I’m Speaking at SQLSaturday #156–Providence

I’m excited to be back on the speaking circuit.  I was able to attend SQLSaturday #122 – Louisville thanks to Idera and the ACE program.

Now I’m on the schedule for SQLSaturday #156 – Providence.  I’ll be presenting Transitioning from SQL Trace to Extended Events.  This has been a very well-received presentation at SQLSaturday #142 – Waltham, SQLSaturday #122 – Louisville, and Rochester PASS.

This event has a great lineup of speakers.  Here are the sessions I’ll try to attend, although I’ll probably be stuck at the PASS table most of the day:

• Andy Roberts – DB Development ALM with SQL Server Data Tools
• Alex Papadimoulis – Database Deployment Done Right
• Andy Novick – BIggest Loser Database Edition
• Andy Roberts – SQL Server 2012 Availability Groups
• Aaron Bertrand (Blog|Twitter) – The Ins and Outs of Contained Databases

If you are there be sure to stop by the PASS table and say, “Hello”

SqlSaturday #71–Boston Recap: An Upscale Saturday

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at SQLSaturday #71 – Boston on April 2nd.  Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter), Mike Walsh (Blog|Twitter), Tom LaRock (Blog|Twitter), Grant Fritchey (Blog|Twitter) and crew did a great job putting on the event.  The event was held at the Babson College Executive Conference Center which is a great facility.  The rooms were large and, except for the large room, theatre-style so the all the attendees could see.  There was also an on-site pub for the after-party that made it easy for attendees to stay and network after the event.  I was surprised that more didn’t, but the crew that did was very lively.

Highlights

Meeting Paul White (Blog|Twitter) – I’ve “known” Paul for awhile online through SQLServerCentral and Twitter, but this was my first opportunity to meet him in person.  I’m always excited to meet people in person, especially when they are among the best and brightest in the SQL Server community, which Paul is.  It was also great to hear that he was rightly awarded SQL Server MVP status in the latest round.  If you don’t read his blog you should. 

Food Service – In order to use the facility the event had to purchase food through the facility and it was the BEST food at any event I’ve attended.  There was fruit, drinks, muffins, etc… throughout the morning at several stations in the facility, and the event staff kept everything stocked.  It was actually so well-done I wasn’t sure it was for our event because I’ve never seen it done like that before.  The lunch buffet was unbelievable!  Tampa has a good lunch at their event, but it did not compare.  I can’t even mention all the items that were available, including the desserts.  There were even servers keeping you water or other drink filled and clearing your plates.  Even the Summit doesn’t serve a meal like this!  Then, to top it off cookies and fruit appeared at the snack stations in the afternoon!  Thank goodness I stayed on my feet throughout the day or I would have gained back half the weight I’ve lost! 

Seeing old friends and making new ones – There is never a time when getting together with old friends in the community is not a great time.  People like Andy Leonard (Blog|Twitter), Aaron Bertrand (Blog|Twitter), Karen Lopez (Blog|Twitter), Chris Skorlinksi and others that make every conversation a learning experience.  Then some new friends, many of whom I interact with online, like Mike Hilwig (Blog), Michael Coles (Blog|Twitter), Andrew Kelly (Blog|Twitter), Stefan Krzywicki (Blog), and Allen White (Blog|Twitter).  Each one of the folks I interacted with during the day made a full day of #sqlwinning.  I know I’m leaving out a bunch of people, but there are too many to include.

My Session

I presented my Introduction to Triggers session in the first slot and I had at least 15 people (that’s how many evals I got), which is about my normal crowd for this session.  Overall it went well, although I lost my train of thought a couple of times, and I was a little nervous having Paul White in my session.  Paul actually was a great help in the session as he asked some great questions that reminded me of some points that I need to make or emphasize.  I am guessing that is why he asked those questions because I’m pretty sure he knew the answers, and I’d be shocked if he didn’t.  There were a lot of good questions from the rest of group as well, especially when we talked about DDL triggers.  We actually spent more time on that part of the presentation than normal because of the questions.  It is always nice to get the evaluations right at the session, especially when they are good .  I had 3 fours and 12 fives for the overall quality of the presentation which is always nice to see. Here a few comments:

“Great session – learned a lot!”

“Great Speaker.  Accessible and sincere”

“On the slides, yellow urls against a blue background are hard to read”

“Lively, engaging speaker”

“Test his code! ” – I did have a couple of oops’s

“Very good @ recovering from the “gotchas”.”

“A little extra on the real basics of what a trigger does and when it fires”

I’ll definitely be working the ones that involve doing something better, but very happy that everyone enjoyed and learned something from the session, including me!

Sessions I attended

I only attended 2 sessions, Paul White’s SQL Query Optimization: It’s Not Rocket Science session, and Karen Lopez’s session, Database Design Contentious Issues.

As I expected, Paul’s session was great and deep!  I know I’m not at his level in understanding the internals of SQL Server and he gave a great overview of how the query optimizer works, ways you can “play” with it, and ways you can “help” it.  The fact that you can help the optimizer by trying different ways to “declare” what you want to see which one brings out the best plan.  This session should be followed by Grant Fritchey’s session on query plans.

Karen’s session was very interesting as it was very interactive.  We talked about surrogate keys vs. natural keys, when to use varchar vs. char, and naming conventions.  Each of which is definitely a contentious issue, and we didn’t even talk about NULL’s!  The key thing I took from this session is that the “tools you use affect the decisions you make”.

Constructive Criticism’s

I’ve never attended a perfect event, so here are a couple things I’d suggest for next time:

1. SQLSaturday signs on the way into the event location.  Once you got to the Babson campus it seemed like you had to drive through the whole place to find the event.  I was looking for SQLSaturday signs and there weren’t any.
2. Include the speaker name on the schedule handed out at the event.  I know a lot of people want to know who is speaking as a the tie-breaker between sessions.

Other than those 2 things I don’t have any other things to change.  Check-in, which is often a problem, went smoothly, and the day seemed to flow very well.

Thanks for putting on a great event and I hope to be back next year!

Upcoming Engagements

I haven’t been blogging lately because I’ve been busy tweaking my resume, working on PASS SQLRally, serving at church, and spending time with my family.  Things aren’t going to be slowing down anytime soon, but I wanted to let those who do read this blog know that I’m still around and about my upcoming speaking engagements:

Wednesday, March 9th 3pm

I’ll be doing a web cast on Security, Performance, and Maintenance Advantages to Using Stored Procedures over ORM Tools where I share my opinions on why Stored Procedures are better than an ORM tool for a data access layer.

Saturday, March 26th 10:50am

I’ll be presenting Introduction to SQL Server Profiler at the Orlando CodeCamp.  I’ve given this presentation several times, but will be tailoring for developers so that they can really see what their preferred ORM tool is doing.

