SQLSaturday #68 Recap

This post has been a long time coming. It’s been two weeks since SQLSaturday #68 in Olympia, WA. A busy workload and dead laptop meant that this post is extremely late in summing up what was a new experience for me in presenting.

Om nom nom

Living (relatively) locally in WA there was no big travel for me to this event. That was nice, although the drive down to Olympia from Bellevue on a Friday afternoon is not the greatest. Luckily the sun was out and the weather warm so I wound down the windows and played bad music while sitting in what seemed like endless traffic.

The speaker dinner was, as always, a great event. It’s so great to just be able to sit down and speak to fellow professionals in an informal and relaxed environment. I was fortunate enough to sit and have my meal while listening to the conversation of Buck Woody (blog|twitter), Crys Manson (blog|twitter),  Scott Stauffer (blog|twitter) and John Halunen (twitter).

Post meal I followed my usual pre-evening presentation schedule by going over my demos to check they were all working and then watching the DBAs At Midnight web show.

When things go wrong

Saturday morning saw me arrive at the South Puget Sound Community College event location reasonably early where I ran into Mike Decuir (blog|twitter). We wandered in and headed right for the chocolate muffins before hitting registration.

As people started filtering in I hung around the speaker area chatting with folks until the first sessions started.

Rather than attend the first session of the day I sat down to bring up all of my virtual machines and get my demos in ready to go so that I could walk into the presentation room, plug in and I would be all ready to talk PowerShell profiles. I spun up my four VMs and to my horror I found that the evaluation Windows 2008 licenses had expired, all of my iSCSI targets had vanished and my cluster was dead.

Not good. Deep breath time.

Backup plans

I’m a DBA, I always have a backup. I knew I could run the presentation from my laptop, just that some of the functionality that I wanted to show would be missing. I managed to get a VM up and running so decided to work with that. I’d never had to go to that DR presentation plan before so this was a new thing for me. I was more than a little nervous to see how this would go.

Presenting: the backup plan

I walked into the presentation room hoping to get twenty or so folks in attendance. When I got there a lot of the seats were already filled and then more people started coming in. All the seats were taken and still more people came in. Now the nerves really kicked in because I didn’t want to let all these folks down. Luckily there were a couple of friendly faces in the crowd. Cameron Mergel (blog|twitter) and Hope Foley (blog|twitter) were up near the front. It really helped knowing they were there.

Things started reasonably well and then about 10 minutes in my VM shut down. At this point I was ready for just about anything to be thrown at me, so I started it up again and kept on talking. I felt myself talking a little too fast and tried to slow down a little and worked to get some questions from the audience to help the timing. The crowd was well engaged and asked some great questions. My time went by very quickly and I was very happy to see that I had as many people in the room at the end of the session as I’d had at the start.

Things done and I had several folks come up and thank me and say that they had enjoyed the presentation which was nice and very well received. The slides and demos are available for download here.

Frankly I was exhausted at this point and just want to take a nap, but went and grabbed lunch instead.

A mellow afternoon

After eating my lunch and spending a little time chatting to some folks I got what little wits I had left and went to watch Buck Woody talk Cloud computing. You can tell Buck is an educator, his sessions are so easy and free flowing and he obviously knows the material inside and out.

I moved from my chair to a more comfortable seat to enjoy Chuck Lathrope (blog|twitter) in the final session of the day talk Transactional Replication. I’ve dealt with Transactional Replication for years and I’m pretty comfortable with it however I know that Chuck always has nuggets that I can take away and work with so when he talks it’s always useful to me.

The day done there were a few raffle giveaways and folks descended upon a local Tavern for a bite to eat and something to drink.

Lessons learned

This little experience taught me a couple of things.

Firstly, never build your presentations on evaluation copies of software, it’ll come back and bite you in the rear. I’ll be purchasing an MSDN sub in the next couple of weeks to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Secondly, it can be really exhausting presenting. I’m thinking power naps for me after speaking from now on.

Thirdly, practice the DR portion of the presentation. Figure out what could go wrong and the mitigation strategy. While I knew I could get by with a lot less I had not built a second presentation around that and had to change a lot on the fly. I won’t be making that mistake again.

Presenting At SQLSaturday #68

This weekend (4/9/2011) I will be speaking at SQLSaturday #68 in Olympia, WA. My session is slotted in at 10:30am. It will be a reprise of the presentation I gave at SQLSaturday #67 in Chicago titled “PowerShell: Are you checking out my profile?”

I think the title sums it up pretty well, but in case you need more details: Powershell is a very powerful management tool and you can spend hours writing magical scripts to do all the things you want. Frequently forgotten is the Powershell profile, a place you can add your own functions which can provide you lightening fast access to information. We'll talk about the power a profile puts at your fingertips. I will also demo (and share) a bunch of short functions that I use frequently for common tasks. I'll show you my Powershell profile if you show me yours.

