Education

#passvotes The process rolls on…

I’m in a bit of a sticky wicket here; as a blogger, I feel obligated to share what’s going on with the Nomination Committee for the 2010 PASS elections, but as a member of that committee, I feel obligated to not say too much too soon.  However, I have seen some of the buzz on twitter regarding applicants that have been selected to continue moving forward and those that were encouraged to try again next year.

All I can really say at this time that we have looked at all of the applications that we’ve received and have decided to move forward with interviewing 7 of the 9 applicants.  An official announcement is forthcoming about how we came to our decision to move forward with those 7, but I did want to share a piece of information that is guiding the process of selecting candidates for the board.

PASS is a volunteer organization that serves the SQL Server community, and although the goal of PASS is to be a resource for everyone who works with SQL Server, there are lots of members of the community that have a limited history of involvement with PASS.  In other words, there are several community leaders (speakers, authors, bloggers) that don’t have hands-on volunteer experience with PASS (i.e., working as a chapter leader or a committee member); while these community leaders are great assets to the community (and PASS),  I was concerned that they didn’t have enough exposure to the organization to lead it.  This was a hard choice to make, because you could look at an application and see that the applicant had a real heart for leadership and support within the SQL Server community, but compared to other applicants, they just didn’t have the same experience with PASS.

Of course, that’s easy to rectify, and there’s always another opportunity to run for election next year.  I’m excited about the applicants that are lined up to be interviewed over the next two weeks (and I’ll probably refrain from commenting until after those interviews are done).  I’m also learning a lot about how PASS committees work, and I hope to continue helping out in the future.

Be sure to check out http://elections.sqlpass.org for the official news.   Good luck to the rest of the applicants; regardless of what happens during the interviews, I am positive we will have a great slate of candidates to choose from during this year’s election.

2010-07-28 by Election2010 SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

Kung fu and the art of SQL Server

A few nights ago, I watched The Forbidden Kingdom with my kids; I’ve seen it before, but this time there was a message in it that I needed to hear.  Obviously, I’ve been in a slump lately, and even though I’m continuing to be involved in what I do as a SQL Server professional, I haven’t been excited about it in a long time.  I’ve been at my current position for almost 8 years, and frankly, I’ve gotten bored.  Mix that with a lot of post-divorce depression, anxiety about the future, and all of a sudden my yin and my yang are not in harmony.

DISCLAIMER: I should point out that my feelings of boredom are NOT an indicator of any dissatisfaction with my current employment; rather, it’s a personal feeling that I’m not pushing myself as hard as I used to.   I’m not planning on making a move or any other sudden change of life; I just feel out-of-balance, and need something to center myself again.

I should stop this post here and point out something; I am a student of Western civilization, and I grew up in the Bible Belt.  The little understanding of Eastern philosophy that I have comes from many wasted hours of watching bad martial arts movies (including the Karate Kid I, II, and III); for the most part, Eastern meditation is still considered to be relatively taboo in the deep south.

Anyway, back to our previously scheduled post.  If you’re not familiar with the movie, The Forbidden Kingdom is a fun martial arts action movie with lots of comedic interludes; it’s loosely based on the story of the Monkey King, and the need to return his staff to him to defeat the Jade Emperor.   The staff bearer is an unlikely choice, and he encounters two martial arts teachers along the way, who train him in the art of kung fu.  This teaching is where the film becomes relevant to me at this point in my life.

The path to kung fu is different for everyone.

In the film, the staff bearer is thrust into a strange world of mystery and chaos; it’s a violent world, and he often doesn’t know whom to trust.  However, he meets two teachers who begin instructing him on his journey.  Their fighting styles are very different;  the drunken fighting style of Lu Yan (Jackie Chan) is often in conflict with grace and agility of the Silent Monk (Jet Li).  However, both are kung fu. 

In a similar fashion, those of us who work with SQL Server have all come from different backgrounds; some of us have backgrounds in analytics, some in application development, and some in system administration.  Yet, we are here today.  The important thing to remember is that this is but a space in time, a point in the journey; in order to survive in our occupations, we must continue along the path.