Saturday April 2nd 9am

I’ll be presenting Introduction to Triggers SQLSaturday #71 – Boston.  I’ll be giving a brief overview of the different types of triggers available in SQL Server (DDL & DML) and then go into more detail on how and when to use DML triggers. This session will cover misconceptions about how triggers work, when triggers should and shouldn't be used (we will discuss options), common mistakes, and how to fix the most common mistakes.

SQLSaturday #62–Tampa Recap

I had the privilege of attending and speaking at SQLSaturday #62 – Tampa the weekend of January 15th and this is my belated recap post of what I did for the weekend.

I headed to Tampa from Sanford on Thursday afternoon as I was attending Denny Cherry’s (Twitter) pre-conference seminar, Storage and Virtualization for the DBA, on Friday.  I was able to have dinner with one of my college roommates who I had not seen in over 15 years that evening.  I had a great time with him.

Friday morning I headed to Denny’s seminar and there was a great turnout, with I think 30 people in the seminar.  It was good to re-connect with Denny, Mike Nelson (Twitter), Ron Dameron (Twitter), and Mike Wells during the breaks in the seminar.  I selected this seminar because both storage and virtualization are areas that I have no experience with and I want to understand them so I can speak credibly with storage and virtualization admins.  Honestly I need a couple of weeks training on both, with some hands on experience, but I definitely know more than I did before the seminar.  This was the first time I’ve sat in on a session by Denny although I did listen to his session on Service Broker on the PASS Summit 2010 DVD, and I was impressed.  He does a great job teaching and explains things in a way a complete noob like me can understand.

Friday night I attended the speaker/volunteer dinner at Spaghetti Warehouse and there was a great turnout with I would guess close to 50 people there.  I wish I had written this sooner so I could remember the names of the new people I met, but I can’t.  I talked with a lot of people there and had great conversations.  The opportunity to see friends is one reason I love the events, especially the Florida ones.  I’d list names, but I’ll leave someone out.  I always feel some awe because of the great talent in the room.  It makes me thankful for the opportunity I have to be part of the SQL Server community.  I’m always amazed at how willing the “names” of the SQL world are to share their hard-earned knowledge.

Pam Shaw (Twitter) and Jose Chinchilla (Twitter) did a good job with the event on Saturday.  They had a great idea for check-in that they called, SpeedPass.  They sent out pdf’s with all your printed materials (name tag, lunch ticket, raffle tickets), so you could print them out ahead of time, and then at check-in you went to the SpeedPass line where you got a bag with just the generic information.  It definitely made check-in, which was an issue at last year’s event in Tampa, go more quickly. 

After getting my t-shirt from PragmaticWorks, I went to Rodney Landrum’s session, DBA Repository, and picked up some good tips.  Then I sat in on part of Andy Warren’s (Blog | Twitter) session on having a professional development plan.  I definitely picked up some good tips and need to develop a better plan for myself.  I left his session early because I was presenting the next hour.

My session, Why I Use Stored Procedures, went very well, and was very well attended.  In fact it was my largest crowd for this particular topic with between 30 and 40 in attendance.  I don’t have a lot of slides for this session, but spend time telling stories about why I like stored procedures of ORM tools.  I do some very simple demos of Linq to SQL and Entity Framework, showing the queries they produce using SQL Server Profiler.  I demo both .NET 3.5 and 4.0 as they do behave differently with 4.0 being a big improvement.  I don’t claim to be an ORM expert, but in the experience I do have I have seen things that cause some concern as they proliferate.  There were several good questions and comments throughout the session and I had a few people hang around and ask some further questions after the session.  I was very pleased with how everything went and had a great time delivering the session.

There was a great catered lunch and I left pretty much after lunch as I had been gone from my family since Thursday and I was ready to see them.

Overall is was a great event.  The pre-con was great, speaker party was good, SpeedPass was a great idea, and lunch was fantastic.  There were 2 things I think could have been better:

1. Better signs in the morning as there were 2 rooms in another building and it was not clear where to go after check-in.
2. The schedule in the event guide didn’t list the speaker names, just the session name.  I like to know who is speaking as that helps me decide when there are multiple sessions I’d like to attend.

Thanks Pam and Jose for a great event.  Sorry I didn’t get this recap up sooner.

Speaking at SQLSaturday #62–Tampa

I’ll be speaking at SQLSaturday #62 – Tampa this Saturday, January 15th.  I’ll be presenting:

Why I Use Stored Procedures

With the proliferation of ORM tools like Entity Framework, nHibernate, and Linq to SQL, many projects have decided that stored procedures are not needed and slow down development. While these tools have their place and have improved greatly, stored procedures still have their place, and, in this speaker's opinion, are the best way to do data access. In this session I'll discuss my reasons for using stored procedures and hopefully stimulate some discussion of other access methods.

Session Level: Intermediate

Every SQLSaturday is a great time and great opportunity to upgrade your skills and network!  Pam Shaw and crew have done a few of these so they know what they are  doing.

I’ll also be attending Denny Cherry’s (Blog|Twitter) Day of Data seminar on Storage and Virtualization for the DBA on Friday, January 14, 2011.  You can still register and get by 2 get one free deal.

Hope to see you this weekend!

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando: Event Recap

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando was this past weekend (October 16th, 2010).  As one of the event organizers the entire week was a busy week.  The week started with sending out final instructions to Sponsors (I was the event lead in charge of sponsors) and finishing up the event guides.  New Tribes Mission, my employer, has some printing equipment and I was able to have the event guides printed by them, but, as part of the deal I had to provide some labor.  I folded and stapled all the event guides on Sunday (my wife helped) and Monday, so that we’d have them for bag-stuffing on Tuesday (see this post for a recap of that fun evening).

Thursday I headed over to Andy Warren’s office to drop off some totes for hauling stuff from his office to the event.  We took the time to finalize some plans for Friday & Saturday and I filled the totes I had brought with attendee bags.

Friday started off with a trip to the airport to pick up Mike Walsh who was coming to Orlando from New Hampshire to speak at the event.  Mike was staying at New Tribes with me so we headed to my place to drop off his stuff and do a tour of the organization.  Then we had lunch and headed to Andy’s to go pickup the UHAUL and load it up.  Mike was great help getting things purchased and loaded on the truck and because of his help we were able to finish early enough to be able to head home before the speaker dinner.

The speaker dinner was Liam Fitzpatrick’s and was sponsored by Confio (thanks again!).   We had a great turnout with about 40 attendees!  It’s always great to have time to get together with the speakers.  At this event I knew almost all the speakers from previous events.  I did get to meet Rafael Salas and Ed Wilson (The Scripting Guy) and his wife, Teresa for the first time.  We had an area on the outdoor patio (one of the perks of being in Florida) that allowed us to mingle freely.  The wait staff did a great job making sure that everyone got the right drinks and meals.  We had so many people attend that we had to have 2 tables added to our area in order for everyone to have a seat.   I’d definitely recommend this location for events as they did a great job and were easy to work with. 