If you decide to attend my session don’t expect much in the way of pretty slides, extended powerpoint information and the like. This is going to be heavy on the demo side of things and interactive, so bring your questions, thoughts and ideas.

SQLSaturday #67 Recap

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at SQLSaturday #67 and boy do these folks in Chicago know how to put together an event!

Friday night lights

I flew in Friday afternoon and after dropping my bag off at the hotel I headed down to Devry to assist in the prep work for the next morning. When I arrived things were already well in hand and a group of volunteers were hard at work stuffing swag bags. Finishing that led to collating raffle tickets and name badges so that everything was ready for the attendees arrival Saturday.

If you are planning on attending a SQLSaturday event, be it local or remote, please volunteer to assist in the setup. Not only can these events not happen without someone like you being there to help get things ready, but you also get to meet some really cool community people and chat with them. It’s very rewarding and you have no excuse not to.

Once everything was prepped and ready we headed over to a local eatery where SQL Sentry (of the awesome and free Plan Explorer tool) opened up their wallet and paid for the speaker dinner. Please note, this was the first (of many) instances where I looked around the room and inside my head the following played….

TISWAS

Today Is Saturday, Wear A Smile.

As a kid one of my favorite shows was on ITV, it was a hilarious, pie throwing, dog spitting, fly dying couple of hours on a Saturday morning. I loved it. It used to provide that kind of inane grin that you just couldn’t wipe off your face, it was just so enjoyable. That pretty much sums up this event.

TISWAS–Insane and awesome

I was there nice and early, ready to help if there were any last minute things that needed doing but it was all in hand. I got there just as the bagels and donuts showed up. It was just luck it happened that way, really (oh and it was so good to have Dunkin Donuts again, we don’t get those here out in the PNW).

Attendees started to show up in droves and it started to get crowded pretty quickly so I escaped to the relative quiet of the speaker room.

There was a scary amount of knowledge in that room. Take a look at the session list and you’ll see what I mean. I think that pretty much any question anybody could have come up with as regards SQL Server could have been answered by the combined smarts in there. Did I feel out of place? Heck yeah. That is my issue though because none of the presenters in there were ever anything but awesome. You never get looked down on by these folks, they just treat you like a peer, which I think makes it all the more humbling.

Presenting

Rather than attend one of the first sessions of the day I decided to put my demos through their paces.

A week before the event I decided to change things up on my session and make the demo’s show their stuff a little better. This lead me to go out and buy a 128GB SSD drive and 8GB of RAM for my laptop and my reinstalling Windows. Then I built 4 shiny new Virtual Machines including a DC, iSCSI targets, a cluster and 3 instances of SQL Server.

I’d had some difficulties getting a mount point working in my cluster before the event but that morning I was able to get it plugged in and working (which probably doesn’t mean much when it comes to the presentation however I was glad to have the functionality show in the demo that this provided). I tested all the demos and felt pretty confident that I was as prepared as I was going to get.

My session “PowerShell: Are you checking out my profile?” was very well attended. I felt it went well with plenty of audience engagement, and the evals handed in seemed to back that up.

The presentation materials are available for download from http://www.sqlsaturday.com/viewsession.aspx?sat=67&sessionid=3183

Remains of the day

After a great lunch I found myself watching Jeremiah Peschka (blog|twitter) talking refactoring. I love his presentations, they flow so well and his slides are artistic and just a punctuation mark to what he is saying. I want to be able to present like that when I grow up.

I ended up missing the second round of afternoon sessions as I was talking clusters with Allan Hirt (blog|twitter). Yeah, I missed out on watching a great session, but it’s not often you have to chance to sit and talk face-to-face with a clustering guru, I considered that hour alone worth the weekend.

I was able to catch one last session where Christina Leo (blog|twitter) talked about SQL Internals. I’ll speak more on that a little later.

With the sessions over it was raffle time. Prizes were won and I got a $100 Amazon gift card. Quality!

The day official over things got more crazy. Food was eaten, beverages were consumed, karaoke was sung and talking was had until the wee hours of the morning. A really fun night to wind up the awesome day. I even managed to get a couple of hours sleep before heading for the airport and my flight home on Sunday.

Something to change

Christina’s session was on SQL internals. This was her first presentation and it was one on a highly difficult and complicated subject. She did a fantastic job, starting things off with a story and tying it back into the SQL internals. Unfortunately there was one highly obnoxious person in the audience who, for whatever reason, decided that he was not going to agree with anything Christina had to say. He openly challenged her and other people multiple times (and it’s not like he was correct in what he was saying).