Kung fu requires a desire to learn.

While this seems self-evident, it is often the hardest lesson to learn.  Kung fu is not just about being willing to learn a few new tricks, it’s also about being willing to put aside preconceptions.  Too often we think we focus on what we believe is the right thing to do to maintain our current place in life, only to later find out that we wasted a valuable opportunity to learn something new.  From the film (thanks IMDB!):

Jason Tripitikas: You think you’ll teach me the No Shadow Kick? Oh, and the Buddha Palm Technique. There’s a guy in Virtual Fighter 2, who does the Buddha Palm Technique.
[Lu gives him a cup]
Jason Tripitikas: Thanks, Lu. And he does the Iron Elbow. And he does the One Finger Death Touch.
[the cup starts overflowing]
Jason Tripitikas: The cup’s full. Stop! It’s full!
Lu Yan: Exactly, how can you fill your cup if already full? How can you learn Kung Fu, you already know so much. No Shadow Kick, Buddha Palm! Empty your cup.
[Jason empties his cup]
Lu Yan: [looks at him in surprise] Hopeless. It is hopeless!

Obviously, the lesson is there; the student has preconceived notions about what he should be learning to be a master, rather than simply watching,observing, and learning from what the path presents.  In my own path to be a SQL Server developer, I’ve neglected my administration skills.  I’ve walked away from learning SSIS because my job required me to build a custom ETL process.  I’ve filled my cup with what I think are important things, and neglected to pay attention to the path.  If I were to apply for a development position today, it would be a challenge to convince a future employer of my worth.

Kung fu requires discipline.

Any one who’s ever seen a martial arts movie recognizes the essential truth of this.   To be good at what you do, you must be disciplined in your study.  However, what is important to kung fu is recognizing that discipline is required not only in the maintenance of skills, but also in the ability to sense where the path leads.  As a database professional, you must be willing to invest time in perfecting those things you know (T-SQL? database design?), but also spend extra time learning something new (pick up SSIS or SSAS; how about Reporting Services or Visual Basic?).  True kung fu knows the balance, however; it is often best to be a master of a single skill than a novice in all of them.

Jason Tripitikas: What do we do now?
Lu Yan: How good is your Gung-fu?
Jason Tripitikas: [puzzled look]
Lu Yan: He who speaks, does not Know; He who Knows, does not speak. Surely you’re masterful.

Kung fu masters are obligated to teach any student that seeks, no matter how unlikely the choice.

This is the part I have been struggling with lately; I have neglected teaching, and that is critical to learning.  If you want to learn something new, volunteer to teach about it.  I recently taught a seminar on XML in SQL Server because I wanted to learn more about it; granted, I didn’t push myself hard enough so I didn’t learn as much as I should have, but at least I took another step along the path.

But kung fu is not just about teaching to the willing student, it’s teaching to those who are different than us.

The Silent Monk: But, he’s not even Chinese.

Too often we database professionals assume that the only people that are interested in what we do are other database professionals.  We often fail to volunteer our services to developers, because we assume that they aren’t interested in database performance; instead we grumble about how poorly applications perform.  We don’t share our concerns about how I/O’s affect the database, and instead struggle on with the allotment that our system administrators hand out on the SAN.  We should be volunteering to speak at other user groups, to share our passion with even the unlikely students.  For example, my friend Aaron Nelson recently spoke at a Powershell event; Aaron himself would admit that he’s a SQL guy first, Powershell guru second.  Yet he took the opportunity to teach students with whom he shared little background on a subject with which he had some exposure.  That’s kung fu.

Final thoughts.

I think most martial art movies attempt to convey the message that kung fu is about self-discipline, rather than preparation for violence, but make no mistake: kung fu is an effective fighting skill.  A master of kung fu is a warrior, not a ballet dancer.  I’ve recently read a great book, Wild at Heart, which contains the following bit of wisdom:

Man is not born into a sitcom or a soap opera; he is born into a world at war.  This is not Home Improvement; it’s Saving Private Ryan.  There will be many, many battles to fight on many different battlefields.