Saturday morning I picked up Mike and we headed to the event, arriving just after 6:30am.  Now, I’m not a morning person, so it took some effort to get there and get going.  Andy enjoyed giving me a hard time about it, saying, “Get a picture of Jack enjoying the sunrise since he doesn’t see it very often”.  Of course this was after I snapped this picture: and said, “Need to get a picture of Andy working hard”.

After unloading we got everything setup and started check-in at 8:00am, and there was a line well before that!  While check-in was on-going I was trying to catch all the speakers to make sure that they got their speaker gift (see it on Andy’s post) and a book to giveaway in their session.  On my travels I snapped a couple of pictures of attendees getting coffee/tea and donuts/bananas.

  Then I got another picture of the sponsor area:

As you can see we had a good crowd arrive earlier, with people registering right up to lunch.

I managed to get around to the first set of sessions and take some pictures.  Here’s what most of the rooms looked like:

The morning went smoothly and lunch was delivered on time.  We tried something new for lunch this year.  We had round stickers that we put on the name badges, red for regular lunch & yellow for vegetarian, it seemed to work well.   Scott Gleason came over from Jacksonville and helped out with lunch.  He did a GREAT job letting people know that he needed to see their badges to verify that they had to have a sticker to get lunch and that he had to see a yellow sticker for a vegetarian lunch.  Lunch went smoothly and people always seem to enjoy eating picnic style out on the lawn.  We have been fortunate to have beautiful weather every year so people WANT to be outside. 

I did present one session, Profiling: It’s Okay in SQL Server, at 1:30pm to about 15 people.  I honestly don’t think it was my best presentation because my focus was on keeping the event going, not on my presentation.  Apparently I did alright though as my evaluations were all met/exceeded expectations and 4’s and 5’s for overall quality.  There were some good comments and questions during the session, and I had fun with the group.

There were 2 more sessions after mine, and I spent that time starting the clean up process and organizing for the end of day raffle.  By the time 4:30 had rolled around I was getting bit punchy from being tired and started tossing out the ninja balls provided by Telerik.  As more people came out of sessions I was tossing the ninja balls at people to check “ninja” reflexes.  If you caught the ball you got to keep it, if it hit the ground it had to be returned to me.  This got me going again and the attendees seemed to enjoy it.

As has become our custom, Andy got to throw things off the walkway to the attendees below.  Thanks to our great sponsors, we had lots of things to giveaway.  We started with t-shirts from CA Technologies, Telerik, and Quest and worked our way up to our big-ticket items (gift card, iPod Shuffle, iPad, software from Telerik, CA, RedGate).  I was actually concerned going in that we wouldn’t have enough stuff, but we had enough so that most attendees had something to take home with them.

We had the after-party at Liam Fitzpatrick’s out on the patio.  We had a good turnout of about 40.  The event provided appetizers and the attendees were responsible for meals and drinks.  I spent time chatting with with Brad Ball, Noel & Tamara McKinney and others.  I was planning on an early night, but once I started talking to people I was having such a good time that the next thing I knew it was after 10pm.  I finally headed out about 10:30.  I had a great time.

This turned out to be a great event thanks to the volunteers, speakers, and sponsors.  We had 75 event evaluations passed in with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5.  Here’s a semi-random sampling of attendee comments:

"Awesome book giveaways
Prize in each session
V101 Freezing
Add speaker contact information to web site (email, blog, linkedin)"

"Event is awesome.  I also love similar events with keynote speakers, I know time is limited.
A break between MINI's and the next session would be good.
Thanks for all the hard work"

"Bottom of screen was hard to see in many rooms
Have extra chairs in rooms
Great topics
great lunch for good price
very helpful staff
easy location to get to
have beginner topics early and advanced later"

Finally, I’d like to congratulate Plamen Ratchev for being voted the best speaker of the event!  Here’s a list of the top 5 speakers:

Votes	Speaker
11	Plamen Ratchev
6	Jeff Garbus
5	Jared Neilsen
4	Ed Wilson
4	Kevin Boles
4	Mike Antonovich

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando Update

This is the big week for SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando.  Sunday and Monday I spent time finishing the event guides.  I had them printed at my office (we have a printing department), but I had to provide labor for folding and stapling.  So I spent about 3 hours finishing the event guides.  I think they came out pretty nice with a color cover and black & white insides.  We had some last minute schedule changes that I thought I had included in the event guide, but, alas, when I was folding them I noticed I had missed changes in the PowerShell track.  Otherwise, everything looks good.

Last night, Tuesday, we had the bag stuffing party at Andy Warren’s office.  We had 5 volunteers brave the traffic  (major accident on I4 east just at the exit for Andy’s office) to help us out for the evening, Brooke and her husband Joe, Mike A, Josh, and Wes.  They did great work and we were done by about 8:30, so it only took about 2.5 hours to get the event bags decorated, speaker evaluations sorted, name tags put in the holders, and the bags stuffed.  For our event bags we decided to go on the cheap with plain, brown paper bags with handles.  We gave sponsors an option to send us stickers to put on the bags, but didn’t have any success on getting any provided.  We may try this again next year, but get the message out sooner.  So, instead of stickers, we provided some paint/markers and volunteers put a big #49 on one side and the paid Platinum sponsor name or names on the other side.  Brooke got especially creative and even did some bags crossword style.

While the volunteers were taking care of the event bags, I went through and organized the SWAG.  I was a bit nervous that we wouldn’t have much to give away, but the sponsors really did a great job providing us with some great give-aways.  I sorted through all the books (60+) and set aside a book to give away in each session, except those sessions in the sponsor track, trying to match a book with the session topic.  I couldn’t match all the topics, but we will have an item to be given out in each session.  I picked this idea up from SQLSaturday #41 – Atlanta.  What I like about this idea, is that it reduces the length of the end of day raffle and limits it to mostly “big-ticket” items.  Here’s some of the items we’ll be raffling off at the end of the day:

• $100 American Express gift card from Quest
• Apple TV from Veredus
• SQL DBA Bundle from RedGate
• Telerik Ultimate Collection from Telerik
• 2 Padfolios with a license for PrimalScript 2009 w/ upgrade to 2011 from Sapien
• 1 Padfolio with a license fro PrimalScipt 2009
• 3 copies of SSIS-DTS Package search from Gerasus Software
• iPad from FusionIO
• SQL Admin Toolset from Idera
• CA Erwin Data Model Validator from CA Technologies
• Flip Ultra HD from Confio
• Fuji 14megapixel Camera from CozyRoc 

That isn’t a full list, just some of what I’ve seen or been informed of.  Our other sponsors, like expressor will all have a nice item to raffle off as well.  There are also a bunch of t-shirts and other items that we’ll be tossing off the walkway.  Anyone have a t-shirt cannon or sling-shot we can borrow?