It was incredibly disrespectful to someone who was freely giving their time to try and impart knowledge on others. On top of that it took away from the time of the other attendees. At the end of the session more than one person commiserated with Christina on the actions of that one person and told her she did a fantastic job.

If you are attending a session show respect for the person speaking. Even if you think that they are saying something wrong don’t openly challenge them. If you can’t keep yourself from berating the presenter then leave the room and speak to them afterwards in private.

SQLSaturday organizers, I would really like to see a buddy system be implemented. While there are some very experienced speakers at these events there are those that are new to speaking. I think that everyone who is a first time presenter (at the very least) should have an experienced speaker with them in the room just in case they run into this kind of situation. They might not need to interject but the knowledge that they are there and have the back of the speaker would mean a great deal. A nod of the head just to reinforce the speakers confidence at a key moment might well mean more than standing up and taking someone to task.

When someone learns to walk a tightrope they have a safety net. Let’s get one in place for new speakers, we don’t want some callous comment or malicious person to deprive the community of a great speaker.

Awesomesauce organizers

As I’ve said this whole event was awesome and I want to call out the team that put it all together:

• Aaron Lowe (blog|twitter)
• Bill Lescher (twitter)
• Bob Pusateri (blog|twitter)
• Norman Kelm (blog|twitter)
• Rich Rousseau (twitter)
• Ted Kruger (blog|twitter)
• Wendy Pastrick (blog|twitter)

And a final mention goes out to Jes Schultz Borland (blog|twitter) who showed up Friday with a great many boxes of t-shirts for the attendees.

Presenting At SQLSaturday #67

This upcoming weekend (3/26/11) I will be speaking SQLSaturday #67 in Chicago. My 10:45AM session is titled “PowerShell: Are you checking out my profile?”

I think the title sums it up pretty well, but in case you need more details: Powershell is a very powerful management tool and you can spend hours writing magical scripts to do all the things you want. Frequently forgotten is the Powershell profile, a place you can add your own functions which can provide you lightening fast access to information. We'll talk about the power a profile puts at your fingertips. I will also demo (and share) a bunch of short functions that I use frequently for common tasks. I'll show you my Powershell profile if you show me yours.

If you decide to attend my session don’t expect much in the way of pretty slides, extended powerpoint information and the like. This is going to be heavy on the demo side of things and interactive, so bring your questions, thoughts and ideas.

SQLSaturday #54 Recap

This weekend I had the good fortune to not just attend but also present at SQLSaturday #54 down in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Thursday night Nuurdygirl (blog|twitter), DorkDog and I got in the car and started the long drive down from Seattle to Salt Lake. Dorkdog is dorky
14 hours, one wrong turn and 900 miles later we arrived with plenty of time to spare before the speaker dinner which consisted of a little food and a lot of louds laughs.

I was able to get a good nights sleep and found myself up nice and early to get to the event. The cloudy skies saw the speakers and volunteers arrive where Pat Wright (blog|twitter) had coffee and bagels waiting (along with donuts for the speakers, cos we’re special).

While the crowds arrived I hung out with some of the other speakers; Denny Cherry (blog|twitter), TJay Belt (blog|twitter), Bill Pearson (twitter), Randy Knight (twitter) and Jason Brimhall (blog|twitter).

All too soon it was time for my first session “Backup & Restore Basics”. I was surprised and pleased at the size of the turn out. The group I was presenting to was very engaged and asked some great questions. Other than fat fingering a CTRL-R and some good natured joshing from Pat and Jason in the peanut gallery things went very smoothly. I did learn one important thing…when presenting make sure you have copious amounts of water on hand as the thirst kicks in big time.

My session over I decided to sit in and watch Denny Cherry at work. If you’ve never seen Denny present I’d highly recommend attending a session sometime. There’s no particular session you need attend, you’ll find yourself learning something and being massively entertained along the way (just be aware, he’s not always ever pc).

While the attendees munched on lunch pizza I did final preparation for my other session of the day “Be Safe Out There: Ship Those Logs”. There were far less people in this session and fewer questions so I was able to breeze through this very quickly and left folks with a couple of minutes break before heading into their next sessions.

The remainder of the day saw me hanging out with the other speakers, finally getting some lunch (thanks Pat) and laughing a great deal.

I’d really like to thank Jason for saving us from someone who shall just be known as SQLStalker, and acknowledge TJay for apologizing to the poor woman who found herself in SQLStalkers sights.

The end of the day found me absolutely exhausted and I was out cold asleep by 9pm. This wasn’t all bad though as I was well rested to take the long drive back home on Sunday.

All in all it was a great event, I got to meet some awesome people and felt good about my presentations.

A HUGE thanks to Pat and TJay for organizing this event. They are already looking towards putting on another SQLSaturday event in September next year. I know that I’ll be there, hopefully you can make it too.