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Epic Life Quest Task: Setting the Summit Pre-Con Attendance Record

October 10, 2017

When Erik and I got a PASS Summit pre-con this year, I asked Alison and Leeza a question out of morbid curiosity: what was the pre-con attendance record? They reported that 7 pre-cons since 2012 have gone over 200 attendees, and the record was 269. I figured that would be really hard to beat, especially given that word on the street is that Summit attendance is down overall due to the Halloween scheduling. To make matters worse, I keep hearing “thought leaders” say that database work is dead, and the magic cloud is going to solve everything. Would there be…

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Using Slack for Conference Session Q&A

September 19, 2017

conference, pass, slack, sqlpass, training

Next month at the PASS Summit in Seattle, Erik Darling and I are teaching a one-day pre-conference class on performance tuning. We sold ~300 seats, which is awesome – but that comes with some challenges, one of which is handling Q&A. As classes get over 100 people, folks can be hesitant to raise their hands, and they rarely want to walk up to a microphone to address the entire room. I’ve tried using Twitter for this in the past, but it can be hard to get people to: “Does anyone have any questions?” Fit the question in 140 characters (less…

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Designing This Year’s PASS Summit Session

August 22, 2017

conference, pass, presenting, sqlpass

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I’m honored to say that I’ll be presenting a session at the PASS Summit this year. The Summit is kinda like the Super Bowl of American SQL Server conferences: the competition to present is intense, and that makes you wanna bring your absolute best game. I try to bring something really different every year. I try to push myself into new presenting styles, bring some kind of new trick to show off. Past stunts have included: 2017 – Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques (24HOP) – Erik and I wore fashion costumes for the online delivery emphasizing how quickly your skills…

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Comparing Conferences: AWS re:Invent, Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, PASS Summit, and SQL Intersection

March 14, 2017

conference, pass, sqlpass

I have this weird job where I get to pick which conferences I go to, so, I, uh, go to a lot of them. Here’s how a few of them stack up. Amazon Web Services re:Invent Audience: About 30,000 AWS users. Database session quantity: not a lot. (I didn’t go for the database sessions here – it’s more of a wide-ranging conference covering Lambda, EC2, S3, etc.) Presenters: AWS employees, with an occasional customer testimonial. Session material: Simply not worth the time. Every time Richie and I sat through a supposed “deep dive” or 300-400 level session, we ended by saying to each other, “We…

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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…

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A Conference Attendee’s Guide to Thinking Critically

October 20, 2015

conference, pass, sqlpass

Conference season is about to start, and it’s time to think critically. (No, that doesn’t mean yelling “BOO!” from the back row.) Critical thinking (Wikipedia) means listening to what someone is saying, then analyzing the contents and coming to your own decision about the concepts involved. “The Wonder Widgetizer will make you 50% better looking.” When you’re listening to a conference session or keynote, ask yourself: Who does the speaker work for? On whose behalf is the speaker talking? Are they stating facts or opinions? If you wanted to prove their facts, how would you go about doing it? If you…

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New #SQLPASS Virtual Chapter Webcasts

September 29, 2014

pass, sqlpass

Want to learn more about what it takes to run a PASS Virtual Chapter? Want to volunteer to get one up and running? Or maybe you want to up the game for your local user group and start doing webcasts of local speakers? @JenStirrup Jen Stirrup is running a free Wednesday webcast series to get you started. She’s the Director of PASS Virtual Chapters, and she’s on the PASS Board of Directors. Click on the titles you’d like to register for: Oct 8 (Weds) – Virtual Chapter Padawan, covering: What is the difference between an organizer, panellist and a presenter?…

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WOOHOO! PASS Fixes Password Vulnerabilities, Voting Restrictions

September 27, 2014

pass, security, sqlpass

Great news this morning – PASS turned the ship around in 24 hours. Late last night, PASS President Tom LaRock announced: Voting deadlines have been extended until October 14th If you didn’t get a ballot email, you can still vote, but you have to update your PASS profile by Oct 5th The password vulnerabilities are fixed, and in the process of being tested Go change your SQLPASS.org password right now. This kills two birds with one stone: you’ll become eligible to vote, and less eligible for hacking. If you use that same password, go change it in every other place you use…

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The Bigger #PASSVotes Problem: Your Password Was Shared.

September 26, 2014

pass, security, sqlpass

I wasn’t originally going to share this, but given how PASS is handling the things that you do know about, it’s time for you to know the even worse story. In this June’s NomCom election, when you signed in to vote, your PASS login credentials were shared with a third party. I tweeted it at first because I was so shell-shocked – this just couldn’t possibly be happening, and it had to be a misinterpretation on my part. After that initial discovery, we took the vulnerability reporting privately to PASS. Volunteer Andy Warren (@SQLAndy – SQLAndy.com) led the charge, working with…

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Here’s Why My #SQLPASS Blog Posts are So Angry

September 25, 2014

#passvotes, pass, sqlpass

Yesterday, as PASS ballots went out via email, people started asking why they weren’t getting ballots: @sqlpass There's something broken here – I never got any emails about updating my profile. I'm a PASS member, I should get to vote. — Paul Randal (@PaulRandal) September 24, 2014 https://twitter.com/GavinPayneUK/status/515035419936038912 @wendy_dance I'm not elligible? I've been volunteering, helping run the Denver group, and pulling of SQL Sats… #sqlpass #passvotes — Mike Fal (@Mike_Fal) September 24, 2014 @sqlpass this is not cool – @KimberlyLTripp doesn't have a vote either. Can you fix this please? — Paul Randal (@PaulRandal) September 24, 2014 So how…

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Hi. I’m Brent.