The inaugural GroupBy.org online event finished recently, and I had the sublime pleasure of watching a bunch of presenters at work. Because I was staffing the Q&A, Twitter, and Slack, I also got to watch the community reactions firsthand. People love different sessions for different reasons. Let’s start with Pinal Dave….
Several years back, I had the pleasure of working with Paul Randal (blog – @PaulRandal) – first in the Microsoft Certified Master program, and then later at SQLskills with Paul & Kim. I had a phenomenal time – they’re truly wonderful people – and I want to share two of…
GroupBy.org is off to an awesome start: Dozens of speakers submitted abstracts and collaborated on ’em Hundreds of readers voted to pick their favorites The winning speakers put on a heck of a show Almost 700 of you showed up to watch live Our A/V team kicked butt and got the…
The 2017 Data Professional Salary Survey is going on now, but with over 1,300 2,400 results in already, I’ve noticed some interesting trends in the raw data. (I did this analysis on Friday, so if you redo it, you’ll see even higher response counts and possibly different results.) 2017/01/06 responses by…
For the last month, I’ve been using two different keyboards: At home, I’m using the Ergodox-EZ split ergonomic keyboard. On the road, I’m using the new MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. Both of them forced me to slow down and look at my hands for a while. The Ergodox…
All year long, I pile up blog post ideas and work through them. Somehow, the vast majority of my ideas are actually April Fool’s Day posts. I can’t possibly write all these, so I’m tossing ’em out in my end-of-year housecleaning. Enjoy. DBAsOnly.com – a dating site for database administrators. Someone…
Most of my sales work involves a productized service: the SQL Critical Care®, a package of consulting work with a defined set of steps and a finish line. But sometimes on introductory calls, prospective customers just start venting. They complain about performance, management, capacity planning, architecture, upgrades, downtime, cost, staffing, the…
When you’re independent, sooner or later, somebody’s gonna want you to work on the weekend or on a holiday. Or, they may say something like, “Is there any way we could get into your calendar earlier, or get this done faster?” Here’s how I handle that: any money I make…
About a month ago when I announced my plans to build GroupBy.org, I wrote: And I bet I can do this whole thing for free, without charging attendees or speakers. Although I’m not betting too much – I’m a huge believer in the Lean Methodology, which means you risk as…
Richie and I are at the AWS re:Invent conference because: A good number of our customers run SQL Server on Amazon Web Services We use AWS ourselves (our first project, PasteThePlan, was built on AWS because we wanted to keep costs low) Clients and friends kept telling me how awesome the conference was We’re recruiting clients (this…