Things are going very smoothly so far, although we can ALWAYS use more volunteers. 

Hope to you there.  If you haven’t registered you can still register here.  There is also still room to register for the $99 Database Design Seminar on Friday by Louis Davidson.

Closing Fast – SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando

Well, the event is closing in fast, less than 2 weeks away!  We have over 300 registered, a great schedule, and great sponsors.  SWAG is coming in from all directions as well.  I have to admit I was a bit worried about giveaways, but books, magazines, and posters have been coming in almost daily.

I sent the event guide (here’s the pdf version) to the printing department at my office today.  I can get the guides printed inexpensively by the printing department at work, as long as I am willing to provide some labor for the folding, stapling, and trimming. 

If you can’t tell, I’m very excited about the event.  I LOVE SQLSaturday and when I only have to drive 10 minutes to get there, it’s even better!  It’s also exciting because my good friend, Mike Walsh, is flying in on Friday from cold New Hampshire to speak at the event.  The last time I saw Mike was in June when I was in New Hampshire and spoke at his user group (Seacoast SQL Server).  There are several other great people traveling in to speak at and attend the event like, Louis Davidson, Patrick Leblanc, Tom LaRock, Kathi Kellenberger, Noel McKinney (just to attend), and Aaron Nelson.  I can’t even name them all!  Then all the regulars from Florida who I get to see fairly regularly at different user groups and SQLSaturday’s in Florida like Pam Shaw, Scott Gleason, Jorge Segarra, Scott Klein, and Max Trinidad.  Oh, and I almost forgot, we’ve the Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson (@ScriptingGuys), as well.

We (Andy Warren and I) are trying to put the finishing touches on the event this week, so next week we can sit back and enjoy the ride.  Tuesday night (October 12th), we’ll be having the event bag stuffing party at Andy’s office (let us know if you want to come and help) and then Thursday and Friday we’ll be buying snacks and drinks and getting everything loaded up.  This year we’ll remember the coffee maker so we won’t run out of coffee.

I really hope to see you there.  I’ll be presenting one session in the afternoon on Profiler with the rest of the day spent making sure that the event runs smoothly.  I’ll be exhausted when the day is over, but I know it will be a good feeling because of what will have been accomplished.

Don’t forget the Database Design Seminar with Louis Davidson on Friday, October 15th.  It’s only $99 and includes an electronic copy of Louis’s book.  You can sign up on the SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando home page.

SQLSaturday #52 – Colorado Recap

I had the good fortune of being able to travel to Denver for SQLSaturday #52 the weekend of September 25, 2010.  I was able to go because my wife, Alice, had connected with Steve Jones’ wife, Tia, because of their mutual interest in horses.  So Alice was able to head out to the Jones’ ranch on Saturday to spend some time with Tia and the horses.  This worked out well as this trip was close enough to Alice’s birthday to double as a birthday present.

We flew out to Denver on Friday afternoon and had a good flight.  Our hotel was only about 1/2 mile from the speaker dinner at Great Northern Tavern, so after settling in at the hotel we walked to the dinner.  We had a GREAT time at the dinner.  I was able to reconnect with many people I already knew: Steve, Tim Mitchell, Jen McCown & daughter, Dean Richards, Nadine (from Confio), and Jason Strate.  There were also many new people to meet as well like: Meredith Ryan-Smith, Marc Beacom, another Steve, Rob, Jeff, Tom, Todd, Jason, Brandon, Michelle (from SQL Mag), Paul, Patrice, and Kate.  I’m sure I’m leaving someone out, but I feel pretty good that I remembered that many names, which is 19 out of about 25 attendees.

On Saturday Alice and I headed to the event at about 7:15am since the first session was at 8am.  The event was at the Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church, which was a beautiful facility, and worked out well.  The gym was used as the lunch room and there were 4 session rooms in the main church building and 2 session rooms in the same building as the gym.  Registration was going smoothly when I arrived, and, since I was presenting in the first session, I headed to my session room.  The only problem I saw with the setup was that there were not enough signs, a common issue, especially when hosting your first event.  They could have used a large sign by the church entrance, more signs directing people to the correct rooms (they get some slack here, as there were last minute room changes), and signs on each room door with the sessions schedule for that room.

My first session was at 8am, not the best time for me, and was my presentation, Why I Use Stored Procedures, which covers why I prefer using stored procedures for data access over other methods, specifically the Microsoft ORM tools, Linq to SQL and Entity Framework.  I had between 15-20 people in the session and had some good discussion.  The interesting thing about this session was that most of the attendees had no experience with ORM tools.  I’ve given this presentation a few times and this is the first time that there has been a majority of attendees without some exposure to ORM tools.  I had made the mistake of reworking my demos on Thursday night and, as expected, one did not work.  I demonstrate the use of Linq to SQL and Entity Framework in .NET 4 and 3.5, and by changing my demos I had broken my Entity Framework demo when using .NET 3.5.  Other than that the session went very well.  I consider any session where I get questions and stimulate some discussion to be a success and there were plenty of questions and discussion with this group.

My second session was from 10:30-11:30, just before lunch, and was my Introduction to Triggers session and was the 3rd time I’ve done this session.  This session was a little different because the hookup for the projector was towards the back and side of the room so I had to present from the side of the attendees when I was doing demos.  This session is mostly demos so it was a bit awkward, but worked.  Again, there were a lot of good comments and questions which made the time go quickly.  I really like doing this session as it gives people something to think about and take back to work to use, whether it is using DDL triggers or improving DML trigger code.

Lunch was nice sack lunch with a sandwich, chips, pasta salad, and piece of fruit.  They did 2 different things at lunch.  The first was to have Steve Jones give a short talk, like a keynote, and the second was raffling off some of the swag during lunch.  I really liked having a raffle at lunch as it gives everyone a chance to win something, even if they don’t stay for the whole event.

In the afternoon I attended 3 sessions: Glenn Berry’s session on Azure, Jen McCown’s T-SQL Code Sins, and Tim Mitchell’s session on Programming the SSIS API.  All three sessions were well-attended and informative.

The day ended with a raffle, and once again I didn’t win the iPad that FusionIO was giving away.  This went smoothly and when it was finished there was a good crew who helped clean up and put away chairs and tables so the church would be ready for Sunday services.

Because my wife had our rental car out at the ranch I hitched a ride to the after party with Lynn Pettis, a good friend from SQLServerCentral, who I met in person for the first time at the event.  The after party was at the Baker Street Pub, where we had a small section just for SQLSaturday attendees.  There was a great turnout of between 50-60 attendees out of about 160 total event attendees.  They had a nice little bingo card that attendees could fill out by talking to other attendees and you could win a gift card.  I managed to get the first bingo and win a $20 Micro Center gift card which I used to get a small PowerShell book and an older DNN book, so I can do a better job on the OPASS web site.

Sunday we went up to Boulder on the recommendation of Paul Paiva and rented bikes to ride around town.   We spent the afternoon biking on the Boulder Creek Path.  We got to see some beautiful mountain scenery, some of deer, and a bunch of prairie dogs (neither Alice or I had seen these anywhere before).

  

It was a great trip.  Actually the best SQLSaturday I’ve attended so far.  I think it was for 2 reasons: Alice traveled with me and the people at the event, speakers, organizers, and attendees, were very friendly and made me feel very comfortable.

Great job by Marc, Chris, Patrice, and crew!  I hope we do as well with SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando.

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando is Closing In

We are less than an month from SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando at Seminole State College – Sanford/Lake Mary campus on October 16th.  Our preparations are going well, we have a good sponsor base, a great schedule, and several volunteers.  We can always use more sponsors (plan|sign up) and volunteers.  Our registrations are bit lower than we’d like at this point, but we normally see a spike in the last few weeks.  If you have registered please invite your friends and co-workers, our best advertisement is satisfied customer base, and if you have not registered, what are you waiting for (register).  If you need a reason to sign up check out Arie Jones’ take:

Why #SQLSaturday Matters

and for any Oracle folks, here’s a post for you:

SQLSaturday for an Oracle Guy

I’ve been trying to woo some more sponsors.  I’m a bit disappointed we don’t have more local companies as sponsors.  I love to have the software companies as sponsors as they bring some great value and expertise to the event, but I also think that the local companies would benefit and add value as well.  At our most recent OPASS meeting, we had several people who are looking for work, but only one recruiter in attendance that we could connect these people with.  We only have one recruiting company signed up as a SQLSaturday sponsor, yet I’d have to imagine that there will be many people looking for work out of the 250 that we anticipate attending.  I know if I’m looking, the first companies I’d contact are the ones I’ve seen at events.

I’ve also spent time on the event guide.  Graphic design and layout are not strengths, but I think I have something acceptable.  It’s hard as I try to keep the length down so that we don’t have a huge expense for the event guide.

We are trying a some new things this year.  First we have a new sponsorship type for personal bloggers.  For $5 you can be a SQL Blogger sponsor and have your logo on the site and in the event guide.  See Andy Warren’s post for details.  We currently have 7 bloggers signed up.

Next we have a volunteer, Bob Blaydes, who has a popcorn machine, so we will be having fresh popcorn in the afternoon.  In relation to this we have offered our currently signed up sponsors the opportunity to become the official popcorn sponsor by bidding on the sponsorship (min. bid $100).  If you are signed up as a sponsor send your bid to sqlsaturday49@sqlsaturday.com by September 30th.

We also are asking each speaker to take the first 2 minutes of their session to ask the attendees to introduce themselves to the people next to them.  We want to encourage people to get to know each other and do some networking.

Overall the event is looking pretty good.  If you haven’t registered yet, register now!

Space Coast User Group Recap

I had the pleasure of making my second annual September visit to the Space Coast SQL Server User Group in Melbourne, FL, last Thursday, September 9, 2010, to present, Introduction to Triggers.  This is small user group, but they are a lot of fun and ask good questions.  Because of the small size it is a very informal group so I took some time to talk about SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando, the pre-con on Database Design with Louis Davidson, and SQLRally before getting on with my presentation. 

The presentation went well and they caught me on one of my demos.  The demo in question demonstrates a common mistake I see in triggers and mention before doing the demos.  So, when I get to it I ask, “Can anyone see the problem with this trigger?”, and in this  case someone noticed I had left out the code, “SET NOCOUNT ON;”, at the start of the trigger body.  This was right after I had mentioned that you should always include this statement, unfortunately, this was not the problem I was trying to point out.  And, no, I’m not going to tell you what the answer I was looking for was.  If you want to get that, you’ll need to come see me present at SQLSaturday #52 – Colorado on September 25th.  Other than that, all the demos went well and the attendees learned a few new things.

Afterwards we went out to socialize at the restaurant at the local Holiday Inn where we talked SQLSaturday, football, and paper mills.  Why paper mills?  Well, it turns out that one attendee worked for the paper company that used own the mill I used to work at, and we had mutual friends in the company, and another attendee used to work for the company that wrote the truck scale software that we used at the paper mill I worked at.  It’s amazing how small the world is!

I’m tentatively scheduled to return next September, as we might as well make this an annual event!  Topic to be announced.

Upcoming Engagements

I haven’t been speaking a lot lately as I’ve been busy working, planning SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando, and planning PASS SQLRally, but I do have some upcoming engagements that I hope to see some of you at.

Introduction to Triggers on Thursday, September 9th 6:30pm, Space Coast SQL Users Group.

This session will give a brief overview of the different types of triggers available in SQL Server (DDL & DML) and then go into more detail on how and when to use DML triggers. This session will cover misconceptions about how triggers work, when triggers shoul d and shouldn't be used (we will discuss options), common mistakes, and how to fix the most common mistakes. After attending this session a person will: 1. Identify different types of triggers and when to use them. 2. Be able to identify when a trigger is the right solution 3. Be able to write triggers that perform well

SQLSaturday #52 – Colorado on Saturday September 25th

I’m scheduled for 2 sessions at this event.  I’m attending this event for 2 reasons:

1. My wife has connected with Steve Jones’ wife, Tia, online and they both love horses.  Tia has horses, so my wife, Alice, will be spending the Saturday at the ranch with Tia and the horses.
2. An opportunity to go to a part of the country I haven’t been to and to connect with some new people.  There are several people I know from SQLServerCentral and Twitter that I have not meet in person yet, and this will be a great opportunity to do that.

Why I Use Stored Procedures

With the proliferation of ORM tools like Entity Framework, nHibernate, and Linq to SQL, many projects have decided that stored procedures are not needed and slow down development. While these tools have their place and have improved greatly, stored procedures still have their place, and, in this speaker's opinion, are the best way to do data access. In this session I'll discuss my reasons for using stored procedures and hopefully stimulate some discussion of other access methods.

Introduction to Triggers

This session will give a brief overview of the different types of triggers available in SQL Server (DDL & DML) and then go into more detail on how and when to use DML triggers. This session will cover misconceptions about how triggers work, when triggers shoul d and shouldn't be used (we will discuss options), common mistakes, and how to fix the most common mistakes. After attending this session a person will: 1. Identify different types of triggers and when to use them. 2. Be able to identify when a trigger is the right solution 3. Be able to write triggers that perform well

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando on Saturday, October 16th

In addition to planning and and running this event I’ll be presenting one session.

Profiling: It's Okay in SQL Server

Learn how to use SQL Server Profiler/Trace to troubleshoot SQL Server performance and errors. This session will cover how to use Profiler to capture SQL Server events, creating server-side traces, creating custom templates, saving trace data, and interpreting trace data.

I hope to see you at one of these events.  Please come up and talk to me, share your business card, and ask questions.  My favorite part of these events is meeting new people and re-connecting with people I haven’t seen recently.

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando Update

Planning is going forward for SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando and the event is coming together well.  My main task is sponsors and I have to admit this is not an easy task.  I’m still trying to figure out what is the right frequency of contact.  I don’t want to contact too often and become an annoyance, but I want to contact potential sponsors enough to keep the event on their mind.  We do have several sponsors signed up, but as most of you know, we can always use more to make the event bigger and better.

The schedule is up and is another GREAT schedule.  I believe we have 10 MVP’s on the schedule and several speakers who will be speaking at the 2010 PASS SUMMIT schedule including some who have received spotlight sessions.

We’ve cracked 100 registrations but in order to get to our goal of 300 attendees we need 400+ registrations.  This means it is time to start the marketing push.  I’m going to try a few new things this year, like getting on newspaper event calendars, but I’m not sure what the right method is.  I’m open to suggestions.

Our August OPASS meeting is next week and we’ll spend some time talking about SQLSaturday, get input from the attendees, and solicit help getting the word out.

SQLSaturday #40 – South Florida Recap

I had the great privilege to be able to attend and speak at SQLSaturday #40 – South Florida this past weekend (July 31, 2010).  Kudos to Scott Klein and crew for another GREAT SQLSaturday event.  They had close to 600 people register, and based on past experience that means that there should have been 400+ attendees.  There was a great lineup of speakers and everyone I spoke with at the event had a great time.

The speaker dinner was at Longhorn Steakhouse and there was a great turnout as almost all the speakers made it to the party.  I spent most of my time talking with Tim Ford, Adam Jorgensen, Troy Gallant, and Don Gabor, as they were the folks sitting closest to me.  It was a little tough to move around, but overall a good experience.  My one comment to future SQLSaturday planners is to try to get a private room, if you can afford it.  It can be tough on the wait staff, attendees, and other customers if you aren’t in a private area.

I arrived at the event just after 8 am and check-in was running very smoothly, in fact one of the smoother check-ins I’ve been through.  The only problem was that I didn’t know where to go after check-in, no one told me and there were no signs.  They had Brent Ozar and Tim Ford do a keynote to start the day, which I missed, but heard it was good.  The space for the keynote was a little tight, and apparently the AC wasn’t scheduled to kick on until 9.  In South Florida in July, AC is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

I spent the first session in the sponsor area, talking with sponsors.  Sure, I had a ulterior motive, I want them all to sponsor SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando, but it is still good to thank them for their support and learn about their products/services.  I did have an interesting discussion with one sponsor who told me that they only go to events where they can get the electronic attendee list, something we normally don’t offer in Orlando.  I understand where the sponsor is coming from because in addition to the sponsorship cost they also pay to have people attend the event.  With privacy laws being what they are, it can be hard for events to share that information, and, as part of the registration process now, attendees MUST opt-in to allow direct contact from the sponsors.  I haven’t seen the numbers on how many attendees opt-in (I’d guess very few), so I’d hate to offer the list to a sponsor and only have 10 names on it.  I don’t think that would be good for the sponsor relationship.

The second session, I attended Brent Ozar’s Blitz: 60 Minute SQL Server Takeover session.  This was a good session, totally using code examples, no PowerPoint, where Brent shares what he does when taking over administration of a SQL Server.  Some highlights for me were:

1. Checking for stored procedures marked as startup.  He even mentioned that some monitoring products (unnamed) create startup procedures and the uninstall does not remove them.
2. Checking recovery models and making sure that DB’s in FULL have log backups happening.
3. Cleaning up msdb, especially the backup history.  I’ve been burned by this one.

This was a very good session and be sure to check Brent’s website (www.brentozar.com) for the scripts.

The third session and last one I attended was by Dave Levy and was titled, Getting Out from Behind the Curtain - The New DBA.  In this session Dave covered what the perceptions are of a DBA and how to change them.  He did a great job covering areas where DBA’s can stop just being a person that “keeps the lights on”, but can demonstrate their value to the company.  A big part of the session was staying on top of the industry by continuously learning and then working on your soft skills (leadership, communication, and documentation).  Sessions like this should be required for DBA’s, especially in today’s economic climate.  If you aren’t communicating the value you provide, then why shouldn’t your work be outsourced, if it is only “keeping the lights on”?

Lunch went fairly well, with boxed lunches from Firehouse Subs.  IT seemed like lunch went pretty smoothly with seating in the Commons area (where the sponsors were setup) and outside.  I saw lots of talking going on during lunch and didn’t really notice anyone eating alone.

After lunch I relaxed and mentally prepared for my session.  Some of that preparation was just talking with other speakers and event organizers about how the day was going and experiences with sponsors.  I like to be sure I’m relaxed and I don’t really like to go over my presentation that day, I like to think I’ve prepared well enough ahead of time for the presentation to go well.  My session was in the 3:20 block, the last block of the day.  For some reason that seems to be the default for me, and I’m not sure if it is a compliment (you can keep tired attendees awake) or not.  Either way it is always fun to present no matter what slot you are in or the number of attendees in the session.  My session was titled, Don’t Be Trigger Happy: Safe Use of Triggers.  Not a great name, and after this event and being on the PASS Summit 2010 Program Committee, I’ve decided to no longer try to be creative with my names.  I’m going to stick with simple, descriptive names and try to have a really good abstract.  I had about 15 attendees in the session and I thought it went really well, especially for a first-time presentation.  I was able to cover all my material and answer all the questions in the time allotted (about 2 minutes over).  All my demos worked, excepted for the blank SQL script, but, fortunately, I could handle that one live.  I was able to cover basic DDL triggers with a couple of basic examples and the basics of DML triggers with examples as well.  I also covered the basic do’s and don’ts of DML triggers.  Things like:

1. Do be set-based.  Triggers work on sets, not individual rows.
2. Don’t rely on outside resources in a trigger, liked linked servers or xp_cmdshell.
3. Do remember that triggers are part of a transaction and an error or rollback in the trigger rolls back the entire transaction.

I also covered some other options you have in SQL Server other than triggers.  I didn’t go into detail, but just covered technologies you should look into.

I felt like the attendees were engaged in the session and had specific things that they could take back to the office and implement.

The raffle at the end of the day seemed crazy!  There was a ton of SWAG to give away and it seemed like almost everyone took something home.  In reality, I really like the way Atlanta gave away the books and smaller SWAG, by giving each presenter a few books to give away in their session to people who turned in session evaluations.  This meant that the end of the day raffle was focused on the “Big” items like the XBOX, iPod, iPad, and software licenses.  The raffle is always exciting though.

I chose to make the long drive home immediately after the event, which is always a tough decision for me to make because I love going to the After Party to continue to meet people and to get to know people I’ve already met better.  At this event I met several “new” people from Twitter, like Dave Levy (@dave_levy), Karen Lopez (@datachick), Noel McKinney (@NoelMcKinney), and others I didn’t follow on twitter, like Sam Abraham (@wildturtle21) and Elliot Lipson (@BigE54).

As I said, overall it was a great event.  Here are some thing I learned from it:

1. You can’t have too many signs.  This was one area I thought the event fell short.  I didn’t see any signs.  I had to ask where the sessions were because they were on the second floor, but there were no signs to tell me that.
2. Make sure you have the event rooms on the schedule along with the track names.  There was a schedule with track names and a map with the room numbers and track names, but the rooms being used for the event didn’t stand out.  Again, I had to ask where the rooms were.
3. Offer value to sponsors.  They were able to get some Platinum sponsors by offering a table in the sponsor area AND a table in one event room with one minute at the start of each session to introduce themselves.  This was a very creative way to offer more value to the sponsors AND get some more sponsor dollars to make the event better.

Again, kudos to Scott Klein and crew for a great event and I hope I can make it down for next year’s event as well.

SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando Pre-Conference with Louis Davidson

The planning team of SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando and OPASS are proud to announce that there will be a pre-conference seminar for only $99 featuring Database Design expert, Louis Davidson (@DrSQL), on Friday October 15th.  The seminar will run from 9am to 4pm with lunch provided.  You can register here.  Here is the abstract for the seminar:

Database design is a seemingly natural process, lending itself to everyone trying to do it themselves, from an administrative assistant with a spreadsheet to a C# programmer with a copy of SQL Server Express. Unfortunately the finer points of excellent database design are not intuitively obvious and the difference between building a spreadsheet and a solid enterprise database is similar to the difference between building a doghouse and a 2 story house, or even the Empire State Building. In order to design a database correctly, there are several things you need to understand, including some basic understanding of relational theory, gathering and applying requirements, normalization, etc. Even then, while having the knowledge of fundamentals is more than many database designers have, it only the start. In this workshop, we will go to the next level and get our hands dirty designing databases too. We will structure the day with an extended session of database design fundamentals followed by designing several databases as a class, in groups, and individually. This will be followed up with another extended session on some advanced topics about database design patterns and practices and more design time.

In the past we have just selected someone to come and do the pre-conference seminar, but this year we opened it up to anyone who could present a full-day seminar and had the OPASS membership vote on the topics submitted.  We had 7 topics submitted and each one was excellent, but Louis’ submission was the winner in a very close vote.

I know Louis and have sat in on his database design sessions at the 2009 PASS Summit and SQLSaturday #41 – Atlanta and I learned something new at each session.  Louis is a knowledgeable, funny and seasoned presenter, you won’t be bored and you’ll learn something that you can take back to the office and use.  I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to attend this seminar and then come to SQLSaturday the next day as well.

SQLSaturday #49 Planning Update

Planning for SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando is on-going and going well especially since we have a good head start.  We have our location, Seminole State College - Lake Mary Campus, our date, October 16th, and, at this writing 30+ sessions submitted, which would give use 6 tracks.

I have been tasked with sponsors, marketing, and messaging.  So far I have 2 sponsors signed up, no money yet, and have contacted many past sponsors personally and sent out our first mass email to the sponsors.  I’ve also added information to the event home page and sent out the first email to last year’s attendees.

For finding sponsors, I will continue to personally contact sponsors in addition to automated messaging from the SQLSaturday site.  The issue is trying to find the right tone and frequency.  It’s important to remember that the event is possible because of sponsors so I need to find as many as possible, and show them the value of sponsoring.

For marketing, we really rely on word of mouth and our previous attendee list.  Hopefully our previous attendees will return AND bring someone else.  We also rely on sponsors, speakers, and user groups to keep the event in front of people through blogs, Twitter, and other social media.  One of my goals this year is to try to get some media coverage in the local newspapers.  I’d like to see us at least get on the event calendars, but I also think there’s the possibility of an article in a technology or business section.  In Orlando we have bit of an advantage here by having the “godfather” of SQLSaturday, Andy Warren (@sqlandy) as one of the organizers.

What else should I be doing?  If you’ve had to find sponsors, how do you do it?  I welcome any and all comments.

SQLSaturday #41 - Atlanta Session Recap

Last Saturday, April 24, I presented my session, Why I Use Stored Procedures and You Should Too, at SQLSaturday #41-Atlanta, see my event summary here.  My session was in the last block of the day, which at this event was at 4:45PM, so it was a long day for attendees, thus I was very happy to have 20 attendees in my session.  At the end of the day, especiallyafter attending 6 other sessions, it can be hard to hang around for that extra hour, so I appreciate everyone who toughed it out.

I started out by encouraging the attendees to become involved in their local user group, about 50% said that they had attended a user group at least 4 times in the last year, and in PASS. 

In this session I give the reasons I believe that stored procedures are the best way to access data in SQL Server and I encourage discussion of other access methods (Linq to SQL, Entity Framework, nHibernate, etc...).  I have 3 main points that I cover:

1. Security
2. Maintenance
3. Performance

I finish the session, as time allows, by demonstrating different methods of data access in a .NET application.  I show the difference between Linq to SQL, Entity Framework, and the various ADO.NET methods (string concatenation, SQL Command using parameters, and Stored Procedure calls).  I also run Profiler to show the SQL generated by the tools, and the impact on the procedure cache.  Prior to .NET 4.0 both Linq to SQL and Entity Framework could cause cache bloat/pollution when using string parameters, but this has been improved in .NET 4.0.

I had some good interaction, but, as you would expect at a SQL Server event, it was hard to find a proponent of ORM tools so I had a friendly crowd.  Prior to my session I had a good discussion with Chris Eargle (@KodeFuGuru) who does a presentation on RESTful Data that uses an ORM layer for data access.  He was in a tough spot in the speaker room with multiple DBA's present, but was a good discussion.  I need more of that.

Based on the speaker/session evaluation I did a good job in communicating what the session was and covered the material as expected.  Here are the numbers (I had 2 blank evals):

Expectations:

• Did Not Meet - 0
• Met - 10
• Exceeded - 8

Overall quality of presentation (1-5 with 5 being the best):

• 1 - 0
• 2 - 0
• 3 - 1
• 4 - 8
• 5 - 9

There were no comments on the evals, but I'd like to know why I someone rated the presentation at 3, but overall I have to be pleased that I graded out above average, well based on these numbers.

I always enjoy attending these events and presenting just adds to the enjoyment.  Thanks again to Stuart (@StuartA) and  crew for putting on a great event.

SQLSaturday #41 – Atlanta Recap

I had the opportunity to go present at SQLSaturday #41-Atlanta this past weekend (April 24, 2010) and I had a great time. Stuart Ainsworth (@stuarta) and crew did a great job putting together the event and as a presenter/attendee I would say that everything ran very smoothly.

