My #PASSsummit 2018 Session Evaluation Ratings & Comments

After big conferences, I like to share my session evaluations to talk about what worked and what didn’t. Let’s see how we did this year.

Pre-Con: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos

This was an all-day session that Erik Darling and I co-presented. When Erik and I designed this session, we were both at a point in our presentation-writing style where we were madly in love with demos. All week long when working with clients, we have to spend a lot of time in slides, explaining concepts that we see out in the wild all the time. (I give my talk on parameter sniffing at least three times per month.) So we thought, “What if we do nothing but demos? What if we just show off our favorite behaviors in SSMS, and…nothing else?”

It was risky because we weren’t really taking you from point A to point B, unraveling a concept all day long and going deeper and deeper into it. We just picked some of our favorite demos of all time, wrote several new ones, and tried to put them in some kind of order that made sense.

We had 273 attendees, 72 surveys filled out:

• Rate the value of the session content. 4.74 out of 5
• How useful and relevant is the session content to your job/career? 4.71
• How well did the session’s track, audience, title, abstract, and level align with what was presented? 4.79
• Rate the speaker’s knowledge of the subject matter. 4.96
• Rate the overall presentation and delivery of the session content. 4.81
• Rate the balance of educational content versus that of sales, marketing, and promotional subject matter. 4.79

Woohoo! I’m really happy with the feedback numbers – they’re much better than last year’s ratings – and ecstatic with the sales numbers. We were up against great lineup including Bob Ward, Kimberly Tripp, and Pinal Dave, and we were the top-selling spot. That completely blew me away. (I thought managers would be more likely to send their staff to more conventional sessions that took you from point A to point B.)

Let’s see what people wrote in the comments – and I’m not going to show every comment, just representative samples:

Event logistics comment highlights: (room temperature, size, capacity, sound, etc.):

• Room size was perfect, temperature was good. Unfortunately the sound was a bit faint – could not always make out what the presenter was saying.
• I had a hard time hearing the speakers. They were loud enough but there was distortion.
• comfortable room. Audio and video were perfect
• Would be nice to have some healthy snacks around (fruit and nuts) and also some charging stations.
• Perfect event logistics for this session.
• Chilly

Overall, I’m happy – it’s hard to make 273 people happy all day in a room. PASS did great. For a feel for what that room size is like:

Content & delivery comment highlights:

• Both Brent and Erik were able to maintain the audience attention
• This was a very useful and interesting session. The material is so well documented and organized, it is very easy to step through and to work with after I leave the Summit. I appreciated the amount of material provided and the Q & A being open to the audience so we can all learn from each others situations. The day went by so quickly. It was a good mix of fun and serious subject matter that will definitely help me address concerns back at work as well as help me be a better developer and troubleshooter.
• Brent and Erik possess a wealth of knowledge on the principles and underhood mechanisms of SQL Server. The way they share the knowledge is bright and easy to understand. I wish this particular session was focused on tips and tricks a bit more, and a bit less on the internal concepts.
• Great organization, knowledge and pace. Was able to accommodate all questions and kept people engaged with a fun and interactive experience.
• I wish everyone could be as good as Brent. Not necessarily the same, just as good. Erik isn’t as wild, but both were engaging to watch. Forget about slides, everything is hands on, solving a real problem. My brain was full but alert after a whole day, and you bet I will be studying the demo scripts on my own. First rate!
• The only downside to this pre-con is that if you follow the blog, many of these scenarios were already covered. I would still recommend it for a newer DBA or one who wasn’t familiar with Brent and his team. As always, they are great presenters.
• Love the energy of the duo on stage. Their passion is shared to the public.
• Discovered Brent Ozar Unlimited a couple months ago. So glad to have a chance to learn from them in person. Learned a lot and certainly continue follow them on-line.

I’m really, really happy with these comments compared to last year’s. Last year, we tried cramming way too much stuff into a single day. This year, we took the time to dive deeper into specific demos, and at the end of the day, we allocated a lot more time for questions. It paid off – we didn’t get the comments this year saying that we were rushed.

Slack Q&A comment highlights:

• Very entertaining and educational. I enjoyed the interaction via Slack with the polls. I really learned a lot and appreciate Brent and Erik sharing the knowledge with the community.
• Loved it! Really enjoyed the content as well as the Slack channel to ask questions and interactive polling – great idea for a large room!
• Brent and Erik are always entertaining. I loved the use of Slack to take and answer questions during the session. I’m also excited about the year of ConstantCare that was included!
• Great session. Very valuable. Always love the mix of technical with humor. I like the use of the slack channel for asking questions and comments. Very interactive. I appreciate the addition of a video training code that allows me to train more once back at work.

I’m so totally sold on using Slack for interactivity in big rooms for all-day sessions. I don’t think it makes sense for 75-minute sessions because it’s too hard to get attendees into Slack and into the right room, but they’re clearly willing to make that time investment for a pre-con, and it pays off.

