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Writing and Presenting

6 Blog Projects to Improve Your Writing

Written on September 19, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

You’re stuck in a rut. You’ve been writing the same thing for the same way for months.

Dated is also a style.

You’ve deluded yourself into thinking you’ve built up a style that works for you, but that’s the thing about style: it rarely lasts forever. As Heidi Klum says, “One day you’re in, and the next day…you’re out.”

Project #1: Tell a personal story first and a tech story second.

There are millions of dry, boring technical posts around, but there’s only one you. I bet you’ve got some hilarious, awkward, touching, or endearing moments from your past that you’d love to share, but it just doesn’t feel right on your professional blog.

Rather than thinking about a technical feature that you want to illustrate with a personal story, turn it around. Pick your favorite story that you’d like to tell, pour your heart out, and then figure out how to tie something technical into it.

I used this approach with my SQL Server Data Compression: It’s a Party! post. I look back and laugh at the party that got me disinherited from the Ozar Family (Lack Of) Fortune. I loved the story, so to get it out there, I tied it into a SQL Server feature that’s been written about many times, and I brought a personal touch in the process.

Project #2: Forget the answer – describe the question.

It’s not always about helping the community by giving the answer. Sometimes you can help just by clearly explaining all of the challenges involved with a question.

My recent post How Do You Mask Data for Secure Testing post was inspired by @ErinStellato‘s question on #SQLHelp. Twitter’s 140-character limit just doesn’t allow for the full explanation of a complex question like this, and I quickly got frustrated with people suggesting half-ass solutions that I’d seen fail. Rather than tweet one limitation at a time, I poured my heart into the question in a blog post and let readers contribute ideas.

In that particular situation, I knew there wasn’t a good answer, but that’s not always the case. Even when you know there’s several good answers, try to write a post just describing the question. For example, how do you find out the most resource-intensive queries running on a system? Try to write an entire post just describing the problem will improve your ability to step back and see the big picture without taking a knee-jerk reaction to explain a tool.

Leaving the answer open for debate in your blog’s comments encourages readers to get interactive.

Project #3: Schedule a blog post months in advance.

The next time you’re about to hit Publish on a blog post, ask yourself if you’re really proud of that post.

If not, don’t publish it. Click Schedule, and use a date three or four months from now. Walk away from the post because at this point, the pressure’s off. Sure, it’s kinda sorta good enough, and you were okay with going live with it right away, but instead it’s just going to get better with age.

Days or weeks from now, you’ll be inspired. You’ll think of several ways you want to improve the post, and you’ll jump in to write more when you’re in the zone. You’ll be tempted to revise the publication date earlier, but don’t give in. The improvements will just keep coming with time, and when the final publication date arrives, you’ll be giddy with anticipation for the world to see your polished, honed work.

Blog posts are the opposite of milk: the younger they are, the worse they smell. Blog posts are more like wine: you want to craft timeless words that will snowball and bring you more and more visits over time.

Project #4: Ask a real writer for their opinion.

Don’t ask a fellow technology blogger. Print out your blog and take it down to your company’s marketing department – the people who write the brochures. If you have the choice between someone who writes press releases or someone who writes brochures, pick the brochure person, but take whoever you can get.

Say, “I’d like your honest, brutal opinion about something. I’m trying to improve my personal blog. Absolutely nothing is off limits. If you could throw this thing in the Author-o-Matic and remix it completely, what would you do differently?” Tell them to ignore the grammatical mistakes for now and save their red ink for big-picture stuff. (They’ll probably mark up the grammar anyway, but I’m just trying to make you feel better about the inevitable stream of red ink. It happens to me too – Jeremiah constantly kicks my ass about my addiction to commas.)

You don’t have to obey their every whim, but getting this completely different view of your work will help you see things in a new light. Your blog doesn’t have to be a brochure, but I bet they’ve got tricks that will help bring life to your prose.

Project #5: Make a list of storytelling tools you’ve used, and skip them once.

I bet you’ve got at least a few favorite blogs that you could identify even if the author info was missing. They always use exactly the same tools to tell a story: they always use code snippets, always use screenshots, always use polls, always use SEO-friendly titles, etc. It’s great to have an identifiable brand, but that doesn’t mean you have to stagnate as an author.

Reread your blog posts from the last several months and make a list of every non-text tool you used. If that list is short, it’s time to teach your old dog some new tricks. Over the next week, as you read other peoples’ blogs, make a list of the non-text tools they use. Get inspired to experiment.

In my Building a Better BrentOzar.com post, I talked about experimenting with pull quotes. It’s free, it’s easy, and it brings a new dimension to your blog posts. Even better, it makes your posts look like something completely new to the tech community, and that brings us to our last project.

Project #6: Read posts from a completely different genre.

If we only draw inspiration from the database blog community, our content is going to look like the British Royal Family’s gene pool. I try to read at least five blog posts from completely new (to me) blogs per week.

This post is a good example – I shamelessly stole the idea from 4 Photo Projects to Make You Better, heard through @RhondaTipton.

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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Sample DBA Resumes

Written on August 4, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Interviewing, Writing and Presenting

Nobody knows who I am.

Yes, I know, you think I waltz into restaurants without a reservation, get the best table in the house, and Rick Bayless brings the food out himself.

In reality, sooner or later, everybody asks for a resume. (Except Rick Bayless. He just asks for money.) Managers don’t read blogs, so they don’t care how many times you’ve seen us do webcasts, how many presentations you’ve attended, or how often you retweet us. They want a simple printout that explains whether we’re skilled.

We get a lot of emails asking how to create a DBA resume or looking for sample templates, so we thought you might get a kick out of viewing how each of us approached the resume thing.

Brent’s Resume: “I wanted to tell two stories for each position on my resume: how I ended up in that job, and what I did in a typical week. I wanted the resume to fit on a couple of pages, but if people wanted more details on a particular job, I wanted to give ‘em more. I used the jQuery Collapse-o-Matic plugin to add Read More sections. Finally, managers have told me that they hired me because of my confident interactions in person, so I recorded a 15-minute virtual interview and embedded it. I’d like to have a more professional one done later, but this is a good start.”

Jeremiah’s Resume: “I spent many years as a consultant at a number of mid-sized firms; I must have re-written my resume thirty or forty times and I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes for job candidates. Unfortunately, resumes and bullet points don’t always tell the full story. I wanted people looking at my resume to know that I love my job and that I love sharing my knowledge. I don’t have the traditional DBA skill set and I wanted to emphasize my unique skills. The second half of the resume is a more traditional Title, Time, Tell Me What You Did format. It points out some of the interesting things I’ve done over the course of my career and some of the things that I’m proud of.”

Kendra’s Resume (PDF): “My big problem with resumes: I want to talk about the exciting things I’ve done right away. I don’t want what I’m proud of to get lost between dates, times, and employers. Since I love to draw, I also want my resume to be graphic. I wrote a two-page resume in a document format. On the first page I talk about the top three questions customers ask me and map in the related projects I get excited about. On the second page I walk through more of the traditional what, where, and when to contextualize my work history. I included the drawing I made of the team at the bottom of the pages– I love that I can swap this out to keep things fresh over time.”

Tim’s Resume (PDF): “I’ve a great number of things going on in my life and that wages a fierce war with my formal business education which preached the cardinal rule of “fit all of yourself onto a single 8.5″ x 11″ page with an ample number of bullet points”. In the spirit of compromise I embraced the idea of still including the “ample number of bullet points” with the concept of a cover sheet of accomplishments and embedded links to provide even more information than I could fit on the page. I’m relying on bits stored and served from other sites to tell the story of Me; plus it recycles leftover bullet points I’ve thrown out of my technical presentations. I’m all about recycling wherever possible.”

So there you have it – four totally different ways of building a DBA resume.

Brent Ozar

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How to Write a Conference Abstract

Written on July 27, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

When I first started submitting abstracts to conferences, I wrote bland, technical descriptions of what I’d be talking about. Later on, I thought being a good speaker meant having lots of people in my sessions, so I wrote spammy abstracts:

“SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! COME SEE THE MOSTEST SPECTACULAREST DISPLAY OF SKILLZ EVER! EVERY SINGLE DATABASE PROFESSIONAL – NAY, HUMAN BEING – SHOULD BE IN MY SESSION! I PROMISE YOU’LL BE AMAZED AND DUMBFOUNDED AND BETTER LOOKING!”

One of my early presentations

Over time, I figured out that the goal of writing an abstract isn’t to get as many people into the room as possible.

The real goal of an abstract is to keep people out.

My abstracts need to communicate what I’m teaching, who should attend, and who should not attend. When I’m communicating what I’m teaching, I try to use the coolest, most creative wording possible. I use tricks from ProBlogger to craft appealing headlines and session titles, but that’s where the spam ends. When I’m dealing with the last two needs – who should and shouldn’t attend – I lay things out in crystal clear language.

I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think the same thing: you think every single DBA should attend your session. You think you’re going to craft a perfect balance of junior and senior material so that there’s something for everyone. That rarely works, and instead, try to focus. Focus is saying no.

Focus is picking exactly one person to be your target audience, and then completely satisfying that one person. Figure out how to get that person into your audience, and how to keep the rest of the people out. Let the others go see a session that’s more relevant for them, because if you don’t, they’re going to give you bad feedback. They’ll say your material was too junior or too senior. That doesn’t mean your material is bad – it means your abstract is bad, because it didn’t weed those people out of the audience to begin with.

To help, I’ve written a set of profiles for people who attend database conferences. As you read these, think about whether they should sit in your audience.

Developer Profiles

The real goal of an abstract is to keep people out. Oliver Klozoff is a fresh-out-of-college developer. He majored in Computer Science because he thought it’d make him rich. He has no passion for technology – his skills are more C– than C++. He lucked into his first job as a C# developer, is learning his way around Visual Studio, but he’s never opened SQL Server Management Studio. His code barely works on his own machine, let alone in production, and he has no concept of whether the code is fast or slow. He’s just finished his first application with LINQ and doesn’t understand why people think SQL Server is hard – mostly because he thinks LINQ handles it all for him.

Seymour Butz’s business card says he’s a Senior Developer, and that’s mostly true. He’s got five years of experience, but he’s the only developer at his shop who hasn’t quit due to the abusive managers. He enjoys what he does, reads programming blogs every now and then, and does a pretty good job of catching exceptions in his code. He can identify when a query is running slow, and he’s comfortable adding tables and views in SSMS, but he relies on the Database Tuning Advisor to add indexes for him. He doesn’t know whether 10 indexes on his tables are good or bad, but he’d like to learn.

Amanda Hugginkiss is the sharpest of the C#. She’s one of those people who was born to develop. She was contributing to open source projects before she got her high school diploma, and by the time she dropped out of college, she’d coded for three different startups. She documents her code even though it explains itself, and she writes unit tests before she starts coding. She knows when to use LINQ, when to switch into stored procedures, and how to read a basic execution plan. Every employer wants Amanda Hugginkiss.

Database Developer Profiles

Mike Rotch used to be a Java developer, but he gradually moved into database development. His company builds Java apps with a SQL Server back end (yes, it actually happens) and he was always the first guy to understand whether problems were due to Java or the database. It’s not that he’s a SQL pro – he’s just naturally curious, enjoys learning, and knows how to use Google. He’s process-oriented: when there’s a problem, he troubleshoots methodically. He’s comfortable writing T-SQL, reading execution plans, and makes good judgment calls about when to add an index or when to fix the query.

Jacques Strap is the kind of guy you want around when things start to get dangerous. He’s fresh out of the field – well, maybe “fresh” would be the wrong word. Let’s be honest: his code smells. He used to be a salesman, but he kept writing more and more Crystal Reports for the sales managers, and next thing you know, his stuff was all mission-critical. He understands what data means to the business, and he’s able to think like a user. He knows how to prioritize, which is good and bad: his first priority was satisfying the business report needs, and his last priority was making it run fast. As a result, he’s got thousands of lines of T-SQL in production stored procedures, but none of them are quick. Nevertheless, he’s got a never-say-die attitude, and the business people love him. He wants to look like a hero in their eyes.

Database Administrator Profiles

Hugh Jass was working happily in his cube as a systems administrator for years until the company decided to buy SharePoint. They handed him the DVDs, told him to get it implemented, and didn’t give him any training or consulting budget. He did typical Microsoft installs – setup-next-next-next-finish – and things started humming along. He turned his back, and next thing you know, he’s an accidental DBA, and all 1,000 company employees are storing documents in SharePoint. He isn’t comfortable in SSMS, let alone T-SQL or DMVs, but he knows the bejeezus out of hardware and Windows. He knows there’s a problem because CPU is averaging 95%, the hard drives are smoking, and the users are whining, but he doesn’t understand what’s going on inside the black box of SQL.

Drew P. Wiener loves to say that he’s got ten years of experience as a DBA, but what he doesn’t realize is that it’s the same one year over and over. He’s been managing the same twenty SQL Servers the whole time, not really improving anything dramatically, just making sure the trains run on time. He’s got one cluster and one transactional replication setup, so he puts clustering and replication on his resume, but he doesn’t really understand what makes them tick or how to fix them if they explode. He’s perfectly comfortable with T-SQL, but hasn’t learned the new stuff like CTEs or TVPs – he just doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Panel Discussion

Ivana Tinkle can take a quick look at a server and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. She’s mastered Ozar’s Hierarchy of Needs, and now she’s teaching her junior DBAs how to do the same. All her servers are well-protected, stable, and part of a master plan. She attends one or two conferences per year, and she’s getting ready to put on her first presentation for the local user group. She knows what she knows, and knows what she doesn’t know – but she’s on a mission to reduce the latter.

Manager Profiles

Yes, managers actually attend conferences.

Rolo McFlurry is a sweet, lovable guy who means well, but he’s incredibly destructive. He knows enough to be dangerous, and he doesn’t know just how dangerous. He kills SPIDs when they block his queries, remembers the SA password because it’s the same as the Windows admin password, and he violates all the standards while he tells his DBA team to enforce them. He hasn’t even begun to track metrics like uptime or data size. He just wants the CEO’s reports to run fast, and he wants to go home at 5:00 PM. He attends conferences to get out of the office, and whenever he sees the presenter doing something, he’ll try the exact same thing in production when he gets back. He loves pointing out how the MVP presenters all run as SA, so why shouldn’t he?

Ollie Tabooger spent years in the trenches, working his way up as a database administrator at a global financial firm. After fifteen years of dedicated service, managing first Sybase, then SQL Server, then a little Oracle too, he became a team manager. He has a dozen very talented direct reports who all respect his dedication and technical prowess. He attends conferences to see what’s coming next, to learn new tricks to manage SQL Server at large scales, and to network with vendors who all want to get into his pants. (For his wallet, you understand.) He likes sessions that explain the why, but not the how – he hates seeing demos.

The Moral of the Story

Don’t ever, ever, ever say your session has something for everyone. You might get a lot of attendees, but your evaluations will be spectacularly poor because the attendees will feel like you wasted their time.

If you liked this, check out How to Deliver a Killer Technical Presentation, Dealing with Presentation Criticism, and How to Pick Blog & Presentation Topics.

Brent Ozar

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Building a Better BrentOzar.com Blog

Written on July 19, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

I’m so proud. My baby’s all grown up now. When I started BrentOzar.com more than ten years ago, I never would have dreamed it’d turn into a consulting company, but here we are. Getting from Point A to Point B is hard as hell, though, so today I’ll give you a peek behind the scenes at some of the stuff we’ve been up to lately.

Adding Pull Quotes

I love to dress up – my blog posts, that is. Pictures are good, but for years, I’ve wanted to do pull quotes: standalone sentences that pop out visually from the rest of the text. They grab a reader’s attention, show off your fancy punchlines, and save them from the tedious monotony of your boring writing. Some posts just don’t lend themselves well to pictures, and sometimes you’re just really proud of a particular line. (No, I’m not proud of most of the lines I write here. In fact, I’m going to go cower in shame right now.)

There’s a really good WordPress plugin for pull quotes, but it doesn’t work for people who subscribe to the blog via RSS or email. We’ve got thousands of RSS and email subscribers, so that wasn’t good enough.

Or at least, mine. Out of nowhere, Kendra Little (b|t) emailed a picture of a magazine article to discuss the typography layout, and it hit me – I could use pictures of text instead. Hard-core web designers will point out that using pictures of text is very bad form: the text isn’t searchable, doesn’t work with screen readers, and kills kittens. I’m not really a cat guy, and the text doesn’t really need to be searchable, and the results are just so damn gorgeous.

To create image-based pull quotes, fire up your picture editor of choice (Photoshop, Gimp, or MS Paint for the Access guys) and lay out your text. Save it as a PNG (gets you image compression with minimal loss) and upload it just like any other picture you’d use in your blog editor. Presto, beautiful pull quotes.

With this method, you can use any font and layout without the hassles of CSS and web-friendly fonts.

Refining Past Posts and Combining Series

Through a lot of careful analysis, I’ve learned that multi-part series posts just don’t work well over time: people randomly stumble upon a single article in the series, but they don’t start at Part 1 and click all the way through the end. I fixed this by combining the posts: I take the Part 1 post, merge the other blog posts into it with copy/paste (yes, I plagiarize my own work) and turn Part 1 into a comprehensive, long post that covers the subject start to finish.

Between combining posts and refining & expanding content as described in my post how to find buried treasure with Google Analytics, I’ve put a lot of work into some of my past stuff. A few examples include:

Perfmon tutorial
How to start a blog (now updated with my current plugins)
SQLIO tutorial about how to test storage subsystems

On some of those pages, I went so far as to embed a contact-us form with Contact Form 7 directly on the page. This represents another step in the evolution of BrentOzar.com. In the beginning, I begged people to contact me. Years later, I ripped out that wording because I was getting overwhelmed with homework questions, and just let people leave comments when they were really struggling.

These days, since we offer consulting services, we’re trying to gracefully offer help where we can. If somebody has a question we can answer in 5 minutes or less, generally we just do it for free. If it’s something that would take an hour of dialog, we need to bill for that. The stuff in between is probably best handled on sites like StackOverflow.com and DBA.StackExchange.com.

Another Social Media Experiment

Social Media Buttons

We’d tried social media toolbars like Wibiya before, and I just wasn’t impressed. Web site metrics didn’t improve (although we did get a big rush of Facebook fans) and the toolbar looked spammy. However, with the launch of Google+ and Facebook Video Chat, we decided to give social media buttons another shot. We added the Twitter, Facebook, and Google +1 buttons right under the post titles.

Did it work? I’m not sure yet – this one’s too early to tell right now, but early results from Backtweets look positive. I’ll keep an eye on the metrics and see if it matters.

Public List of GoCodes

When we work with clients, some issues pop up really frequently. I constantly have to refer people back to certain posts. Rather than trying to remember some obscure URL or hoping that an outside link service doesn’t go down, I used the WordPress GoCodes plugin to create my own list of useful short links. This way, when someone wants to learn more about how to do backups, I can just say, “Go to BrentOzar.com/go/backup and I’ve got my best practices and posts on there.”

This set of specialty landing pages is something I’ll be putting more work into over time. We write a lot about our favorite topics, and we need to group together our best past posts by topic into a single resource page per topic.

Added Author Info Section

BrentOzar.com has four authors now, but we kept getting confused readers complimenting me for a post that someone else wrote. The sweet WP About Author plugin fixes that elegantly by adding the post’s author profile to the bottom of every blog post:

WP About Author Plugin Profile

It even works on the main page of the blog, and you can customize which pages show it. On a single-author blog, you probably only want it on your single-post pages. That way, when people arrive at your post via a Google search, they learn a little more about you and might remember you by name later.