We are at war with ourselves; the battle to perfect our craft is a battle against sloth, laziness, and a lack of focus.  I am choosing to continue on the path of kung fu in my quest to become a SQL Server master, and I hope you can make the same commitment.  For me, that’s a commitment to finish my SQL Server 2008 certifications before the end of year; that’s a benchmark, not a destination.  I need to learn much along the way.

2010-07-15 by Education SQLServerPedia Syndication The Social Web 1

Well, boo…. Back to the drawing wheel #sqlpass

Nose to the wagon board.  Grinding away at the dog-and-pony show.  Keeping a stiff upper lip.  Insert Other Platitudes…

Apparantly, PASS started notifying potential speakers that their submissions for Summit 2010 were accepted today for ; unfortunately, I was not one of them (at least not yet).  2 of my 3 submissions were “Considered” before being rejected, and a third is listed as an “Alternate”.   Although I’m disappointed, I do think that it suggests that the quality of submissions must be EXCELLENT this year.  I mean, if I didn’t make it, then obviously they put in the heavy hitters 🙂  Congrats to those who did make it.

I’ll keep trying, of course; I was accepted to speak at the Baton Rouge SQLSaturday, but unfortunately a personal conflict is keeping me from being able to attend.  I have high hopes about Nashville, and I’m pondering Kansas City.    I’m also planning on presenting at the Columbus Georgia SQL Server User Group in September, so I’ll keep refining my chops a bit.  I’m also still hoping to attend Summit, if I can figure out a way to pay for it.

Anyway, back to the grind.  Life ain’t all bad; I’m teleworking this week from lovely Florida, where I’ve been able to work all day, see friends at night, and enjoy some time at the beach in the evening.  It’s all a matter of perspective.

2010-07-08 by Conferences PASS SQLServerPedia Syndication The Social Web 1

English Interpreter of English #PASSvotes #sqlpass

In case you missed it, the call for nominations for the PASS Board of Directors went out yesterday; there are 3 seats that need to be filled this year, and PASS is trying to be very open about the nomination and electoral process this year.  I thought I would post a couple of links here (in case you missed them), as well as my brief perspective on parts of the process.

General Information

First, there’s the general home page for the 2010 Elections: http://elections.sqlpass.org  Not much to day, but here’s where you can find answers to a lot of your questions about the application and nomination process, and it will continue to be updated as candidates are chosen.  Of special interest to most people is the section labeled “How Does It Work?”; in one short paragraph (copied below), the nominations procedure is well-summarized:

The elections process starts with the nomination application.  Applicants are screened and ranked by the Nominations Committee.  The top applicants are invited back for an interview.  They are then again ranked by the Nominations Committee, which presents an election slate to the Board of Directors for review.  The top interviewees become the official candidates when the Board of Directors approves the election slate.

Additional links going into greater detail are also in this section, including a timeline and an in-depth walkthrough of the 2010 elections procedure.

So you think you have what it takes?

On the right side of the page are a couple of links; one for the actual application (APPLY NOW), and one for What does it take to be a Director?  The latter is probably THE most important link on this page in terms of transparency because it lays out the general guidelines for choosing a candidate from the small pile of applications we (the Nominations Committee) hope to receive.  Be sure that you spend some time on this information (if you’re interested in applying), but realize that much of it is describing the IDEAL candidate, which may or may not exist in the real world.   Think of it like you would any job interview; your skills may be a perfect fit for most of the criteria, but you’re probably going to have some weak spots as well.   However, other candidates will have the same limitations; the Nominations Committee is looking for people that are generally qualified to perform the job needed, and we will be picking the best candidates from the list of applicants.

How many applicants will make the slate?  PASS bylaws require that the slate be made up of (n+1) candidates, where n equals the number of Board seats available.  There may also be no more than (n*3) candidates, so for this election with 3 Board seats available,  we (the NomCom) hope to present between 4 and 9 candidates for election.   However, if we do not receive enough viable applicants to move forward with filling all 3 seats, the Chair of the Nominations Committee has the right to present a smaller slate and leave seats open; this is NOT an ideal situation, so please APPLY NOW if you are generally capable of being a Director.

Who is the Nominations Committee?

The NomCom for 2010 is:

Wayne Snyder (Chair)
Thomas LaRock
Rick Heiges
Rick Bolesta
Judy Christianson
Denise McInerney
Stu Ainsworth

Brief bios can be found here.

2010-06-24 by Election2010 SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

so it’s official: I’m a People Person. #PASSVote2010

I’ve been appointed to the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Nominations Committee for the 2010 Elections for Board of Directors; as one of two volunteer (non-Board) members, my job is to provide some feedback to the other members on the pulse of the community. While I am deeply honored, I can’t help but feel a smidge like Tom from Office Space.

The good news is that one of the main goals of this committee is to provide transparency into the electoral process of PASS; much of the information regarding why candidates were chosen (or not) will be provided throughout the process (barring any personal information) in order to create a dialogue between the community and the board.  I think this is a good thing, even though it’s not always easy to implement.  There are three board positions open this year, and I hope we get a slew of excellent candidates from which to pick.

Anyway, stick around for more news about the election; every year gets a little more exciting, and I hope that this year proves to be no different.  PASS is a community-driven organization; it should represent the ideals of the SQL Server community.  In other words, if you are a database professional, PASS should represent your interests, and be a useful mechanism for furthering your professional development.   That only works when people get involved, mmmK?  Oh and remember, next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.

2010-06-21 by Election2010 SQLServerPedia Syndication The Social Web 4

#SQLSat35: Dallas 2010 notes

I realize that it’s been an entire week since SQLSaturday 35 in Dallas and that’s an eternity in the blogosphere, but I’ve been recently reminded of a very painful lesson: you pay for taking days off.  Two days out of the office to go to Dallas cost me much more than two days worth of work; I’m not sure what temporal and spatial laws are in effect that cause this, but it’s damned annoying.  It’s not making me look forward to next week, when I’m taking the entire week off; I should be behind for the rest of the month.

Anyway, the trip to Dallas was especially great for me; I grew up in Northeast Louisiana, and many of my friends moved to the Dallas area after college.  Unfortunately, I was only able to catch up with two of them (Evan R. and Brad W.); they graciously allowed me to use their couches, saving me a lot of coin for what was essentially an unpaid employee training expense.  It was great catching up with them, and I hope to be back that way in the near future.

This particular SQLSaturday was also very cool because it’s the first one that I attended simply as an attendee and NOT as a speaker; this was eye-opening for me, because it gave me a chance to experience some things as an outsider (although I did crash the speaker’s dinner on Friday night), and that gave me a chance to reflect on what it’s like to not know all of the details about an event, and what can be done to make sure people know what’s going on when, where, and how.  I’ll get to that in a second, but let me throw some thoughts out there.

What Worked Well…

I don’t think anyone can say enough about the team of volunteers from the North Texas SQL Server User Group; these guys simply ROCK, and they pulled without a hitch.  I especially liked the fact that they spread out the work effort over several volunteers, and that every member of the team took their responsibility seriously.   In my mind, however, there were a couple of amazing contributions at this particular event that often get overlooked, so I want to give a quick acknowledgement to them:

  1. Having a designated photographer was a great idea.  Everywhere I looked, there was a volunteer taking snaps.  I’m not sure where those pictures will be posted, but we’ve had volunteers in the past take some great photos, but never really treated them as a full-time member of the team. I think having someone designated to capture the memory of the event is a great idea, particularly if it can be folded into networking opportunities later.
  2. The food and food distribution was amazing; whoever picked the caterers did a great job, and the way it was laid out was simply wonderful.  Although I loved the ice cream at the end of the day, the sugar rush (and subsequent crash) was a bit tough for me personally.  Great idea, but unexpected side effects; I slept through most of the last session 🙂
  3. Finally, Ryan Adams was the sponsor coordinator, and I watched him work those tables several times throughout the day.  That was a nice touch, and I hope the sponsors appreciated having someone who was available to them all the time to handle any issues that they may have had come up.

Others have noted how great the facility was; I couldn’t agree more.  I’m hoping that we can find a similar venue for our next SQLSaturday in Atlanta.  Registration worked great; I think having an early morning raffle incentive helped keep the distribution of the attendees relatively constant, and they had several lines available for people to check in.   I did feel a bit of “what happens now” after I made it through the line, but it was easy to spot where everyone was hanging out.

One thing that I really liked was the use of a claim ticket for filling out speaker evals; we had done something similar for the last Atlanta event, but the Dallas crew did it a little different.  Each attendee got a single ticket at the beginning of the day, and they used that same number throughout the day to fill out speaker evals.  Unlike us, however, they chose to do all of the drawings at the end of the day.

Finally, the event guide was amazing; it was very thorough and complete, and looked very professional.  All in all, I think the event was a wonderful day, and I hope people really appreciated how well things were handled.

What Didn’t Work So Well…

There were a couple of minor issues, however, and I mention them only so that other SQLSaturday coordinators can plan from them.  The brochure was wonderful, but the central schedule was organized around tracks, not times, which meant that if you were hopping tracks, you had to keep scanning in order to find the time something was occurring in order to see what classes were available.  This was a departure from the traditional scheduling format, and I just think it didn’t work as well as the planners hoped.  The planning team did have a great web tool for picking a schedule, and I noticed that many people were walking around with paper copies of those; those schedules were the traditional arrangement by time.

Second, and this was completely minor, I felt lost at the beginning of the day.  Again, this was the first event I’ve been to in a long time where I was simply an attendee, and it was a little overwhelming to go from the registration desk and walk into a mass of people milling about.  I’m not sure what can be done about that, but I’m wondering if introducing an usher would help make that transition slightly less disconcerting.

Third, the sponsors were responsible for providing their own tickets; this was both good and bad, so I need to follow up with sponsors about how they felt about it.  Waiting on people to fill out forms did create a traffic jam, but it completely took away some of the set-up responsibilities from the organizers.  The sponsors may also have benefitted from having people hanging out.

Finally (and this happens at every SQLSaturday I’ve been to), I don’t think enough mention was made of the fact that there is a thriving SQL Server community that meets every month behind every SQLSaturday.  We get so caught up on the day, that we forget to give enough shout-outs to the local or national PASS communities.  Tim Mitchell tried to do that at the end of the day, but it was done after the raffles were over and people were packing up to leave. 

These, of course, are minor quibbles; overall, it was a great day of training.  The classes I went to (for the most part) were excellent, and I felt like I came back with some new ideas to try out.

Plans For Future Events…

So here’s my final take-away, and what I plan to do at the next Atlanta SQLSaturday:

  1. Punch up the mention of the local chapter and PASS a LOT.  Focus on getting people connected to those organizations.
  2. Reward people for making connections; find some variant of Twitter Bingo to help people make local connections.
  3. I loved the claim check idea with a single number for the whole day; I think we’re going to steal it, but continue to do raffles in-session and save the big prizes for the end of the day.
  4. Contact the sponsors and ask them how they want to handle raffle tickets in the future.

Other Writeups….

A lot of other people have already written about their experiences at SQLSaturday 35′; in case you missed them, here’s some of the ones I read:

SQLAJ – What I gained from volunteering at SQLSat35

MidnightDBA (Jen) We Made This, Part 1 of 2 (Thoughts on SQL Saturday 35)

Made2Mentor: My SQL Saturday Experience

Ryan Adams: SQL Saturday Weekend Palooza

Bill Fellows: SQL Saturday 35 experience #sqlsat35

Wes Brown: SQL Saturday #35 Notes and Observations

2010-05-30 by Conferences SQLServerPedia Syndication 1

#sqlsat35 looking ahead to the weekend

This weekend I’ll be traveling to the DFW metropolitan area to attend SQLSaturday #35; I’m very excited about it.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to attend this weekend (had to trade kid time with the ex-wife), so I missed the call for speakers.  I am looking forward to actually attending sessions and bumping into some friends.   If you’re there, look me up; I’ll be wearing my SQLSaturday #41 t-shirt (see this link for a sample).

