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Brent’s 2012 Conference Schedule

Written on November 28, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world: I get to take part in six major SQL Server events in 2012. Here’s where I’m going and why:

January 26-Feb 4: SQLCruise Miami

SQLCruise is the highlight of my year. This year, we’ve transitioned SQLCruise completely to Tim Ford – he owns the event start to finish. I’m really excited because I get to sit back and enjoy the event a little more, and Tim gets to do what he truly shines at: bringing good people together to learn and bond.

I’m doing three all-new in-depth sessions on SQLCruise Miami: Procedure Cache BI, Scaling SQL with Solid State, and SAN Features for Senior DBAs. All three are targeted at DBAs who have to make applications go faster. You need 3-5 years of experience with SQL Server, and you should already be familiar with the basics of reading execution plans and designing indexes.

I like SQLCruise because it’s a limited number of people together for an extended period of time. I get to know every single attendee, hear about their challenges at work, and have plenty of one-on-one time for design questions. Some attendees have started bringing their laptops armed with a SQL Server instance, a copy of their production database, and their toughest queries or design problems. I love discussing this stuff for hours over margaritas.

Trust me, this is the cheapest way to get the most honest consulting, and it’s not just from the presenters – it’s also from your fellow attendees. Learn more at SQLCruise.com.

Feb 28-Mar 2: MVP Summit Redmond and SQLSaturday Redmond

The annual international MVP shindig is the coolest benefit of being a Microsoft MVP. We have to pay for our flights to Seattle, but once we’re there, Microsoft picks up pretty much everything else. We get insider NDA sessions, and given the timing on the below event, I’m hoping that we’ll get insider content on SQL Server 2012 at the MVP Summit this year. The training really isn’t my favorite part – I just like getting the chance to spend more time with my favorite community and Microsoft people. There’s no substitute for face time with these folks.

The public isn’t invited to the MVP Summit, but the good news is that the MVP Summit will bring a ton of great speakers to SQLSaturday Redmond! This might be the best SQLSaturday all year. I try to work in SQLSaturdays whenever it matches my travel schedule, and this one fits perfectly. I bet lots of out-of-town MVPs will make a similar decision.

March 25-31: SQL Connections Las Vegas

This Connections is billing itself as a SQL Server 2012 launch event, and it just so happens that the conference date exactly lines up with the next SQLBits conference too. Does this mean we’ll see SQL Server 2012 released here? Who knows – it’s tough for conference planners and software vendors to get all the stars to line up simultaneously.

Connections feels like the most training-oriented of the conferences: it focuses on quality, not quantity. There’s less simultaneous sessions, but the presenters tend to be very polished professionals who are very accustomed to being onstage. (Presenters get free registration, hotel, and a fee per session.) It lacks the rowdy, party, community feeling of the PASS Summit: but there’s clearly an audience for a more traditional learning event. I like both events for different reasons – I meet more friends at the Summit, but I make more consulting business connections at Connections.

I’m doing a few sessions at Connections, but the official itinerary isn’t out yet. The only one I can announce for sure is my all-day Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs session, which will be a $399 post-con session on March 30th. Registration is open now.

May 24-June 2: SQLCruise Alaska

I’m doing the same presentations that I did on SQLCruise Miami. Neither cruise is more junior or senior than the other – it just boils down to whether you’d like to see the islands or the icebergs.

There’s one big difference, though: in Alaska, I teamed together with Jeremiah, Kendra, and a friend of ours to get the Garden Villa suite. SQLCruisers will all get to hang out with us here:

Look like fun? Book yourself a cheap inside room (they’re as low as $679 per person right now) and register for SQLCruise.

Fall: SQL Connections Las Vegas

Sometime in the fall, I’ll be returning to Vegas for another round of Connections. The dates, exact location, and session agendas are still to be determined.

November 6-9: PASS Summit Seattle

The PASS Summit is the biggest event of the year in terms of quantity: thousands of SQL Server professionals from all over the world gather together to talk shop. It’s a zoo of nonstop activity, a whirlwind of tweeting and meeting that goes by in a blur. I love getting the chance to meet up with some of my best friends for the briefest of moments.

There’s at least a dozen sessions going on simultaneously at any given time, but as big as the event is, there’s fierce competition for speaking spots. Speakers get free registration (roughly $1500 value), so speakers from all over the world vie for spots. The call for sessions hasn’t gone out yet, so I have no idea whether I’ll be accepted, but I’d pay to go out of my pocket even if I didn’t get the chance to speak.

And I Wish I Could Hit More!

The good news – heck, the GREAT news – is that I’ll be hitting so many major conferences next year. I pinch myself when I think about this because it just seems too good to be true.

The bad news is that I’d love to do more: I would love to do SQLBits, TechEd, a few CodeCamps, storage conferences, and VMworld, but with just these ones above, I’m already away from home for six weeks. In order to keep a good work/life balance, I try to only travel one week per month, and that only leaves me 6 more weeks of travel in 2012. Since I like to eat and pay rent, I gotta use those other 6 weeks for client projects to make moolah. <sigh> Decisions, decisions.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Webcast: What We Learned at the PASS Summit

Written on October 19, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

It’s like going to several sessions in the span of just 30 minutes! In this short video, we talk about our favorite highlights from the PASS Summit in Seattle last week:

The links we mentioned include:

And finally, SQLPASS 2012 Summit registration. If you register before November 15th, you get the Summit for $995 or the Summit plus two precons for just $1,395. That is one heck of a deal! See you there next year.

Brent Ozar

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Interview with #SQLPASS Presidents Rushabh Mehta and Bill Graziano

Written on October 17, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

PASS takes bloggers seriously.

This is the third year I’ve been offered press-style sit-down interviews with members of the PASS Board of Directors. On Friday, outgoing President Rushabh Mehta (@RushabhMehta), upcoming President Bill Graziano (@BillGraziano), and PASS Marketing’s Alison MacDonald talked with me for over an hour about PASS, the Summit, finances, membership, web sites, and beer.

Rushabh and Bill are perhaps two of the busiest guys at the entire Summit, and yet they made sure to connect, learn, and share with me. I can’t tell you how humbled I am about that. These guys really live the mantra.

But wait – it gets even better.

About 45 minutes into our discussion, Rushabh excused himself because he had to go to his session. This guy had actually taken time OUT OF HIS OWN SESSION TO TALK TO ME. His co-presenter handled the first half of the session while Rushabh talked to me. I was completely shellshocked. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not that important, but it tells you just how serious PASS is about community. That’s insane.

Every year, it seems like more and more events overlap. Several sessions compete for your attention, three or four parties happen every night at the same time, and there’s hundreds of people you want to talk to in the hallways. I thought my schedule was tough, but I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be for the PASS volunteers. I really salute these folks who give up their own enjoyment of the Summit just to make sure everyone else is taken care of. Big round of virtual applause for these selfless people.

