I mean really? Why should you spend some of your training budget to go to this thing? Suppose you’re someone in the PASS Community who mainly looks after people’s data. That could involve database administration, performance tuning, helping developers write queries, that kind of thing. What part of “Advanced Analytics and Insights”, “Big Data ...

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 ...

I don’t tend to find that anything about me gets described as “Fabulous”. It’s not a word I ever use myself, so I was slightly amused to see it here. It’s going to be an interesting week (in May, Monday 14th to Saturday 19th), in which I have two stints in classrooms (the three day course in downtown Chicago and this pre-con), plus two ...

This coming Tuesday sees a midweek SQL Saturday hit Adelaide. LobsterPot’s a sponsor, as are a bunch of other companies. An all day event, with two tracks featuring some of the best material you’ve ever seen presented. I’m presenting too. The thing I really want to draw your attention to is that we have two sessions from Paul White. If you ...

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 ...

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 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of ...

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 ...

My guys are great! When PASS started accepting abstract submissions for their Summit (in October this year), some of the LobsterPot employees immediately started looking into ideas for talks they could do. We rate communication as one of our key values at LobsterPot, and all my staff are keen presenters. Roger Noble was at the PASS Summit ...

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 ...

PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS ...