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5 recommendations for attending #sqlpass #summit12

Posted on November 7, 2012 by johnsterrett | Leave a comment

The following are five recommendations I would like to share with anyone attending the #sqlpass member summit. I hope you have a blast!

GuideBook

If you have a smart phone I highly recommend grabbing the GuideBook application for your mobile device. This will give you direct access to the session schedule, general information and more. This is a very helpful tool for being flexible and changing which session you should attend on the fly.

Buy the conference sessions

There are so many great sessions its impossible to catch them all. I strongly recommend buying the USB drive that includes all the sessions so the pressure is off to try and make sure you see them all. This will allow you to enjoy the conference without worrying about seeing the best session. Personally, this allows me to focus more on networking.

Networking

The SQL Server Community is awesome. There are so many people in the community willing help you accomplish your goals. All you have to do is meet them. There really isn’t a better place to do that than PASS Member Summit. I would never be where I am today without some of the connections I have meet at the past PASS conferences.

SQL Server Clinic

Got a problem and don’t know how to solve it? Your at the right place, not only are there tons of great DBA’s around to help, you also have the SQL team willing to help for free. This year I brought a couple interesting problems with me and I cannot wait to review them with the Microsoft support team to get their thoughts.

Vendors

Do you need more hours in the day? Do you wish there was a way to make a process easier? If so, most likely one of the many vendors at the conference has a solution for it. Time is money, so if one of these tools on display can free up your time wouldn’t you want to use it? All the major SQL Server vendors will be at the conference, hopefully spending a few minutes with them will save your hours of time next year.

Is #SQLPASS helping their speakers?

Posted on October 30, 2012 by johnsterrett | 7 comments

I love the SQL Community because it usually is a great environment to connect, share and learn. With that said, I am noticing that we can do a much better job with helping the people who share, learn how to share better. For every single, Grant Fritchey, Thomas LaRock, Andy Leonard, Brent Ozar, Mike Walsh, Allen White (I could keep going..) there are several DBA’s who speak in the community who don’t get the feedback they need to get to the next level. The SQL PASS community does a great job of providing opportunities for people to speak but we fail as a group at giving speakers the proper feedback that is needed to help them succeed.

Being a speaker and regional mentor I have attended many user group meetings and SQL Saturday’s in the past few years. I have seen a lot of great changes in the community. Recently, I motivated some friends into giving their first presentation at the local SQL Saturday. I was able to attend their sessions so I could directly give feedback. It makes me wonder how many speakers only get the feedback provided on the evaluation forms? How is it possible to use the limited information on these forms to make a presentation better? That is if you’re lucky enough to be presenting at an user group who uses speaker evaluation forms. I admit I was guilty of this while running the WVPASS User Group. From firsthand knowledge I know running a user group can require a lot of time and dedication so I completely see how this important feedback is missed when there are several other important pieces to the user group leader puzzle.

My call to action (this is where the rant ends). What is the answer? I wish I knew, but I defiantly can provide some suggestions. It would be nice to have a consistent evaluation process during a SQL Saturday and other PASS events including virtual chapters and user group meetings. I would like to see questions that are open ended that provide constructive feedback to help speakers improve as they grow instead of hoping attendees provide feedback on the back of a form. I think it would be nice to give attendees an simple online tool that allows them to provide feedback during the session. Once again, these are just suggestions. Maybe there all wrong as they are just ideas on how the process can be improved through my experience as a chapter leader, speaker, SQL Saturday organizer and regional mentor.

In closing, I look forward to hopefully finding the answer with some friends in my #sqlfamily. Every year at the PASS Member Summit there is a meeting where the community can meet and ask questions to the Board of Directors. This year, I plan to attend and ask, “As a volunteer, how can I be involved in improving our current system in place to provide speakers with better feedback to help them improve their public speaking skills and get them to the next level?”

7 Comments

Posted in Professional Development, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Tagged SQL Server, sqlpass, User Group

Dallas, TX to Pittsburgh, PA A #sqlsat171 Story!

Posted on October 12, 2012 by johnsterrett | 1 comment

First SQL Saturday in Pittsburgh

It was an honor to speak at the first SQL Saturday in Pittsburgh. The company I

We even got some professional development done while I was in the office.

currently work for is based out of Pittsburgh so I flew in a week early and traded my work from home lifestyle this week for working in the office. It was fun to do some training and mentoring in person this week. One of my coworkers went all out and hosted a great BBQ dinner while my boss picked me up at 1:30am on a Monday morning and let me crash with him all week. I am very lucky to work with some great people.

For this event I had two goals. One, help Gina anyway possible with finding speakers and sponsors. Second, I wanted to encourage and help some great local DBA’s in Pittsburgh give their first #sqlpass presentation. So, months before this event I gave myself a personal challenge to target three great DBA’s in Pittsburgh and I tried to get them to deliver their first presentation locally at the SQL Saturday. I was very happy to help and see two of the three potential speakers give great presentations. They even filled all the seats and had standing room only. One of them has even caught the speaking bug and submitted abstracts to SQL Saturday in DC.

Speakers Dinner…

The SQL Saturday committee did a great job on picking a venue for the speakers dinner. We meetup at the Rivers Casino across the river from downtown. We had a great view Mt. Washington and the Point. I wish I could have stayed longer but I had a work item that needed to be completed.

Day of the Event..

I started the morning by giving my Performance for Pirates (code, tools and

Kon did a great job, with the room being packed!

Kon did a great job for his first presentation with the room being packed!

videos provided with link) presentation. Next, I got the opportunity to catch Eric Keeps dive into ORM that make DBA’s happy. I was surprised when Eric showed one that allowed developers and DBA’s to build the SQL statements. Finally, I caught Konstantin Melamud who presented an “Introduction to Execution Plans” session. He did a fantastic job, most of the people in the room wouldn’t know it was his first #sqlpass presentation.