Summit 2011: Best. Summit. Ever.

Talking to attendees and speakers, I kept hearing that this was one of the best SQL Server community events ever, and I completely agree. Board of Directors member Allen Kinsel (@SQLInsaneo) heard this a lot, too, but he followed up with a sharp question: why? Here’s what I heard:

First-timers were embraced. Last year’s introductory programs for first-timers had a rocky start, but this year’s looked really impressive. The Big Brothers & Sisters program helped introduce newbies to the community.

Session offerings were fantastic. In almost every time slot, I had at least two must-see sessions. The community is learning to write better abstracts, and the Program Committee is doing a great job of sifting through them. Attendees had plenty of great choices for pre-cons, too, and they responded by buying more than ever.

First-time speakers were well-received. Bill Graziano pointed out that a lot of local speakers are building their reputations at SQLSaturdays and SQLRally, and as a result, even first-time-speakers got good attendance numbers in their sessions.

Submit Your Feedback and Vote

How Do We Make the Summit Even Better?

Bill Graziano carries a little notebook around during the Summit to jot down suggestions. He thumbed through page after page and talked about some of the most interesting and practical suggestions he’d gotten from attendees. I’m going to touch on a few of them and give my own thoughts, not necessarily Bill’s or Rushabh’s – the Board has to put thought into these kinds of things, and they can’t leap to conclusions like a knee-jerk blogger like me.

Help the hearing impaired – hearing-impaired attendees had a tough time getting the most out of some sessions. (Not to mention those of us who couldn’t read the slides.)

Add a closing get-together – the Summit has a gradual taper-down close right now. People gradually leave throughout the day, with less and less people in each session, and there’s not a feeling of closure. For those of us who stay over Friday night, we could have one last networking event. I love this idea. In the past, there’s been an MVP networking event, but an open event makes more sense. Vendors probably aren’t going to throw last-night parties because their staff have all flown out on Friday.

Put the PASS logo at the bottom of the slides, not the top – attendees in the back of the room can’t see the bottom 10-20% of the slides because the projector screens are near the floor. You can’t just raise the screens – in many rooms they were already near the ceiling. You have to make the screen size smaller, and that isn’t good. Instead, move the PASS logo from the top of the slide down to the bottom, giving more content space at the top. Smart.

Put electric outlets on the pre-con desks. Attendees pay $395 to sit in a pre-con all day and learn, but they can’t take notes as easily if their laptops die within the first hour or two. At every break in my pre-con, the attendees made a mad dash for the wall outlets to plug their laptops in for a brief burst of resuscitating juice. I can almost understand the unreliable wifi – after all, it’s hard to satisfy thousands of geeks in a single room – but extension cords are easy. We need to handle this. One attendee even told me, “Idera is my new favorite vendor because they put fast phone chargers in the hallway.”

To read about more ideas, vote on them, and submit your own, check out Feedback.SQLPass.org.

How Do We Make the Keynotes Better?

This year will go down as one of the most (unintentionally) funny keynotes ever. BI projects made the amazing discovery that kids like frozen yogurt. Attendees made the awkward discovery that presenters wanted to utilize children. And nobody made any discoveries on screens covered with tiny fonts. When I recovered from the fits of giggles, I was pretty happy with the balance of marketing versus technical information when all three keynotes (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) were added together. There’s still some improvements to make, and I talked about these with Bill and Rushabh:

Microsoft keynotes need to embrace the community. PASS listens to what the community likes and jumps right in to join us. For example, Bill Graziano took the stage on #SQLkilt day wearing a kilt himself – but not the Microsoft speakers. A few of the Microsoft speakers were willing to poke fun at themselves (Denny Lee and Lara Rubbelke were a hoot), but otherwise, things felt pretty stiff.

Test the keynotes with tough critics. If Sean McCown, Aaron Bertrand, or I would have seen any of the decks or demos, we could have pointed out the font illegibility, pedophile hilarity, and Excel saturation ahead of time rather than having it blow up in public. Plus, by getting members of the community vested in the keynote itself, it turns us into cheerleaders rather than the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

If you don’t have something timely, do something timeless. Microsoft didn’t really have anything impressive to unveil at the Summit – absolutely not their fault, because the Summit came at an awkward time in the release cycles for SQL Server and SQL Azure – but that doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t have anything cool to say. Microsoft has all kinds of brilliant thinkers who’ve done amazing things over their careers. Put Buck Woody up on the stage as a host and let him cycle through four people as they explain something they’re really proud of. Look at the number of people who chose to go to Bob Ward’s session on TempDB – that demonstrates how well-received a Microsoft speaker can be even when there’s no new feature announcements involved.

Offer choices. When a keynote starts to bomb, we can’t really vote with our feet – there’s nowhere else to go. What if we opened the expo hall earlier so that attendees could spend time with the sponsors rather than being stuck in uncomfortable seats listening to uncomfortable pitches? Competition breeds improvement, and right now the keynotes feel a little monopolistic. If Microsoft knew people had real choices, I bet keynote quality would improve dramatically – especially after the first year of people walking out. Or perhaps we could choose from three simultaneous keynotes on day 2 – one for DBAs, one for BI, and one for developers? Microsoft could deliver targeted information without boring 2/3 of the people at any given time. I swear, if I see one more demo of PowerViewPivotCrescentStreamChartExcel, I’m going to pivot forward in my chair and hurl. I’m not saying we should offer sessions that compete with keynotes. (Although as a presenter, I’d looooove that. I bet I could completely pack a room with keynote refugees. Hmmm.)

Got something you’d like to see improved? Check out feedback.SQLPass.org and cast your vote. The PASS Board listens!

Brent Ozar

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PASS Summit 2011 Day 2 Keynote Liveblog #sqlpass

Written on October 13, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Time for another keynote liveblog. Let’s get started.

It’s #SQLKilt day! Bill Griaziano is kicking things off in a kilt:

Bill Graziano Supporting #SQLKilt Day

8:19am – Bill introducing Tim Radney and Jack Corbett as outstanding volunteers.

8:22 – Lori Edwards is the 2011 PASSion award for her outstanding work making this such a great Summit. Nice job!

Lori Edwards - PASSion Award 2011

8:24 – PASS Board Meet & Greet is happening Friday 12:15-1:30pm in room 307-308. The Board will be available for any Q&A. I love that they’re doing it during lunch – it’s probably the only time left without overlapping content.