I’ll be packing a couple of presentations (just in case they have an opening): the Social DBA and my latest discussion on XML in SQL Server 2008.  I was planning on submitting both of them to PASS Summit this year, but I feel a little guilty about the Social DBA one given that I’ve completely slacked off over the last few months.  I keep thinking I’m going to get back on the wagon, but life has been flying by much too fast these days.

Speaking of friends, Dallas is kind of like an old home to me; I grew up in Louisiana, and many of my high school and college buddies wound up in the big D after graduation.  I’m looking forward to crashing on a few couches, having a few beers, and hearing what happened over the last 20 years or so.

2010-05-21 by Blogging is FUN! Conferences PASS SQL Server SQLServerPedia Syndication The Social Web 0

Speaking today: PASS AppDev Virtual Chapter

I know it’s short notice, but to be honest, I totally forgot about this until a couple of weeks ago.  I’ll be presenting today at noon eastern on a LiveMeeting for the Application Developers Virtual Chapter of PASS.  Deets below:

“You Got XML In My Database? What’s Up With That?”
May 11th 12:00 PM EDT (GMT -4)
Add to Calendar
Presenter: Stuart Ainsworth

A brief presentation exploring the marriage of XML and relational databases, including when it works and when it doesn’t. Coverage will include various use case scenarios, and some tips on how to improve performance using design techniques.

Stuart Ainsworth

Stuart R Ainsworth, MA, MEd is a Database Architect working in the realm of Financial Information Security; over the last 15 years, he’s worked as a Research Analyst, a report writer, a DBA, a programmer, and a public speaking professor. He’s one of the chapter leaders for AtlantaMDF, the Atlanta chapter of PASS. A master of air guitar, he has yet to understand the point of Rock Band (“You push buttons? What’s that all about?”).

How do I view the presentation?
Attendee URL:  Live Meeting link

2010-05-11 by PASS SQL SQL Server SQLServerPedia Syndication XML 0

SQLSaturday #41 Wrap-up: Lessons learned from Atlanta, April 24, 2010

So this wrap-up took a little longer for me to write than I had hoped; work had piled up a bit post-con, and finals were going on in the class I teach part-time at Gainesville State College.  Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened at the third SQLSaturday for AtlantaMDF, and hopefully this list will help some of the other groups prepping for their event.  Before I get started however, you may want to review my life lessons from SQLSaturday 13 and 25.  Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Ready?  Before I go too much further, I should note that there have already been a lot of write-ups about the event from the speakers; I’ll try to build a list of them below my notes, but I will be borrowing liberally from some of them (particularly Jen McCown’s post at http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/midnightdba/blog/post/A-MidnightDBA-in-Atlanta-(SQL-Saturday-41).aspx).  I’ll try to give credit where credit is due, but in case I overlook someone’s contribution, please feel free to point it out.

Pre-con preparation

Here’s a list of stuff that I could have managed a little better BEFORE the conference began.  Again, I don’t think we did anything bad; I just want to improve it for next year.

Committee Work.

This particular SQLSaturday was a new challenge for me; the previous two SQLSaturdays I had done most of the leg work before the conference by myself, and only really accepted volunteers to help on the actual day of the event.  That had pluses and minuses; the pluses were that I became very aware of some of the larger issues associated with putting the event on.  The minuses were that I was a raving lunatic for several weeks, including the day of the event.

This year, I tried to put together a committee, and there were some different challenges with that; there was a lot of energy among the members of the group, and that led us to do some things that I wouldn’t have normally tried (good thing), but it also meant that we spent a lot of time debating how to do things (not a bad thing; just something to account for in the future).  The biggest plus for me was delegation; the week of the event, I actually had a very small list of things to do, and that was wonderful.  Other people on the team really stepped up and took care of a lot of issues for me.

I definitely think working with a committee is much better than attempting to do it solo, but I would still recommend that you have a definite committee leader (someone with veto power).  If I were to do it all over again, I’d be much more strict about working with a punch list (more on that in a minute); we had a lot of ideas floating around, and unfortunately, most of them were in my own head.

