AtlantaMDF

TIL from Atlanta #AzureDataFest

AZURE DATAFEST

I’ve been meaning to write this post since we wrapped up the event, but life, as usual, gets in the way.  Overall, I was very pleased with the whole event; things (for the most part) ran very smoothly.  However, in the spirit of continuous learning, here’s a few lessons (in no particular order) for anyone considering hosting an Azure DataFest in the future. 

Event Management

We used Sessionize and EventBrite to handle speaker submissions, schedule building, and attendee management.  Both tools worked great, but both are a little pricey (Sessionize charges $250 for the event, and EventBrite added a $3.54 fee to every ticket sold).  The benefit is that it was very easy to generate a professional looking schedule, review abstracts, and manage attendees (from fee collection to attendance rosters).  The one downside is that the tools don’t integrate (no way to easily export speakers into Eventbrite), and we really need a central website for people to hit rather than each individual tool.  I also had a small issue where some attendee badges didn’t print; that was probably user error.

Sponsor Expectations

  • I should have added company names to each attendee badge to make it easier for them to see what company attendees were from when talking.
  • I need to explain the email\contact information privacy policies better.  Some sponsors wanted to get more contacts to add to their mailing list.  May need to borrow a page from the SQLSaturday playbook and encourage raffles to get information directly from the attendees.
  • Microsoft SSP’s were on site, and that was a very valuable contribution.  Saw lots of hallway conversations with clients and Microsoft; that’s rare for SQLSaturdays.
  • Need to charge more for sponsorships in general; we had a flat rate of $500, which doesn’t go a long way toward building a community.  Also, I need to provide more structure over what’s included in a sponsorship; we had a couple of sponsors which had 5 or 6 team members show up.  Since food was included in their sponsorship, that literally ate up most of the profit from their sponsorship.
  • Need to find ways to encourage relationships between speakers and sponsors; speaker dinners or vendor parties?

Attendee Management

  • Generally, went well.  Food portions were about right, fee was right for a two day affair, and we had very few snacks and\or drinks left over.
  • Would love to go as paperless as possible; however, I think people like having SWAG bags.  Maybe provide them with an empty bag, and tell them SWAG is available at sponsor tables?
  • Stickers were a HIT!
  • Very different crowd than a SQLSaturday.  In fact, during opening session, only a few people had heard of SQLSaturday or AtlantaMDF.  Need to do a better job of evangelizing both of those, while recognizing that this is a crowd that may not want to give up their weekend.
  • Pretty sizable fall-off on Friday (the second day).  May need to do Monday-Tuesday to see if we do a better job of retaining folks.

Speaker Management

  • As noted above, Sessionize worked great for speaker management.  Abstracts were easy to receive and review, and building a schedule was a snap.
  • Need to be more up-front about the volunteer nature of this conference.  We had a few people that misunderstood, and submitted from abroad, and then inquired about travel reimbursement.  It was cleared up over a few emails, but I should have headed that conversation off earlier.
  • I had a speaker withdraw because we charged $50 to attend the two-day conference;  they felt that didn’t fit as a “community” event, since most community events should be free to the consumer (or offer an optional lunch, like SQLSaturday does).  I get the point, but in practical terms, that’s tough to do with a new event.  No event is free; just different people (sponsors) pick up the tab.  We’ll continue to work on this, but ADF may always have a small fee associated with it.
  • Most sessions had speakers sitting in the audience.  I haven’t seen that happen at SQLSaturday’s in a long time, so I’m hoping that people learned as much as they gave.

Logistics

  • Facility was great, but room capacity != seating arrangement.  I had to steal chairs from sponsors, and actually order more chairs on the first day to eliminate standing room only.
  • I loved having the plenary (everybody in one room) sessions at the start; really need to do one at the end, and then do a wrapup.
  • I could have saved some funds on table linens.  The caterer brought their own, and they weren’t really necessary for the check in tables.
  • We had a few technical glitches, so we need to make sure we keep the facility staff around next year.  They went to lunch and weren’t back in time for the afternoon session, so those were a little rough (maybe promise them free lunch next year?).

#Azure DataFest Sessions I want to see: @sqlgator #Cortana and #PowerBI

There are still plenty of seats left for the inaugural #AtlantaAzureDataFest2018, so I thought I’d try to drum up some interest by posting about a few of the sessions I really want to see.  First up, Ed Watson‘s session: “With Power BI and Cortana, You Can Take Over the World”.