8:26 – Videos playing pimping the AlwaysOn, Column Store indexes, Distributed Replay, Power View (formerly Crescent). Aaron Bertrand and I were talking at the LiveBlogger table, trying to figure out which features have spaces in the name, which don’t, and how the capitalization works. Microsoft needs to be more consistent with that. But hey, if that’s the biggest complaint I’ve got about SQL Server 2012 (Denali), then we’re in great shape – and I think that might just be my biggest complaint. It really is that good of a release.

8:30 – Microsoft’s Quentin Clark talking about SQL Server 2012′s features. When it comes to data, he wants to let us “manage it in the form it was born in.” I like that, catchy.

Quentin Clark

8:34 – Quentin’s Fantastic 12 of SQL Server 2012:

Required 9′s and Protection – Integration Services as a Server, HA for StreamInsight, SQL Server for AlwaysOn (woohoo!)
Blazing-Fast Performance – ColumnStore Indexes, performance improvements in the engine, SSAS, SSIS
Rapid Data Exploration – PowerView, PowerPivot, administration from SharePoint, reporting alerts
Managed Self-Service BI
Credible, Consistent Data – BI semantic model, Data Quality Services, Master Data Services
Organizational Compliance – Expanded Audit with user-defined audits and filtering, user-defined server roles
Peace of Mind – Production-simulated application testing, System Center Advisor, Management Packs, Expanded Support – Premier Mission Critical
Scalable Data Warehouse – SQL Server Appliances, HW + SW + Support (Just Add Power), Choice of Hardware
Fast Time to Solution
Extend Any Data Anywhere – Greater interoperability with PHP, Java, Hadoop. ODBC drivers for Linux, CDC for SSIS & Oracle
Optimized Productivity – SQL Server Data Tools (formerly Juneau), unified across database & BI, deployment & targeting freedom
Scale On Demand – AlwaysOn, deployment across public & private cloud, elastic scale

8:37 – Bob Erickson, Executive VP of Interlink Transport Technologies, Mediterranean Shipping Company taking the stage. #2 in the world transport industry, and their line-of-business apps are mission critical. Bills of lading, logistics, vessel planning, invoicing, accounting, sales, marketing all goes through SQL Server.

PASS Keynote

8:41 – Doing a demo of SQL Server 2012′s AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Showing how you can configure one synchronous replica and a couple of read-only asynchronous replicas to offload reporting queries.

8:46 – Good news: the crowd erupts wildly in applause. Bad news: they’re applauding because the speaker zoomed in on the demos instead of making us read tiny text from far away. Sarcasm aside, these features are just freakin’ amazingly usable in the real world. This is the kind of tool DBAs need.

8:48 – Quentin’s covering other features. I sound like a fanboy when I say this, but for each feature he’s covering in just 60-90 seconds, there’s a gold mine of good stuff for DBAs, BI pros, and devs. This really is a killer release.

8:53 – Lara Rubbelke, @SQLGal, takes the stage and starts with a joke. “I was going to demo all Excel, but…” Nice. Bloggers chuckle.

Lara Rubbelke

8:57 – Lara’s demoing a report built with a Column Store Index. Finds suspect data, then segues into a Data Quality Project – showing how users can identify suspect data, get data cleaning info from cloud-based services, and then update their report.

9:01 – Lara demoed how users can set up their own alerts. Hello, SQL Server Notification Services? Not quite sure what that tool was, wasn’t paying close enough attention.

9:06 – Quentin’s whipping through feature lists. All good stuff – really hard to do a whirlwind tour on this. I wish for every summary, they had something like, “For more info, go to room X at 3:00PM where you’ll talk to Mr. Y.”

9:07 – Talking appliances with Dell and HP data warehouse and business decision appliances with SQL, SharePoint, and/or Parallel Data Warehouse.

SQL Appliances

9:12 – Covering the new HP Database Consolidation Appliance as a scale-out appliance. “We have never built the biggest one.” Uh, whatever you built is the biggest one. That’s kinda how that works. Sarcasm aside, I really like the appliance concept, but I don’t see a lot of these deployed. I think it’s mostly just the type of clients I have – my clients don’t buy hardware dedicated to SQL Servers in one big rack chunk. They want to cycle through hardware easily because big changes happen in short amounts of time. Virtualization helps you cycle through those.

9:20 – Announcing ODBC drivers for Linux. The audience breaks into spontaneous applause that surprises even Q.

9:21 – Michael Rys takes the stage to talk about the new semantic search. This is kind of the opposite of full text search – instead of searching for terms, SQL Server figures out what documents are related to each other. This is massively useful for things like StackOverflow’s “related questions” search – you want to figure out what questions are related to the ones you’re looking at now.

9:28 – Nicholas Dritsas takes the stage to talk about merging on-premise and off-premise SQL Server deployments. Inside SSMS, he can create a new database in SQL Azure, pick the database, and export an existing on-premise database to Azure. This integration between developer tooling, on-premise services, and cloud services is a big edge for Microsoft. Nicholas has a nice sense of humor. “Let’s refresh and see if it’s there….oh thank God it’s there.”

9:36 – Inside SSMS, we can back up SQL Azure to Windows Azure storage. Nicholas is having to beg for applause, but frankly, this just shouldn’t have been hard. This should have been built in from the beginning. You don’t release a database without backups. I’m glad we have it now though.

9:37 – Demoing Windows Azure file management inside SSMS so you can review your backups. Nifty.

9:39 – Nicholas & Quentin are discussing Samsung’s use of the cloud for SmartTV. I’ve got one of these, and I can see how it’d be a perfect fit for the cloud. I’d like to hear more about this one for just an hour or so, but of course there’s only so much you can do in a keynote.

9:40 – Cihan Biyikoglu onstage to talk about elastic scale with SQL Azure federations.

Discussing Azure Federations

9:44 – By the end of the year, SQL Azure will support databases up to 150GB and any collation. Big pause in the crowd, Microsoft waits for applause, and they get a very polite and quick golf clap. Seriously, though, between 150GB databases and federations, this platform is getting serious.

9:47 – They demoed the new Azure management portal and it looks gorgeous. Metro tile UI like Windows Phone 7, new way of looking at execution plans, zooming in and out. Very quick preview, but I think it caught a lot of viewers by surprise – nobody seemed to understand what they were looking at.

9:50 – And we’re out! Off to Kendra Little’s session.

Brent Ozar

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Announcing sp_Blitz: Automated SQL Server Takeovers #sqlpass

Written on October 12, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

I’m presenting right now at the Professional Association for SQL Server Summit in Seattle, and I’m just about to show my attendees the latest incarnation of my Blitz script.

In the past, my manual Blitz script has helped DBAs all over the world discover ugly problems in SQL Servers. However, one thing has been bothering me a lot for the last year or so. One of the lines in the script said, “Change this email address to your own, then execute this line and make sure you can receive emails from Database Mail.” You can probably guess what happened – a lot of people didn’t bother changing the email address. I used my own email in the script because I wanted to know when people ran it that way, and I got at least a dozen emails a week. I talked to some of the users, and they confessed that they didn’t even bother to read the script – they just clicked F5.

At first that bugged me. The Blitz script really has two purposes: to enlighten DBAs about their SQL Server’s risks, and to start teaching the basics of DMVs. These users weren’t learning anything – they just wanted to run the script and make the magic happen. So I figured – why not give it to ‘em?

sp_Blitz: One-Minute Server Takeovers

Say hello to sp_Blitz – a simple stored procedure that runs a bunch of health checks and exports the results in a prioritized list. Here’s what the output looks like:

sp_Blitz Output (click to enlarge)

The URL column includes a link for each problem we found in the SQL Server. Copy/paste that link into a web browser and you’ll be able to learn more about the particular issue you’re facing. I also include a quick snippet about the general source of the data, like which DMVs I’m querying to catch the issue.

The stored procedure can take a minute or two to run on larger servers, and this is very much a version 1.0. If you find things you’d like to improve, please feel free to let me know – especially if you include sample code to improve it, heh. I expect sp_Blitz to undergo some rapid improvements over the coming weeks as people holler about bugs, which leads me to the next fun idea I’m playing with in the session.

sp_BlitzUpdate: Easy Updates Using the Cloud

Don’t you just hate going to somebody’s site to update your utility scripts? Most of us end up using vastly out-of-date versions of popular tools just because we can’t be bothered to do updates. I’ve got a solution.

At its simplest, updating a script means doing this:


ALTER STORED PROC dbo.sp_Blitz AS BLAH BLAH BLAH;

GO

But if we take a step back, we’re really building a string, and then executing that string:


DECLARE @StringDDL VARCHAR(MAX)

SET @StringDDL = 'ALTER STORED PROC dbo.sp_Blitz AS BLAH BLAH BLAH; GO;

EXEC (@StringDDL)

And if we take a step back even farther – what if we got that string from the cloud? That’s what I’m doing with sp_BlitzUpdate; I open a connection to a SQL Server in Amazon EC2, fetch the most up-to-date version of sp_Blitz, store that in a string variable, and then execute that variable. Just by executing sp_BlitzUpdate, you get the latest version of sp_Blitz.

Here’s a simplified version of sp_BlitzUpdate to illustrate the basics of the concept:


CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.sp_BlitzUpdate AS

DECLARE @ScriptDDL VARCHAR(MAX);

/* Fetch the script definition from THE CLOUDZ */
SELECT @ScriptDDL = a.ScriptDDL
FROM OPENROWSET('SQLNCLI', 'Server=publicsql.brentozar.com;UID=ReadOnly;PWD=PainRelief;',
'SELECT TOP 1 ScriptDDL FROM dbo.Scripts WHERE ScriptName = ''sp_Blitz'' ORDER BY ScriptID DESC') AS a;

/* Drop the existing Blitz script if it already exists */
IF OBJECT_ID('master.dbo.sp_Blitz') IS NOT NULL
DROP PROC dbo.sp_Blitz ;

EXEC(@ScriptDDL);

Warning: this approach is fraught with peril. Somebody could hack my SQL Server in Amazon EC2 and put malicious code up there. Even if they don’t, you’re still counting on me to have safe code inside that database, because you might be running it on your production box. This is like the ultimate in dangerous SQL injection. This is purely experimental, and I don’t know that I’ll keep using it permanently, but it’s something really fun to play with.

Hey, not everything I do is productive – sometimes it’s just about stunt driving. Enjoy!

Brent Ozar

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Liveblog for #SQLPASS 2011 Day 1 Keynote

Written on October 12, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server

Welcome to the big show! I’ll be liveblogging today’s keynote at the Professional Association for SQL Server Summit in Seattle. If you’d like to check out some of the photos I’ve taken so far, check out my Facebook album for the Summit.

You can watch the keynote live, and refresh this page every couple of minutes to get the latest notes.

8:19AM – Packed room, very large. I didn’t bring my wide-angle lens with me.

PASS Summit 2011 Keynote

8:22 – Showing a very professionally-produced video of attendees talking about what the PASS Summit community means to them. Great sales pitch. I hope we see this on YouTube.

8:24 – PASS President Rushabh Mehta taking the stage. He’s reminding us that PASS’s mission is to help us connect, learn, and share, and that PASS is the community. I’d agree – for SQL Server professionals, this event really does feel like coming home. Great community vibe.

PASS President Rushabh Mehta

8:30 – PASS has provided over 430k technical hours of training, 20k new members (currently 80k). Their goals are 1 million technical hours of training and 250k members.

PASS Goals

8:33 – There’s 189 sessions on 5 tracks, 204 speakers, 93 MVPs, 11 MCMs. Rushabh has heard attendees say, “There’s just too many simultaneous sessions – we can’t choose between ‘em.” That’s where the DVDs and online streaming come in.

SQLPASS Community Connections

8:36 – Lots of community bloggers helping to promote #SQLPASS. (Ooo, and I’m at the top left! Flattery will get you everywhere.) Lots of chances to make connections with your peers and Microsoft at the Summit. Talking about all the different ways you can interact with your peers. The Summit really does shine this way – you *always* have something to do here.

8:40 – Covering the new edition of SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2, a monster book with a chapter from each of 55 different MVPs.

Rushabh Mehta

8:42 – Ted Kummert, Senior VP of Microsoft BPD taking the stage. “We have the most amazing jobs in the industry. We get to sit around every day and imagine what the future’s going to be for business processes and applications.”

Ted Kummert of Microsoft

8:44 – Ted says, “Some database vendors just decided to get into the cloud last week. You know who I’m talking about, right?” Zing, Oracle, zing!

8:48 – Ted’s looking back at all the things released or announced in the last year, and there is indeed a lot. PDW, HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Database Appliance, SQL Server Denali CTP 3, Windows Azure Marketplace, etc. He believes in a hybrid cloud world: on-premise and off-premise database capabilities.

Looking Back at 2011

8:51 – New product names:

Denali will be SQL Server 2012 and released in the first half of 2012
Juneau is going to be released as SQL Server Data Tools
Project Crescent is going to be released as Power View

8:55 – Love the metro-style slides. Content, whatever – give me beautiful presentation, heh.

Metro Style Slides

8:59 – SQL Server 2012 will support Hadoop. This shouldn’t surprise anybody – if there’s a way to connect more stuff to SQL Server, it sells more SQL Server licensing. Yay!

Apache Hadoop Announcements

9:03 – Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of HortonWorks, is onstage to discuss why Hadoop is the best way to solve big data problems. He was one of the original team to implement it at Yahoo. Ted adds that Microsoft is going to contribute code to make Hadoop run better on Windows Server and Windows Azure.

Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler

9:06 – CTP of Azure-based Hadoop coming by the end of the year.

9:07 – Microsoft’s Denny Lee gets by FAR the loudest applause. Then leads off with, “Are you ready for some demos?” Big cheers. “Sorry, not yet.” HA! He can get away with that.

Denny Lee and Ted Kummert

9:10 – Denny’s handling network demo issues with grace. He starts with a Hadoop demo but glides into Excel. All demo roads lead to Excel these days. Denny’s excitement can’t cover that he’s demoing Hadoop and Excel to a room full of SQL Server people. Tough crowd, not much applause after the content starts. Denny can only carry things so far.

9:16 – Suggesting a private in-enterprise data marketplace so people can shop for internal data. Now that sounds kick ass.

9:17 – Tim Mallalieu and Nino Bice are demoing code name Data Explorer. And of course, they’re demoing…Excel.

Tim Mallalieu and Nino Bice

9:22 – Demoing joins between Excel and Azure. Users are adding their own Excel data, joining it (doing lookups) to public data sources. “With just 3-4 mouse clicks, we’ve joined between Excel, Azure, and marketplace data.” Yes, you did a one-time one-way join between multiple sources. It’s called a query. It’s easier, but it’s not persisted and it’s not updating and it’s not centrally managed. This is Access again. Not that Access wasn’t successful – it was – but there’s a landmine of management perils here, and it just doesn’t play to SQL Server professionals.

9:27 – The demo suddenly went creepy – talking about how kids like free ice cream and candy. The Twittersphere is going off the hook with racy jokes about free candy vans. The whole back of the conference hall is giggling. This demo is going down in the hall of fame with Tina Turner.

9:33 – Ted’s retaking the stage. I’m almost sorry – that demo was one of the unintentionally-funniest ones I’ve ever seen, right down to tweets about Pedobear.

9:37 – Amir Netz, Microsoft Technical Fellow, taking the stage. He was the one who introduced us to Project Crescent last year.

Amir Netz and Ted Kummert

9:45 – Amir is demoing movie sales over time with ~~Project Crescent~~ Power View, but it’s just completely impossible to see. These are the tiniest fonts I’ve ever seen in a demo.

How Not to Demo Software

9:49 – Lots of funny jokes about different actors making more money than others. Only one actor has made more movies/money/gross than Samuel L. Jackson – John Wayne. Interesting storytelling about data exploration, but you just can’t demo this in front of thousands of people on a low-res screen a hundred feet away.

9:52 – Power View will export to PowerPivot, and will render on Windows Phone, iPad, and Android. Unfortunately, only one of those three demos worked the first time – the iPad one.

iPad Demo of Power View

9:59 – Windows tablet demo is a little less, uh, portable. Couldn’t even pick it up off the desk, and the demos failed.

Windows "Tablet"

10:00 – Keynote wrapping up. Off to the sessions! This one was hilarious. More thoughts shortly.

Brent Ozar

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Free Guidebook App for #SQLPASS Summit

Written on October 8, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Want a complete session schedule, conference center maps, feedback forms, and more all on your phone? There’s an app for that.

Go to Guidebook and download the app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, or Blackberry. After launching it, you’ll be prompted to download a guide. Type in PASS Summit, and we’re near the bottom of the list:

Downloading the PASS Summit 2011 Guidebook

The home page of the PASS Summit Guidebook has links like Schedule, Maps, Sponsors, and My Schedule:

PASS Summit Guidebook

When you click on Schedule, you get the list of sessions. Use the right/left arrows at the top of the screen to switch between days. Clicking on an individual session gives you the speaker and session details:

Damn, that's a good-looking session.

Click the Add to My Events button, and it asks whether you’d like a reminder before the session starts. (Which is awesome, because a couple of Summits ago I was late to my own session. Never gonna live that one down.) The time zone support seems a little off – I downloaded the SQLSaturday Portland guide when I was in the Central time zone, but now that I’m in Pacific, it’s sending me alerts 2 hours off. Probably a bug in the app. Because of that, you might want to wait to download the app until you get to Seattle.

Minor drawback here: it’s totally independent from the PASS Schedule Builder, so if you’ve already built your schedule there, you’ll have to build it here too. It’s also not synced between devices – I’ve got Guidebook on both my iPhone and my iPad, but it’s as if they don’t know that each other exists. It’s like me and Nikki Rant in high school. But I digress.

Inside joke: for sessions with multiple presenters, there can be only one speaker thumbnail. Looks like I won this one:

Not our session. MY session.

I find this hilarious because people are constantly calling Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals & Troubleshooting “Brent’s book.” The head author, the genius behind the concept and the bulk of the work, is fellow MCM Christian Bolton. He’s also in this session, and he’s listed first – although it’s really Chris Testa-O’Neill’s session here. Regardless, my picture, MY SESSION, guys. I’m gonna give Christian a hard time on that one.

Conference organizers can keep the guide up to date without sending a new version of the entire app – the schedules are in-app downloads. I’ve already gotten updates to SQLSaturday Portland’s schedule for this morning through the app.

Nice work, PASS! Go to Guidebook and get the free app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, or Blackberry.

Brent Ozar

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PASS Summit Tips and Tricks

Written on October 4, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Wanna learn where to go after hours? What to take with you during the day? What to say to presenters? It’s all here in this week’s Technology Triage Tuesday webcast:

Brent Ozar

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How to Get Budget Approval for Conferences

Written on June 20, 2011 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQLServerPedia Syndication

If you’ve never been to a conference before, the PASS Summit and Dev Connections events seem like things that happen to Other People. This year, I wanna help make you one of us. You’re a geek, right? Let’s break this down into numbers.

Lightning Talks at the PASS Summit

What It Costs to Attend a Conference

People usually think conference attendees fall into two buckets: people who paid everything, and people whose company picked up the tab. Truth is, there’s a lot of gray area, and when you’re getting ready to attend for the first time, you want to aim for that gray area. You don’t want to pay the full costs plus take vacation time to attend. We need to make your attendance as easy-to-digest for everybody involved, so let’s break out the three costs to attend:

1. Your salary for the week. I bring this up first because it’s your negotiation tool. Companies love paying your salary because it’s already built into the budget. They don’t have to do any extra approvals or paperwork to get you paid. It’s already happening. Your goal is just to keep it going during the conference week.

2. The registration fee. Registration for a 3-day conference is around $1,500 for early-bird discounts and around $2,000 for late registrations. Focus on the $1,500 number because we want to get you registered as fast as possible.

3. The travel & hotels. Companies hate paying for travel, and managers hate asking companies to pay for travel. There’s a lot of opportunities here to save money by staying at cheaper hotels and eating fast food value meals. Add these two things together, and this is actually a huge benefit for your negotiations. Watch how this works….

How to Pitch It To Your Manager

Think like a boss: cost #1 is already covered, and they want to avoid touching cost #3. Let’s make negotiation easier by starting from a place they might just approve immediately:

“Good morning, your highness, how’s it going? Wow, you look fabulous this morning. That combover takes fifteen pounds off for sure. Just fifty more to go! Comb harder. Hey, I was thinking about going to training next quarter. It’s not available locally, and I know it’s hard to get travel approved, so how about if the company just pays for the $1,500 registration and I’ll pay the travel? Nobody needs to know it’s out of town. Here’s the list of topics they’re covering, and I’ll brief everybody on what I learned when I get back.”

See what I did there?:

You erased the money and political problems of travel
You didn’t even mention your salary – it’s an assumed win for you
You’ve reduced the entire discussion down to $1,500 for a training class, which isn’t unreasonable
You didn’t say it was a conference – I know, it’s a little slimy, but negotiations are usually slimy
You gave a list of topics the manager wants his staff to learn more about

Conference Downtime

Now that I’ve got your attention, I have to admit that I’ve skipped a few things. Before you talk to the boss, you need to be armed with a few things ready to go. When you walk into that office, you need to have the following:

A printed list of the most high-value sessions you’re going to attend. Don’t just print out the entire session list and dump it on your boss’s desk – cull through it to find the sessions that give the most value to your manager. There’s no need to tell him that you’ll be attending those professional development sessions or the after-hours vendor parties. Just keep it to 10 session abstracts max, one page front & back, and for every session, have one sentence about what the business will gain from you attending that session.

The registration link for the session. There is a slim chance your manager will say, “Sure, let’s do it,” and you want to be able to strike while the iron is hot.

Your next half-hour free. He may ask you to fill out some budgetary approval paperwork, and you’re going to need to track down the right people to do it. Offer to do everything for him – just get the contact name of the person in accounting who manages this kind of thing, and hound that person. Introduce yourself as the guy who makes sure their servers run. (I play dirty.)

The Three Most Common Ways to Say No

Here’s some of the most common management objections to sending you to a conference, and how to neutralize them:

“I can’t have you gone for a week.” I’ll have my cell phone with me the entire time. If there’s an emergency, I’ll leave the conference and walk across the street to my hotel where I’ve got free WiFi, and I’ll spend as long as it takes to fix the problem. Work always comes first. (If they continue to object, remind them about the last vacation you took.)

“We’ve already used up our training budget for this year.” Well, I really want to learn this stuff to do my job better. How about we split the costs – I’ll eat the training cost as long as I don’t have to take vacation for the week?

“Let’s talk about this in a couple of months.” Only if you agree that the company will pay registration. If I have to pay registration out of my own pocket, I need to have an answer this week because registration cost goes up.

After The Boss Says Yes

Optionally, Buy a Kilt

Register as fast as possible. Ideally, you’ll get someone with a company credit card to pay the registration fee, but if not, use your own card and submit an expense report right away. You don’t have to wait for the event to send an expense report. You worked hard to get to yes for this cost, and it’s the single biggest barrier standing between you and a week of happiness. Knock ‘er down fast.

During the registration process, you’ll be asked if you want to attend any pre-conference or post-conference sessions. These are day-long events taught by a single instructor, so they tend to go much deeper into a single topic. At the PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, for example, I’m giving my day-long session on Virtualization and SAN Basics for the DBA. These pre-cons typically cost around $400 and I think they’re a huge bargain. You don’t have to sign up for these right away, but if you can get the company to pay for one, I’d highly recommend it. It’s usually an easy sell to bosses, too: “I can spend a day learning about virtualization and SAN storage for just $400.” Bam, out comes the credit card.

Block that week out in your group calendar. When people try to schedule team meetings, software releases, projects, whatever, you want to be able to say, “No, I’m going to training that week, and I’ve had it blocked out in my calendar since June. It’s already paid for.”

Book your airfare. My personal favorite travel booking tool is Bing Travel because it has nifty sliders to change your arrival and departure times. I would recommend flying in at least one day early, preferably two if you can afford it. You’ll either decide to attend a pre-conference session, or you’ll want to join in as other geeks roam around town doing things like photo walks and tweet-ups. It’s a great way to meet your fellow Twitterers in a relaxed session, and it pays huge dividends in your career.

Reserve your hotel room, but don’t pay for it. Hotels will let you reserve a room with a credit card, thereby locking in your room and your rate, without charging your card. It’s called guaranteeing the room. You usually have to cancel by 6pm on the day of the arrival, but that’s plenty of time. By prepaying your room, you get a discount, but you lose flexibility. If you get the chance to share a room with someone else and they’ve already prepaid their room, you’re out of luck.

Finally, when it works, post a note here in the comments. Your fellow geeks are just as scared as you are to approach The Boss, and they need encouragement to know it can be done.

Brent Ozar

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PASS Summit Speaker Feedback

Written on December 21, 2010 by Brent Ozar in #SQLPass, SQLServerPedia Syndication

The 2010 PASS Summit attendee feedback just arrived, and I’m very, very honored to have two sessions in the top 10. Last year, I had one session in the top 10. Based on the trends of this data, I look forward to the 2019 PASS Summit evals when I will have all 10 of the top 10 sessions. WORLD DOMINATION, MUHAHAHA! Well, no, that’s not really likely, because I’m up against some tough competition – my SQLskills cohorts Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp.

This year, 5 of the top 10 highest rated sessions were by SQLskills.

Last year, SQLskills had 4 of the top 10, and this year it’s even better. I don’t even know where to go with that. It’s just amazing. I’m really humbled, and it makes me want to work even harder for next year to make sure we stay up there.

I’ve already talked to a few other speakers about their feedback, and if you’re a speaker reading this, remember something: it’s an honor to even be chosen to speak at the Summit.

But enough about you – let’s talk about me again. Here’s the scores and feedback for my sessions, along with my own feedback about the questions themselves. I used to work for a survey company, so I’m really anal about this kind of thing.

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs (DBA283S)

How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment?

Average – 4.76 (out of 5)
5s – 94
4s – 27
3s – 1

I hate this question because it’s not the speaker’s fault. It’s up to the attendee to choose the right session, and there’s already a separate question asking about the accuracy of the abstract. Sometimes people want to go to completely irrelevant sessions just to learn – take the cloud or future versions of SQL Server, for example – and it’s unfair to penalize the speaker for talking about futures or esoteric stuff. I don’t pride myself on getting a high score on this question, and I don’t kick myself for low scores. I got a really low score on this when I did a cloud session at the Summit last year, but I knew it’d be low because nobody was using the cloud back then.

How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills?

Average – 4.88
5s – 107
4s – 15

I have a rather goofy presentation style – fast, loose, and casual – and I know it can generate extreme reactions on surveys. If you sit through a Paul Randal session, a Kimberly Tripp session, and then a session from me back-to-back, you’ll see completely different styles. There is no one right style for presentations. You have to find your own voice as a presenter, then hone the bejeezus out of that voice. I’m proud of this score because it means I’m continuing to refine my approach.

Finding your voice is only part of this score, though – if somebody comes into my session expecting a Paul Randal style of delivery, they’re going to give me horrendous marks. Before people sit down in my Summit sessions, it helps if they’ve already seen me speak online or at a user group. If someone sees my session and style online and decides they don’t like my presentation methods, they won’t sit in my session at the Summit either. The more people see you speak, the higher your scores become on this question.

How would you rate the Speaker’s knowledge of the subject?

Average – 4.91
5s – 111
4s – 11

Jeez, I hope so. I’m a Microsoft Certified Master and I specialize in virtualization and SANs.

But seriously, I think getting a high score here means showing the audience something they didn’t already know. In the future, I’d like to surprise every attendee in every session with at least one slide. That’s insanely difficult in the age of blogs, but that’s what it takes to ace this question.

How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session?

Average – 4.79
5s – 74
4s – 41
3s – 5
2s – 2

This is all on me, and it sucks. I’m completely dissatisfied with this score. I have to do a better job of crafting my abstracts. My problem has been that I start by writing an abstract, then I write the deck, then I deliver the deck several times at different places, and I gradually refine the deck over time. Unfortunately, the abstract reflects the original session because I had to write it so far in advance to get approved for the Summit! I have to make this work better.

How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session?

Average – 4.53
5s – 74
4s – 41
3s – 5
2s – 2

This is where the marketing guy in me comes out: this score is too high. I have a full-day session on this exact same topic, and I’ve got around 12 hours of material on it. In my 1-2 hour session on this topic, I go out of my way to emphasize this to the audience by saying things like, “I wish I had a whole day to cover this, but because we’ve only got an hour, I’m going to give you some of the most important topics.” I want them to walk away saying, “Wow, I wish I could have heard him talk more about this.”

Why? Because that’s how you sell training.

I want the audience to give horrendous marks on this question and leave comments like, “I wish this session was four hours long.” For me, that’s a win, because they can pay to hear me talk all day on these topics. The trick is to get low scores on this question, yet get high enough scores on the other questions to make it into the top ten. This is one of the reasons I’m amazed I made it into the top 10 this year.

How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?

Average – 4.68
5s – 90
4s – 26
3s – 5
2s – 1

I think the attendees were being generous here. The only way I can justify this score is because of my resources page approach – I put all of the links on a single page on my site, and keep referring to it throughout the presentation. Otherwise, I don’t think the deck itself was as good as I’d like, and I don’t have demos for this one.

Attendee Comments:

Ran out of copies of handout. – (From Brent: errr, I don’t have handouts.)
There wasn’t a question he couldn’t answer.
This could have been a 90 minute session. - (From Brent: good answer!)
This guy knows how to present and keep presentation topic entertaining and interesting.
This was great, thanks!
Very direct, personable and funny! Time flew by.
Very good introduction with lots of useable information.
Very good!
Very informitive session and best practicle tips.
Very interesting, keeps your attention, very amusing.
virtualization isn’t all vnware. Would like to hear a bit on hyperv. – (From Brent: This is where I need to perfect my abstracts. When I first wrote the deck, it was a mix of Hyper-V and VMware, but the attendees *overwhelmingly* tell me they only use VMware, so I gradually phased out the Hyper-V material.)
wish it could have been a bit longer, good info.
Perfect combination of basic and advanced information.
Wish you would have did a day session! Great work!! Really liked the tips! Your session was very useful. - (From Brent: Awesome with the day-session stuff – again, love that.)
Wonderful! After seeing Brent’s presentation at 24 hours of PASS I don’t want to miss another mc. He is fantastic.
Very informative and love the energy. Happy Birthday and Thank you! Great session.
Need to do it a bit louder, we had issue hearing on the last row.
Entertaining and educatinal.
Loved it. Thanks for the repeat.
Could’ve used a longer session on this.
Could use more time.- (From Brent: Woohoo! See the trend here? I’m really proud that my evil subliminal messaging worked.)
Brent’s sarcasm and wit always keep his presentations entertaining. Good content makes it worth it. Great links from his site also help facilitate learning after the fact.
Brent is very engaging and informible. Excellent speaker, very comfortable in front of a large group.
Excellent insights.
Brent – always impressive!!
Awesome presentation and timely as we are in progress with these issues.
As normal, nice job!
As always, good info from Brent. Thanks for helping new guys like me grow as a DBA!
A bit longer, more of SAN details and a longer question and answer period. Thanks!
Awesome presentation.
Excellent presentation. Best so far.
Excellent. Thank you!
Fantastic presenter, gave a lot of useful info that I will use when I’m back at work.
Loved it.
Like drinking from a firehose but in a less painful way. thanks for all the info and links. Now it’s time to go learn.
Informative and entertaining, as always.
If you can extend the session to 90 minutes that will be great. – (From Brent: Remember when reading feedback that the attendees don’t understand what’s under your control, versus what’s controlled by the conference.)
I will highly consider attending any presentation he does with only the topic being my final decision!
Have many virtualized servers and would like to understand better.
Great!
Great tips for SAN
Great job! Good lines and good level of detail.
Great job!
Giving me lots to go back to work and look at.
More time. Brent could have spoken for 2 more hours. - (From Brent: Yes, indeed I could, or even several days.)
Awesome! Very deep knowledge and great topics.

You’re Not Attractive – But Your Presentations Can Be (PD193S)

I co-presented this with Buck Woody, and lemme just say that he was the best co-presenter a guy could ask for. He is the reason this session is in the top 10 – I simply couldn’t have done a good job without him. The bantering back and forth made that session so enjoyable.

How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment?

Average – 4.71 (out of 5)
5s – 53
4s – 12
3s – 4

I think the attendees were being generous here. Realistically, you’re not presenting day-to-day, although we did cover how to communicate things better to your managers.

How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills?