General Session: Getting Better Query Plans by Improving SQL’s Estimates

This was my regular 75-minute session during the conference itself. You can see an earlier version of it at GroupBy. The basic demo idea was the same, but I’d added SQL Server 2019 in as well, and tweaked a lot about the flow. I had 653 attendees, 169 surveys filled out:

• Rate the value of the session content. 4.80 out of 5
• How useful and relevant is the session content to your job/career? 4.75
• How well did the session’s track, audience, title, abstract, and level align with what was presented? 4.79
• Rate the speaker’s knowledge of the subject matter. 4.96
• Rate the overall presentation and delivery of the session content. 4.88
• Rate the balance of educational content versus that of sales, marketing, and promotional subject matter. 4.85

Well, alrighty then. With numbers that good, especially across 169 folks, I’m not sure I even wanna read the comments, but let’s do it:

Event logistics comment highlights: (room temperature, size, capacity, sound, etc.):

• Not a stable beamer, was wobbly constantly (Brent says: one of the two projectors in the room was vibrating the whole time)
• Shaky projector, otherwise all good
• Too warm. Turn up the AC.
• very cold rooms, very aggressive air-con
• WiFi connection was terrible
• Great
• Excellent
• Packed room but that is expected with someone like Brent Ozar speaking.
• Good but seating gets very tight in popular sessions – seats are too close together.

Yep, pack 653 folks in a room, and it’s gonna be tough to make the room work for everybody. I’m mostly sharing the comments here just to explain that people can be unhappy with the room and still end up leaving good scores for the presenter. It’s your job as a presenter to outshine room problems.

Content comment highlights:

• As usual, Brent was excellent. The session had a great pace and was very upbeat. The session was helpful for beginners as well as seasoned professionals.
• Speaker really knew his stuff. Was able to make it light and seem familiar and intuitive. Giving me the confidence to go and try various pieces at my own workplace. Very funny and great content.
• Excellent teacher for sure. Wish he had included some more complicated example queries though.
• Would like to see more in depth information presented. More scenarios and diving deeper…maybe more sessions to accomplish this. But always great to attend your sessions.

It’s called a pre-con. You should check it out. 😉

Question handling comments:

• Brent got stuck maybe a little too long on a couple of questions from the audience about cardinality estimator Changes without it actually leading any further in the presentation. Apart from that: Excellent delivery of excellent content.
• Great as per usual, i always try to make it to a Brent session at PASS. I think you pushed through some of it just a hair too quickly that made it harder to follow but did a great job answering all the audience questions throughout
• Pros – Very knowledgeable. Great info. Entertaining!
  Cons – I felt that he jumped around a bit too much, esp at the end. Maybe limit the Q&A part to the last 15 min, instead of 30-45 min…

The question handling is really interesting to me on this one because people so rarely ask questions in a 600+ person room. When I started getting questions, I got so excited at the opportunity, so I went down a bunch of rabbit holes. (They were really good questions!) Given the high scores on the session, I’m kinda okay with this though. I think I was still able to cover what I wanted.

Humor comments:

I’m only picking maybe 1/4 of the comments – by far and away, the vast majority of the comments were about the delivery – but here goes:

• Charismatic speaker, but maybe tone it down a bit. Some of the jokes were edging towards being offensive. The clever consultant versus big bad Microsoft schtick gets old quickly.
• Brent was hilarious as usual, and also informative. He makes learning boring topics interesting and his depth of knowledge is extraordinary.
• Great energy and content, thank you!
• Brent was excellent. Funny and engaging with tons of useful info.
• The ‘Robin Williams’ shtick gets old
• Brent is awesome as always! With great sense of humor! Making this talk lively and not boring!
• Brent has an exceptional ability in using humor to keep us engaged through technical material.
• Most fun and exciting and unboring worthy content in a short time
• Excellent presentation. Love Brent’s sense of humor. I watch him speaker for how to be a better speaker as well as the SQL knowledge.
• Excellent pace especially for a session after lunch 🙂 Brent is a very engaging speaker, I was not bored at all even if I already know a good amount of the subject.
• Loved the talk. Brent has an amazing sense of humor and the unique ability to talk some of the most dry topics on the planet and make them interesting.
• Your style define the passion for what you do, everyone should express more than you in expression level. Thanks for sharing all you knowledge.
• So far my favorite presenter of the whole summit. He was extremely knowledgeable and very witty and entertaining. And he always had insightful answers without having to gloss over area lacking knowledge. I would take all day training from Brent. I can’t say enough good about his presentation. Top rate!

The humor is what makes me a Purple Cow: I try to do something wildly different than the rest of the sessions. Like Seth Godin writes in that book, it generates raving fans – people are either gonna love you, or hate you. That’s the reaction you want – you don’t wanna be cheese pizza, where everybody is kinda “meh” and just shuffles out of your session without remembering your name or what you do.

When you build your own conference sessions, bring you: bring your personality and your excitement to it. If you can’t be excited about the topic, why bother?

Update: here are other presenters sharing their feedback:

• Allen White
• Andy Leonard
• Cathrine Wilhelmsen
• Enrico van de Laar
• James McGillivray
• Kevin Feasel
• Pinal Dave
• Steve Jones
• Steve Stedman