I love the thought of integrating voice control with reporting; have no clue what that means, but it definitely satisfies the whimsical nature of this conference. Let’s build something together just because we can, not necessarily because it satisfies a need.  Ed is a crazy fun presenter to watch (and a good friend).  I’m excited to see him push the envelope a bit.

Join us!  Seats start at $50 for two days of jam-packed training on Aug 16-17th, 2018.  Tell your boss you’re being forward-thinking; they love that.

 

#SQLSATATL 2018 – call for speakers through March 16, 2018

SQLSaturday #733 - Atlanta 2018I haven’t posted much about SQL Saturday Atlanta in a while; things are moving along, and the event is coming back to Alpharetta (albeit a new building) on May 19, 2018.  Lots of folks are busy behind the scenes preparing, but there’s a few key things to keep in mind:

  1. Call for Speakers closes March 16, 2018; f you’ve been sitting on a presentation idea, now’s the time to get it uploaded to the site.
  2. Shortly after the Call closes, we’ll publish the full schedule.  Once that hits, there’s a mad rush to register.  This event sells out every year, so why wait?  Register now.
  3. Pre-Cons are coming; we hope to publish the list soon.  More details to come.

Exciting times ahead; stay tuned.  As always, SQL Saturday Atlanta is brought to you by AtlantaMDF; SQL Server meetings every month on the second Monday.

#SQLSatATL, #DevOps, #Cloud, & the Future of the DBA

Last weekend was SQLSaturday Atlanta 2017, and I was not only an organizer, but a presenter. In the future, I’ll need to balance that a little better (especially when we’re dealing with a lot of unknowns for the day, like a new building). Overall, I think my presentation went well; had a lot of great hallway conversations with folks later, and got some good feedback. You can find the slide deck here, or look on the Code, etc tab above.

However, during my presentation, a couple of questions came up that I didn’t have a great answer for; mostly it was revolving around the first bullet point on this slide:

Why, if DevOps as a philosophy encourages better communication between development and operations, do I believe that there will be increased segregation between those roles? I fumbled for an answer during the presentation, but then went back and realized what I left out in my explanation, so I thought I’d take a stab at rebuilding my argument and explain where I was going with this:

DevOps is built on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model.

Services logically represent business activities; they are self-contained, and the inner workings of each service are opaque to the consumers. Services can be built using other services, but that rule of opacity stays true; when you consume a service, you don’t care what it’s doing under the covers. It just has to provide a consistent output when given a consistent input.

The Cloud Paradigm is also built on a SOA model.

Software-as-a-Service is built on a Platform-as-a-Service, which is in turn built on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Communication between service layers must be consistent and repeatable, but processes and procedures within each services should be opaque. Furthermore, the consumers of a service are not the same; for example, if you have a web portal displaying account information to a client. The client consumes Software-as-a-Service; they just want to see their account information. They don’t care how many servers are involved or how the network is laid out. Software-as-a-Service consumes from the Platform layer; they may have a requirement that they use a particular database system, or OS, but specific configuration isn’t exposed to them. Software engineers define performance expectations (e.g, “we need to commit 1000 transactions per second”), and leave it up to the Platform (and Infrastructure) engineers to meet that expectation.

The traditional tasks associated with SQL Server Database Administration can be roughly divided into two roles: Development and Administration (Operations).

From this slide, I outline the general breakdown between skills:

 

SQL Server as a product spans the top two layers of the Cloud Paradigm:

Basically, I believe that traditional development skills belong to the Software-as-a-Service Layer, and traditional administration skills belong to the Platfom layer.

So by segregation of responsibilities, I mean that as companies embrace the Cloud paradigm, the current role of a DBA will fork into both Software-as-a-Service engineering (Dev) and Platform-as-a-Service engineering (Ops). I need to clarify that thought more in future presentations, because I may be using those terms differently than others would.

Thanks for reading, and if you attended, thanks for coming!

-Stu

SQLSaturday 285 (#sqlsatatl) pre-cons are now live!