Average – 4.93
5s – 67
4s – 1
1s – 1

I got such a laugh out of the person who said “1.” Awesome. But really, this score is kind of self-fulfilling: if you choose to attend a presentation about how to present, odds are you’re going because you admire the presentation skills of the presenter already. If somebody thinks Buck and I suck at presenting, they’re not going to come to our “how to present” session because they don’t want our advice. This is a high score, but I’m not particularly proud of it. I’m not saying I’m not proud of the presentation we did – I had a hilariously good time with Buck – but the score isn’t an indication of our presentation skills. The real score here is the number of people who attended, and I’m proud of that.

How would you rate the Speaker’s knowledge of the subject?

Average – 4.93
5s – 64
4s – 5

We’re really good at faking it.

How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session?

Average – 4.90
5s – 62
4s – 7

Compare this to my score on the virtualization & SAN presentation and you’ll see why I need to work on my abstracts. Buck and I wrote this abstract specifically for this one presentation, and we never honed the deck. The abstract exactly lined up with the original deck.

How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session?

Average – 4.74
5s – 53
4s – 15
2s – 1

The funny thing is that Buck and I finished the material after 30-40 minutes, and we riffed for the rest of the time. The only reason we scored well here is because of great attendee questions that let us elaborate. If we didn’t have a fired-up, friendly audience, we’d have bombed here.

How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?

Average – 4.72
5s – 56
4s – 10
3s – 1
2s – 1
1s – 1

I think the audience is being generous here too, because our slides were just a handful of pictures. We wanted you to focus on us, not bullet points, and we wanted the flexibility to go off on tangents. It worked for us, but if someone else took our deck and tried to read it without attending the session, they’d be disgusted.

Attendee Comments:

So engaging
Smile
Simple, good and effective.
Some examples of good power point and other presentation materials.
ran out of time. - (From Brent: Wha? We finished early!)
perfect
not just a good show-but great content as well.
Not as focused on tips to improve presentations as I expected- based on title.
No new information-but good refresher and well presented.
Ppt was not very inspiring-presentaion depended the skillsof the presenter-if you’re not a charismatic speaker, not much to help you out. – (From Brent: that’s completely fair. I would argue that there are no good speakers that don’t have charisma. Charisma is not optional for great presenters, and that’s why we explained that you HAVE to go to something like Toastmasters. PowerPoint slides alone can’t carry you to the top.)
Speakers were in shadows-lighting could be improved. - (From Brent: That’s to protect us from the snipers.)
Very entertaining!! Thank you!!
“The talk is excellent with very practical tips.
I wished you could include some of the info as bullets – (From Brent: I’ve got your bullet right here. Just kidding.)
You answered the one nagging question I’ve had for ALL my presentations; Don’t read your bullets. Thanks
wish it could go on and on and on
Wasn’t sure what to exactly to expect coming into this. I have great struggles with telling a story with data (lots of data and sometimes there really isn’t a story). I think some of the referencs that you cited may deal with that. I enjoyed the presentation a great deal. Thanks! – (From Brent: Edward Tufte‘s stuff is fantastic about lots of data, and he explains that there’s always a story. One of my favorite examples is on pages 56-57 of Envisioning Information when David Hellerstein explains the economics of health care by telling the story of just one receipt.)
Very polished speakers, their lifetime of presentation work shows.
very pleasant speaking voice.
Very informative session!!! Thanks.
more time would have been ok.
very entertaining and usefull at the same time.
Very engaging-high energy, funny.
trololololoooooooo!!
Thought it would just be funny with some good tips, but it was incredibly useful. Even for daily life. NOt fjust for when presenting. (and of course it was very funny as well).
Take a Bow!!!
I am a budding/new speaker for pass events (chapter/SQL Saturday) and trying to find my “groove” this session was really helpful.
“*phenominal & absolutely excellent.
*Ver applicable to everyone.”
Great tips-the wacom/draw your preso is priceless.
Fabulous, excellent conversational
Excellent ideas for improvement and ideas to get audience involved and engaged!
Excellent coverage of how to prepare a preso. Great tips on how to tell stories, final pics. When to use power point? Good stuff. How many times to reherse. Where does he come up with his retorts? Great!!!
Entertaining, lots of content. Thanks!
Do you think Dora the Explorer is an excellent presenter?
Both guys are the top of the heap.
Awesome!!!!
Awesome presentation, funny and inforative.
Awesome presentation – would love a longer session discussing methods and stlyes.
Amazing, funny
You guys suck.
Fun with lots of good info.
“Great way to end the day.
Good info presented quickly and to the point while still entertaining.”
Fun, informative and more fun on many, many levels.
getr the point across and entertaining also.
Great Team!
Great Presentation
Great Job!! Thanks
Great information. Appreciate the tips. Really want to someday (soon) apply them or at least pass them on. Great audience questons.
Great info as I start doing more demo’s/ presentations.
Great ideas, suggestons & links.
Great humor and great points.
Great deck.
Good, fun presentation, but hard to say how much information will help improve attendee’s presentation. Nice way to wrap up the day.
Good Stuff
Good Detail. Very much enjoyed the follow up as well. Looking forward to using this on my execs.
Funny and extremely relevant. Great job!!!!
You guys sucked. Thanks!!!

What a way to finish up the year. Thank you so much for filling out your evaluations, and I’m humbled by your appreciation for what I do. I have a great time doing this stuff, and I’m amazed that I get to do this stuff for a living.

Want to See More of My Presentations?

I’ve got 1-hour videos available online for free, plus links to day-long and week-long sessions I’m doing in 2011:

My SQL Server training video archives – I’ve put together a page with links and embedded versions of my presentations around the web including the MCM videos, the Quest Software day-long videoconferences, and more.
Free Microsoft Certified Master videos – Paul, Kimberly, Bob, and I recorded 40 hours of video that Microsoft is giving away for free! You can hit the MCM web site to download the videos individually, or use Aaron Nelson’s cool PowerShell script to download all the videos and watch them at your leisure. When you’ve got questions about the videos, check out the Microsoft Learning forum for SQL MCMs.
Connections Post-Conference on Virtualization & SANs for DBAs – I talk for an entire day in Orlando about virtualization and SAN storage after the SQL Connections conference. Registration for my Thursday March 31st post-con is $399, and you can attend the post-con even if you don’t register for the conference itself. Here’s the Connections registration link.
SQLskills Master Performance Tuning week – I’m teaching a couple days of this course along with Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp to help prepare you for the Microsoft Certified Master tests as well as your daily work. We’re offering it in Dallas TX on March 14-18, and Bellevue WA on August 1-5. Early bird rates are $2,995 per person, and we cap attendance at 32 students, so get your registration in quick.
SQLskills Master High Availability & Disaster Recovery week - Another intensive course preparing you for the MCM, taught by me, Paul, and Kimberly. The only date we’re announcing right now is Bellevue WA on August 15-19, and the early bird rate is $2,995.

Brent Ozar

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