Start legwork earlier.

I’ll admit it; I procrastinated on this event.  My divorce wasn’t final until March 8, and I basically didn’t do enough work on this event before that to make it a smooth project.  I think it came off well, but we were playing catch-up for the last month.  As the project manager, this was solely my fault; I even had several members on the team to act as designated “butt-kickers” for me.  I don’t think it would have changed the outcome much, but it would have been less stressful.

Building a better event guide.

As most of you know, the event guide is the key to a good SQLSaturday.  I didn’t deviate much from my previous event guide formulas (schedule on the front page, summary of speakers bios and sessions on the following pages, sponsor logo throughout).  In hindsight, there are some things I should have done.

  • Jen recommended that we have a map of the rooms; we did.  It was on the last page of the guide.  I should have made it MUCH more obvious because we were dealing with several tracks.
  • We (I) decided not to have a keynote session; we were expecting more people than we had room to hold in our largest conference space.  I should have taken the time to write out what to expect and where to go.  I answered a lot of basic questions over and over again on the day of the event (what do we do with raffle tickets, where are the extra restrooms, etc.).
  • I’m not sure if the speaker bio is as relevant to the session attendance as we think; it may be better to have either a separate speaker book OR simply recommend that speakers do their own bios as part of the session.  We could have trimmed the book down quite a bit.  

How many people are we talking about?

I completely underestimated the response from attendees, speakers, and sponsors.  SQLSaturday has been around long enough that I think everyone is on board these days, and we definitely did not lack anything in terms of attendee registrations, speakers, and sponsors.  Our biggest challenge was space; I chose to reuse the Microsoft facility in Alpharetta because a) it’s nice, and relatively close to a tech hub in Atlanta, and b) it was free (Microsoft was a Gold sponsor).  Again, not a bad decision, but a decision that had consequences; we could only have 250 attendees in the rooms AND we needed to enforce room counts.

Before the event began, we had 250 people on the registration list and almost 100 people on the waiting list at one point.  We did this with minimal advertisement, and I think we could have easily hit 500 registered people if we had done more advertisement.  What really surprised me was the number of sponsors that responded as well as the number of speakers that submitted.  I made the not-so-smart decision to accept most submissions from speakers (I had a few complain about that; suck it up, Kendal); this meant that many submitters were presenting multiple times, and I was trying to evenly distribute 250 people across 7 tracks.  To keep the session count high, I decided to add an extra hour to the day (start early, end late).   7 sessions is too many, so next year I’m going to have say NO to more sessions by speakers.  However, I still want to encourage new speakers to apply as well as the more established circuit riders; I love Robert Cain and Kevin G. Boles (and they draw crowds), but I still want to hear from Audrey Hammonds and Julie Smith.

Sponsor participation was amazing (we had 14 sponsors; 6 of them a type of Gold), but I have bad news for my sponsors for next year; if we’re going to have to pay for space, our price levels are going to have to go up.  We’ll make it reasonable, but I may have to introduce a Platinum level for larger sponsors.  The good news is that while the overall cost will go up, we’ll be able to deliver a larger list of attendees to them and a broader reach.  In keeping with the comment above about getting started sooner, I plan to talk to a few of my regular sponsors and get their feeling on what was reasonable and what is fair.

The T-shirt.

I had chosen in the past to NOT do an event T-shirt, and Aaron Nelson (one of our committee members) talked me into doing one this time.  My past arguments about the shirt included a) I didn’t want to deal with sizes, and b) most people would wear the shirt for 1 time and then it would become a gardening or paint shirt.  We couldn’t do anything about sizes, but Aaron and I talked about a couple of different options for the shirt so that it wouldn’t be a typical wear-it-once kind of a thing.  We decided to come up with a geek-friendly saying on the front, and a simple advertisement for the event and the local user group (AtlantaMDF).  Here’s one of our happy raffle winners at the end of the day wearing the shirt!