SQL Saturday #285 is offering 3 preconference sessions on Friday, May 2 at the GSU campus in Alpharetta, site of SQL Saturday #285 on Saturday, May 3:
Kalen Delaney: What the Hekaton!? A Whole New Way to Think About Data Management

SQL Server Hekaton, Microsoft’s new In-Memory table technology being shipped as part of SQL Server 2014, will completely change the way you think about data management. As a DBA, you’ll need to analyze your memory and storage needs completely differently. All Hekaton data is always stored in memory, and the data stored on disk is basically just a REDO log used to regenerate the contents of your memory-optimized tables. In this full-day seminar, Kalen Delaney (a SQL Server MVP for over 20 years) will show you the in-memory architecture for your Hekaton data and indexes, and discuss what gets written to disk during checkpoints, as well as what gets logged. She will explain how the recovery process recreates your Hekaton tables. Finally, she’ll go into detail on just what it is that makes Hekaton so much FASTER!

 

Denny Cherry: SQL Performance Tuning & Optimization

In this session you will learn about SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 performance tuning and optimization. Industry Expert Denny Cherry will guide you through tools and best practices for tuning queries and improving performance within Microsoft SQL Server.  This session will guide you through real life performance problems which have been gathered and tuned using industry standard best practices and real world skills.

 

 

Teo Lachev: Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM)

The chances are that your organization has a centralized data repository, such as ODS or a data warehouse, but you might not use it to the fullest. Join this insightful full-day event to understand the importance of having a semantic layer that bridges users and data. In the Microsoft BI world, BISM consists of Power Pivot, Tabular, and Multidimensional. 

All 3 presenters are published authors and Microsoft MVPs many times over. These sessions are a huge value to spend a day with an acknowledged SQL Server

thought leader.

Early registration is only $129 until March 1, when the price of any remaining seats will go up to $149. Follow @AtlantaMDF on Twitter and get a promo code for $10 off the early registration price (for Kalen Delaney or Denny Cherry)! We’ll tweet the promo code at 9am Thursday (Jan 23) – it’s only good for 10 uses (for each session), so be sure to check your Twitter feed tomorrow morning!

#SQLSATATL simply rocked…

sqlsatatlSo, last Saturday, I went to the first SQL Saturday in Atlanta that I had absolutely no responsibility on the actual day of the event.  I wasn’t an organizer, I didn’t really even volunteer.  As a chapter leader for AtlantaMDF, I do have to go in and pay the bills later this week, but for the most part, I got to walk around and revel in the day. 

And it was a good day.  The team (led by Geoff Hiten) pulled off another great event; 555 people attended the event, and there were some AWESOME sessions throughout the day.  I was in the 9 am slot, and my session on Biggish Data went well, even if (as usual) I had WAY too many slides.  Speaking of slides, you should be able to download the deck from the SQLSaturday 220 schedule (as well as many other great presentations).  I did have to slip out early since this weekend was my weekend with the kids.  My current youngest (Grace) had to get service hours for beta club, so she got to hang out with me, but I needed to get back home early to hang out with the oldest one.

So what was cool?  What did I learn?

  1. The number one highlight for me was watching Louis Davidson demo Red Gate’s SQL Monitor tool, and he chose one of my custom metrics to use in the show.  I respect Louis a lot, and it made my day.
  2. I learned that I need to cut out about 10 slides out of my presentation.
  3. I had a great conversation with a few people about table partitioning and performance gains; I think there’s enough material for a future session explaining why you will or won’t see performance benefits from partitioning.  Hmmmm….
  4. I had another excellent conversation with Robert Cain regarding the growth of SQLSaturday’s, and bounced around a few ideas about moving to a mid-tier model.  Kind of like what SQLRally was supposed to become, but different. 
  5. I also got to hang out with Andy Leonard.   He and my Grace had a good time discussing movies (Where’s my super suit?).

Mostly, I just got jazzed about being back in the #sqlfamily.  Hopefully, I can build off that momentum, and start blogging again.   Granted, the next few months are going to be personally interesting, but I need to make time to share again.

#SQLSatATL SQLSaturday Atlanta 220–May 18, 2013

Just a quick note; SQLSaturday is coming back to Atlanta on May 18, 2013.  This free (lunch is optional) event usually sells out way in advance, so you may want to go ahead and sign up.  Also, the speaker lineup tends to fill up pretty quickly (call for speakers closes 2/24), so if you’re a SQL Rock Star or just want to share your knowledge, go ahead and submit your session as well!