 

Getting to Atlanta/Alpharetta

 

I flew up to Atlanta on Friday afternoon and met Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA) at the Enterprise Rental Car counter and we drove from the airport to the speaker party, sponsored by Confio Software, at Bahama Breeze in Alpharetta. I have to admit that I was a bit worried about how long it would take to get from the airport to Alpharetta since we had to go through Atlanta to get there, but we had no problems and got to Bahama Breeze at about 6:30 and the party officially started at 7:00.

 

Friday Night Speaker Party & Extended Event

 

We thought we were early so we waited outside, but it turned out Stuart and some others were already out on the deck on the other side of the building. There was a good turnout at the party and nice to re-connect with people I already knew and to meet some new people (I’d list them, but in most cases I only have first names).

 

After the speaker party Kendal and I headed out and spent some time with Peter Shire (@Peter_Shire) and Steve Wright from SQL Sentry, another of the event sponsors. I had met both Peter and Steve at the 2009 PASS Summit so it was nice to get to know them a little bit better. Then we headed to Aaron Nelson’s (@SQLVariant) house to crash for the night. Thanks for opening your home to me; it was nice to be able to save a few dollars by not having to pay for a hotel.

 

The Event

 

Saturday morning we headed to the Microsoft campus where the event was held and arrived about 7:45. If this is what Microsoft’s satellite campus is like I really need to get to Redmond to see the main campus. Once you got to the campus Stuart and crew did a good job with signs directing you to the correct parking area and Microsoft did a great job of blocking the roads you were not supposed to head down. Registration was setup in the lobby on the first floor and seemed to be going smoothly, I didn’t spend much time here, so if there were any issues I didn’t see them. The first “problem” I saw was that the event was being held on the third floor and Kendal and I were not told this at check-in, although to be fair, we did bypass the main check-in line because Kendal had a session in the first block. Kendal had attended last year’s Atlanta event so knew we needed to go to the third floor, but either signs near/in the elevators or a person in the area directing people to the third floor would have been nice. Also signs or a person directing you were to go once you got off the elevator would have been good as well.

 

Once we got to the third floor we were directed to the speaker room which was right next to the sponsor area. The sponsor area was a little small, but everyone had to pass it to get to the sessions and, it appeared that the sponsors got a lot of activity. In fact, of the six events I have attended, this seemed to have the most active sponsor area. I spent quite a bit of time in the sponsor area, not so much to hear about the products, although I did that, but to meet the sponsors and begin advertising for SQLSaturday #49 – Orlando and OPASS. The sponsors are the ones who make it possible to offer these events for free with only a small lunch fee.

 

One thing that was different at this event was that they had books to raffle at the end of each session. Now this has been done before, but the way they did it was different. Each session attendee was given a speaker/session evaluation form and a raffle ticket and at the end of the session they put their raffle ticket number on the evaluation and the speaker drew the winner(s) from an envelope with the evaluations. The nice thing was that the speakers then kept the evaluations instead of turning them back in to the event staff. This is good for three reasons:

1. Every attendee turns in an evaluation, although I did get two without any evaluation information. 
2. The speaker gets immediate feedback.
3. The organizers don’t have to compile the evaluations and send them out to the speakers.

There is one drawback and that is that the organizers don’t have data on the speakers for next year.

 

The second thing that they did differently was have a proctor in each room who was responsible for handing out the evaluation forms and raffle tickets, keeping the speaker on time, and making sure that the rooms were not over capacity.

 

The last thing I noticed that was different was that some of the volunteers/organizers brought their teenage children to serve as gophers. This was a great opportunity for the kids to do some community service and this meant that the adult volunteers were free to act as proctors and deal with any issues that arose.

 

The day ended with the large item raffle. The big items were a couple of $100 American Express gift cards, a signed iPod Shuffle, and SQL Sentry’s suite. The raffle was organized and went quickly. Any sponsors who were present got a minute to say something about their company and drew the winner of their prize.

 

Overall it was another great event. I went to try to make some new contacts, which I did, and also to work on developing relationships with the sponsors and I was able to do that pretty well also. So for me the event was definitely a success and worth taking the time and spending the money to go.

 

Thanks to Stuart and team for allowing me to come and speak. I hope I can do it again next year.

 

I’ll be discussing how my session went in my next post.

OPASS is pleased to announce - SQLSaturday #49 - Orlando October 16th. Get it on your calendar now.

SQLSaturday #49 - Orlando is now live on the SQLSaturday web site.  It will be held on October 16th at Seminole State College, Lake Mary Campus.  This is #4 for Orlando and the #3 held at the Seminole State College, Lake Mary Campus.  We've had about 250 attendees at each event and this year we are really hoping to crack 300.  We know we have enough SQL Server users around to make that number and we're getting a head start on the event this year so hopefully we'll make it. 

We are still going to have the $10 lunch fee, so we know that is covered and can hopefully do more with sponsor dollars.

We are going to try some new things to try to grow the event, some of which are in this blog post, but here are a couple I didn't mention:

1. A dedicated sponsor track.  We think that this will add value for the sponsor by letting them demonstrate their product and for the attendee it's an opportunity to see some of the third-party tools in action.  I know this is something I've been interested in for awhile.  Why should I choose one monitoring tool over another, or how can I get the most out of the tool I already have.
2. A Deep Dive block after lunch.  Instead of all 1 hour sessions we are planning to have one block of 2 hour Deep Dive sessions after lunch.

Feel free to contact me via twitter (@unclebiguns) or the blog if you have any ideas to help make the event better.

Presenting at SQLSaturday #41 – Atlanta

I have the privilege of being able to attend and present at SQLSaturday #41 – Atlanta this weekend.  This will be my first SQLSaturday outside of Florida and the first time I will have presented outside of Florida.  I’m looking forward to seeing many “old” friends and making even more new ones.  My presentation is:

Why I Use Stored Procedures and You Should Too!

With the proliferation of ORM Tools like Linq To SQL, NHibernate, there has been a move to no longer use stored procedures for Data Access, I personally disagree. This will be a professional and polite open discussion starting with why I believe stored procedures are the best way to access data in SQL Server. Alternate view points welcome.

With the recent release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 there have been changes in the Microsoft ORM tools that alleviate some of the issues I have with ORM tools, but I don’t think all the issues I see have been addressed.  It’s interesting that at my office we just brought in a consulting company to work on a project with us and they are proponents of Linq to SQL, so I get to try my arguments with them and hear the other side of the argument. 

I’ll be flying into Atlanta Friday afternoon and should be at the speaker party of Friday night, but will miss the after-party on Saturday to be able to catch my flight back to Orlando. 

If you are attending please be sure to find me on Saturday.  I’ll have my contact cards, I hope you will, too!

If you have registered, but will not be able to attend please cancel your registration so someone on the waiting list can attend.  Thanks!