Did it work?  Dunno; by the end of the day, all of the extra shirts were gone, and that’s unusual for an event of this type.  I had a lot of people asking me if they could grab one for a co-worker, or a youth group, and even a math class.  For all I know, there’s a family of four out in Dunwoody somewhere doing yardwork in the shirt we designed, but I hope that a least a few of my fellow data geeks will wear them in public or at work and advertise the next SQLSaturday (and AtlantaMDF and PASS). 

 

The Raffle Tickets for In-Session Drawing.

To me, this was one of the best ideas we had for SQLSaturday, and I am definitely going to keep doing it in the future.  We decided this year that we were going to do in-session drawings for swag in order to keep the final session as short as possible (all we had to do at the end of the day was draw tickets from our big sponsors).   After a lot of debate on how to do this, we finally decided that we would do the following:

  1. Hand each session attendee a raffle ticket and a speaker evaluation form.  The attendee would fill out the speaker eval form, and use the ticket number instead of a name on the form.
  2. The speakers would draw for prizes from the speaker eval forms, calling out the ticket number for a winner.

The benefits?  Fast drawings for prizes, session feedback was confidential, and the speakers got immediate feedback (no tallying necessary).   There were some challenges; attendees got confused by the word name on the speaker form, and were unsure what to write.  Next year?  Do it more like a claim check, with the number already assigned to the individual eval form.  I may have to spend a little money on perforated paper, but it should make it go easier.

Day Of The Event

Obviously, there were things we could have done on the day of the event better; we get a little better each year, but there’s always stuff to improve.

Registration

Our registration staff was AMAZING; unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of them.  We should have had more than two lines, particularly since we were expecting 250 people + wait list to show up before 8:30 AM.    A good formula is probably 100 people per line, with at least 2 hours of registration time.  The good news is that our head registrant (Lorra Newton) is thinking about writing an app to help speed up registration next time; we’ll discuss next time.

Sponsor Pit

We had to stuff sponsors into a relatively small area this year in order to make sure they had power; I know that it may have been an inconvenience, but I think it actually helped facilitate conversations.  The small space made the sponsor pit look busy, and busy places draw a crowd.

Better Training For Volunteers

Volunteer participation this year was amazing, and we did a better job than last year of pre-organizing the volunteers.  I still think we could do better, and we may need to see about making pre-con meetings mandatory for volunteers in exchange for greater rewards (a custom t-shirt, free lunch, something).  We were training people on the morning of the event, and there were a few mix-ups (like the aforementioned speaker eval/raffle claim check).

Lunch Tickets

Like the last two events, we charged a lunch fee in order to keep attendance high; when people pay for an event, they tend to show up, even if the event has only a nominal fee.  Unfortunately, we don’t do enough to distinguish between the fee for the event (FREE) and the fee for lunch.  I think next year, we’ll need to do lunch claim tickets to allow people to not pay for lunch and still come (bring their own or pay at the door).   Of course,  we’ve used non-payment of lunch fees in the past to help clean up the list before the event, and we’re not doing that anymore; we do, however, need to find ways of verifying that people will come, particularly if we have space limitations.

Session Scheduling

I need to be more sensitive to back-to-back scheduling for speakers; if I’m going to have them go back-to-back, then I need to put them in the same room.  Speaker schedules are always a bear; no matter what you do, you’re never going to get it perfect.  I think having a tighter schedule will help, but I still need to get better.  We did do a pre-conference survey to determine space requirements (large classes vs small classes), and that helped immensely, but I forgot to check for a balance of advanced, beginner, and intermediate classes during each hour of the day (the last hour of the day I had 1 advanced session, and the rest were all beginners; we had a bit of crowding at that point).

 

Post Con Activities

No doubt about it, I need to set realistic goals for wrapping up the event.  I still haven’t sent out sponsor emails, and I’m just now finishing the writeup.  I should have delegated some of these activities to volunteers, but simply didn’t.  That’s definitely on the list for next year.

There’s also more work to do, but I’ll save it for another post; I need to compile a list of blogs and photos from the event.  Hopefully that will come out in the next few days.

2010-05-03 by Conferences SQLServerPedia Syndication 4