s SQL Server team, to name a few, Paul Randal (blog | twitter), Kevin Farlee, Gert Drapers (blog), Joe Yong, Bob Ward (twitter), the late Ken Henderson, Jimmy May (blog | twitter), Mark Souza (twitter) and the Jedi of SQLCAT, and many others.
I still remember fondly how a friend had forwarded a “tweet” from a certain Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) about him being excited to sit in my session at the PASS Summit in late 2007. My first thought was “What the heck is a tweet?!?” My second thought was "I should meet this guy!" Before long, though, I was working with Brent in his new role as our full-time technology evangelist whence I moved to Pre-Sales to work more directly with large customers and key accounts - and where I have been ever since (until now). During that time I learned how to give a really good product demo from Jason Hall, David Swanson, and Ari Weil (If you don’t already know how to give a good product demo, check out http://www.secondderivative.com/ and buy their book post-haste). It was also very education to learn from great Pre-Sales leaders like John Milburn and Robb Dunewood. I also learned a whole lot about the awesomeness of Camtasia – which you should buy right now if you ever do recorded presentations. Brent stayed with us for a couple years, teaching me an enormous amount about social media and, although I’d been blogging since 2004, a whole lot about how to be a better blogger. Someday, I hope to actually apply what I learned from Brent.

From that early team, we built a culture of trust with our customers, attempting at every turn to add value to what we built. And it shows. Our products have won a multitude of awards and plaudits. I’ve seen a host of product launches and major new releases. I cannot take nor deserve the credit for these great tools. I was merely a very small part of the team that brought them to life.

I’m so very proud of the full-stack monitoring and alerting in Spotlight, of the unmatched analytics in Foglight Performance Analysis, of the raw value of LiteSpeed. I’m also very proud of the evolution of Toad, from a small and practical aggregation of utilities, into a full suite for developers, data modelers, and data analysts. Add in the unique scalability testing features of Benchmark Factory and I can say without any apology that we built the definitive and comprehensive platform of tools for the database professional.

Working deep in technology has always been interesting and exciting. But my favorite part of the job has always been interacting with customers and partners. It’s an uplifting experience to share the ways in which the Quest tools empower customers to do things they’ve never been able to do before and to make their jobs and their lives better. Meeting our clients on four continents over the course of thousands of presentations and meetings has been a top highlight of my career. Whenever I interact with customers, I want the focus to be on mutual learning. Customers teach me as much as I’ve ever taught them.

As time advanced, though, I gained insight into why some periods at Quest were more enjoyable than others. The laser-sighted focus of our early, smaller organization was a definitely highlight. The rhythm of business travel also picked up dramatically in recent years, with a commensurate decline in my overall health and wellbeing. Clearly, I needed a change.

You might be asking “If it was so good, why are you changing things?” Well, I’m not leaving because of a negative of some kind. I can assure you that it is not because I’ve had some kind of personality conflict, disagreement over strategy, or that I’m otherwise unhappy with Quest. Quite the opposite, I’m leaving because I’ve been offered an new opportunity that is both very exciting and enormously reinvigorating.

To all of you that I’ve already mentioned mentioned by name, and to the multitude more whose name I wasn't able to record above, I owe a debt of gratitude. I wish you not goodbye, but the fondest of farewell.

Farewell is also in order because to you, my readers because, well, you’ll still be seeing me in all the old familiar places. So where am I off to? Tune in next Monday for that bit of news.

Until then. Enjoy!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

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!