Blog Posts

GroupBy Conference is Now Accepting Session Submissions

November 22, 2016

Last month I announced my next crazy idea, a free online conference, and then I asked for your help picking the logo. Now it’s time to take the wrapping off. The first GroupBy Conference is now open for session submissions! November 20-Dec 15 – Open call for abstracts, and readers can vote on which sessions they like. December 16 – Voting closes, winners are announced, and registration starts. (No big mystery here, since your votes choose the winning sessions.) January 13 – The first online event. We’ll be recording the sessions live, then uploading them to YouTube afterward for permanent archival.…

Read

Survey Says: My #SQLsummit 2016 Session Ratings & Comments

November 15, 2016

conference, pass, presenting

After conference attendee feedback comes in, I like to blog about it to talk about what worked and what didn’t. This year, I think things worked fantastically overall. Intro to Internals: How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine Abstract: When you pass in a query, how does SQL Server build the results? Time to role play: Brent will be an end user sending in queries, and you will play the part of the SQL Server engine. Using simple spreadsheets as your tables, you will learn how SQL Server builds execution plans, uses indexes, performs joins, and considers statistics. This…

Read

Thoughts on Giving Away How to Think Like the Engine

November 15, 2016

business, community, open source, presenting

This year at the PASS Summit, I submitted one of my favorite abstracts, How to Think Like the Engine. It’s an introduction to SQL Server internals. I was really excited when the session was accepted – I love this presentation, and I figured the attendees would love it too. When the Summit schedule came out, I saw that I was in the largest room. That’s super-flattering, a champagne moment, because I wasn’t really expecting that. That room comes with a perk, too: a camera man doing a live broadcast on the web. It’s exciting to be going out live online, free…

Read

The Three Parts of Every Presentation (#tsqltuesday #sqlnewspeakers)

November 8, 2016

presenting, tsqltuesday

No Comments

T-SQL Tuesday: Growing New Speakers Every presentation has three parts: The topic you want to cover The material you write to cover the topic The way you deliver the material After picking your topic, that’s where writer’s block comes in. You stare at the blank presentation deck going, “How on earth should I tell this story?” Start here: ProBlogger’s 52 Types of Blog Posts. Along with the usual styles of howto, tutorial, and definitions, they include ideas like: Case studies – which could be real work you’ve done, or an imaginary company facing that issue, and how you’d propose solving…

Read

Pick the Logo for GroupBy, the Free Online Conference

November 5, 2016

groupby

The free online database conference I wrote about two weeks ago now has a name: Group By. Now, we need a logo. I ran a 99designs contest, and I’ve narrowed it down to 5 choices. Don’t worry about the font or the color – we can swap those out pretty easily. Just choose your favorite mark/logo: Design #1 Design #2 Design #3 Design #4 Design #5 Alright, you’re up: tell me which one you like, and in the comments, you can talk about why, or mention tweaks you’d like to see to the logo. (I have a couple of days…

Read

Questions & Answers From My #SQLSummit 500-Level Guide to Career Internals

November 1, 2016

career

No Comments

Last week at the PASS Summit, I presented a half-day session: The 500-Level Guide to Career Internals. I used a cool new trick to accept private/silent questions live via the web, but…due to a technical difficulty <cough>I’m an idiot</cough>, I didn’t see the questions on my iPad. So here they are, along with answers: “I’m the first DBA my company has hired. How do you respect the DBA role so that I don’t have to fight developers about data management issues?” DBAs are kinda like law enforcement: we’re here to protect and to serve. There are laws around data. Sometimes they’re actual…

Read

My Next Crazy Idea: A Free Online Conference

October 25, 2016

community, conference, groupby

I wanna build something awesome where: Speakers submit session abstracts publicly online Vendors can be speakers, too (anybody can submit a talk on anything – your own open source project, paid project, Microsoft can apply, hardware vendors, etc) Readers can leave comments on the abstracts to help the author clarify and improve them Everybody votes for the abstracts they’d like to see most Once a month, voting closes, and the top X speakers/abstracts for next month are picked (maybe 5, maybe 10, let’s play this by ear) Sessions are held online in an easy-to-watch platform, on a predictable day/time (like the first Tuesday of every month,…

Read

One Bold Change to Help SQLSaturday Scale

October 18, 2016

community, conference, presenting, sqlsaturday, vendors

Alex Yates wrote a very interesting post called 5 bold changes to support the scale problem of SQL Saturdays (and other data platform conferences.) The short story: Cut costs (and no free lunches) Attract new sponsors Attract new attendees Get more diversified attendees Attendees have a duty to talk to sponsors They’re a lot of great ideas, and I’m going to suggest one of my own. Sponsors need to deliver sponsor sessions that don’t suck. Today, sponsors buy attendee eyeball time by doing things like sponsoring sessions at lunch. SQLSaturday organizers usually set up the time slots so that no “real” sessions are given during lunch,…

Read

Book Reviews: Gear List of the Golden Moon, and The Book of Leadership

October 11, 2016

book review

Have you ever thought about rowing up the coast in an open boat for, I dunno, a month? Yeah, me neither. But on vacation, I saw this book, and I just had to open it up: “What to pack for coastal travel in an open boat with notes on anchoring, hazards, money, and other helpful things” I had to know if the author, Dick Callahan, was trolling me. He was not. He describes his journey up the coast from Seattle to Alaska in yes, an open boat. Watch the book’s trailer to see some of the book’s pictures. He gives specific…

Read

PasteThePlan.com’s September Hosting Costs: $3.43

October 4, 2016

aws, cloud, dynamodb, lambda, pastetheplan

We launched PasteThePlan.com on September 11th, and it got just shy of 5K pageviews in 3 weeks: PasteThePlan pageviews After launch, it stabilized at around 125 pageviews per weekday. (That’ll bump up this week with a new page that lets you see the 20 most recently pasted plans. I kinda find that addicting.) In Richie’s architecture explanation, he wrote that PasteThePlan runs on Amazon Web Services: The web requests are handled by AWS Lambda, aka serverless code or function-as-a-service The plans are logged in AWS DynamoDB, a managed NoSQL database So what’s it all cost to host? PasteThePlan Costs for September Yep,…

Read

Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.