One of the most important parts of attending SQL Saturday’s is to catchup and extend your network. I love catching up with my #SQLFamily and extending it too. I had a great time catching up with Karla Landrum, Joey Dantoni, Rick Heiges, Craig Purnell, Eric Kepes and more (too many to list all!). After some networking I had to cut out early to catch my flight. I was able to hitch a ride to the airport with Joey and get a sneak peek into traveling like a rockstar as he got me through priority checkin and the US Airways club. Thanks Joey!

The After Event Buzz…

Finally, its now close to a week after the event and I am still hearing good news about the event. We were able to round up about ten co-workers to join in and attend the event. They are still talking about the event and cannot wait for the next one. Many of them mentioned that they are going to start attending the Pittsburgh SQL Server User Group meetings, a few are considering going to the SQL Saturday in DC in December. If this isn’t #SQLWinning I don’t know what is!

1 Comment

Posted in Professional Development, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Tagged Presentation, SQL Server, SQLSaturday

Presenting at OKC SQL Server User Group Tonight!

Posted on October 8, 2012 by johnsterrett | 2 comments

Tonight, October 8th at 6:30pm I am virtually speaking at the OKC SQL Server User Group. I had a blast there earlier this year when I presented at their SQL Saturday event. Tonight I will be talking about Performance Tuning for Pirates! There will be free knowledge and food for all who can make it down. I hope you can make it and I look forward to meeting you virtually!

Here are the meeting details!

The title for the talk is: Performance Tuning for Pirates and will cover:

If you follow baseball you will notice that the Pittsburgh Pirates (this speaker’s favorite team) has to do more with less to be successful. This trend can also exist within IT shops. If you need to improve the performance of your SQL Server instances and cannot purchase 3rd party tools this session is for you. Learn to improve your performance tuning process by using several free tools. This session will cover wait stats, dynamic management objects, perfmon, PAL, SQL Trace, ClearTrace, SQL Nexus and SQLDiag.

When: Tonight! Monday, October 08th

Time: 6:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m.

Food and Drinks will be provided by GDH

Location: GDH Offices – Follow this link for information on location and parking!

1111 N Walker Ave

Oklahoma City, OK 73103

Directions link: Click Here
Our Website/MailingList: http://okcsql.org
Twitter/Facebook: @OKCSQL and http://facebook.com/okcsql

2 Comments

Posted in SQLServerPedia Syndication

Tagged Presentation, SQL Server

Upcoming speaking engagements

Posted on September 19, 2012 by johnsterrett | Leave a comment

Ayyyy, matey being that today is the International Speak Like a Pirate Day I thought it was appropriate to post some future dates for my Performance Tuning for Pirates presentation.

You can download the slides, check out the reference material and videos here!

North Texas SQL Server Group

If your in the DFW area and haven’t been to a North Texas SQL Server Group meeting I highly recommend you check one out. I will be speaking tomorrow (Thursday, September 19th) and its not too late to sign up to attend this free event.

SQL Saturday #171 in Pittsburgh, PA

On October 6th Pittsburgh will be hosting its first SQL Saturday. It’s an honor to be speaking during the first time slot. If you in the area, there is no better opportunity to get free SQL Server training. I look forward to meeting you there. If for some reason, you cannot make it make sure you check out the Pittsburgh SQL Server User Groups monthly meetings as there also free!

#TSQL2Day – A Day in the Life of A Service DBA

Posted on July 18, 2012 by johnsterrett | 2 comments

Today I am excited to join in with my #sqlfamily and participate in this months #tsql2day throw down. This month Erin Stellato is the king pin and her topic is “A day in the Life.” This gives me a great opportunity to explain a day in the life of a DBA who works for a company who provides DBA services remotely. A typical day has me working on several projects or problems with several clients. One of the things I enjoy about my job is that each day has a new set of challenges. The following are the highlights of my work day on Wednesday, July 11th.

Backups instead of Coffee..

You might start your morning with a cup of coffee but I got to start my day with working with a new client going over an very important issue. We noticed holes in a clients backup maintenance plan so I got to work with them to correct those holes. I know this isn’t the sexiest task out there for DBA’s but making sure that you can recover is one of the most important tasks for a DBA.

Configuring A Cluster to improve High Availability.

Implementing a cluster usually gives you higher availability for your databases but you might not be getting the highest availability possible from how you configured your cluster. Today, I reviewed a four node cluster and found a few flaws that limit the availability of the cluster. To summarize here are some of my findings. The cluster was running in node majority instead of node and disk majority. Instances of SQL Server were not added on all the nodes. The preferred nodes and possible owners were not configured correctly. I look forward to doing another blog post at a later date going over each of these settings.

Troubleshooting Version Store

Today, I got to work with another team mate to help troubleshoot why the version store was filling the tempdb database and causing slowness with the clients application. This gave me an opportunity to go learn more about what all is used by the version store. Noticing that the client used RCSI for their main database we were able to use the Performance Data Warehouse to find a massive update statement that did more writes than expected which caused the growth problems with tempdb.

Assessment review with Client

One thing I enjoy about my job is going over assessments with a client. This usually gives me an opportunity to share some knowledge about how the database engine works. I also gave some recommendations that can be used to improve their performance and how to bring their server up to speed with our best practices.

Favorite Part of the Day!

Every day I get to eat lunch. I try to make sure I have a lunch date with ~~#babybeluga~~ Gregory my one year old son. This is by far my favorite part of the day and it reminds me why I love working from home.

Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed my blog post on A Day in the Life. I look forward to seeing the recap of how everyone else in the SQL Community spent there day.