The one drawback is that it doesn’t show up in the RSS feeds. <sigh> A blogger’s work is never done.

Brent Ozar

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Which Sessions Will YOU Send to the SQL PASS Summit?

Written on July 15, 2011 by Kendra Little in Writing and Presenting

It’s votin’ time, folks. SQL PASS 2011 community sessions have been selected by the Program Committee, but there are still five slots up for grabs. Those five sessions are up to you, the community.

My Potential Session – “No More Bad Dates: Best Practices for Working With Dates and Times”

Vote for me and save this kitten.

Your votes could send me to speak at SQL PASS!

My “No More Bad Dates” session is up for community choice. Here’s the abstract for my session:

Dates and times seem simple at first. Kendra Little will show you there’s more to it than you think. She’ll give you five best practices that will help you select the right temporal data type, avoid common issues, and use the most effective techniques to aggregate data. She’ll also explain painful problems with query performance and how to avoid them. Choose wisely: the correct types and high performing data access logic will scale well and save development and administrative time.

Why I’d Like to Present This Session

This presentation surprises people. Dates and times are tricky, and they’re significantly evolving. We got some seriously big improvements in SQL 2008 and more cool changes are coming in SQL Server Denali.

I would love the opportunity to share these changes with the community.

How to Vote for SQL PASS Community Choice Sessions

Follow this link to the PASS Summit 2011 site. Log in with your existing account or create a new one. It should redirect you afterward to the voting page.

Then: vote!

Kendra Little

Kendra specializes in high availability and performance tuning. She is a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server-- the highest technical SQL Server Certification available. Kendra loves databases and software development more than long walks on the beach. Those cartoons in her blog posts? She draws 'em all. Read more and contact Kendra.

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What Makes a Good Conference Session or Keynote?

Written on May 23, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

One of our FreeCon Chicago brainstorming exercises was to talk about what makes a good training session, conference session, or keynote speech. I started it by asking a few questions.

Sign of a bad session: all the cool kids would rather stay out in the hallway.

Does a successful session require a packed room? I was so happy to hear the attendees answer, “No.” A packed room has absolutely nothing to do with the success of a session: a packed room has to do with the success of the conference schedulers picking the right room size for a given topic, abstract selection committee picking the right abstract for the audience, and speaker’s marketing ability in getting the word out. You can’t even judge success by the population in the room at the end of the session, either, because many attendees won’t leave mid-session out of sheer politeness.

Does a successful session require demos? The attendees universally answered, “NO!” The best explanation I’ve seen comes from a post Jeremiah shared in our community newsletter: Why how is boring and how why is awesome by Benjamin Pollack. No, most audiences don’t really want to watch you click and type and fix typos, but even if they did, conference rooms are horrible, awful places to watch demos. You can’t see the screen well, you can’t take notes fast enough, and you need a step-by-step reference that you can follow along later anyway. That’s not to say presentations with demos aren’t successful – indeed, they can be. It’s just that demos aren’t required to be successful.

Does a successful session require slides? Again, the answer was simple: “NO!” We talked about some all-demo sessions that were spectacular, Buck Woody’s sessions where all he used was a whiteboard, and panel discussions. We even liked the Actor’s Studio style where a session is nothing more than a very well-conducted interview.

I have presentations that are on both extremes: my Virtualization & SAN Basics presentation is 100% slides, and my Blitz: SQL Server Takeovers presentation is 100% demos. Every now and then, a fellow presenter will come up to me afterwards and say (with more than a little disdain), “I noticed that you didn’t use any (slides/demos). Do attendees ever leave bad feedback about that?” I totally understand their point of view because presenters are used to certain delivery mechanisms, but instead of the tools, we need to focus on the storytelling. It’s a tough concept for us technology people to get because our very business is tools. Instead, we have to take a step back and ask the audience what they’re really here for. At FreeCon, the answer from the attendees was loud and clear.

A successful session requires one thing: engagement. Attendees have to feel that they’re interacting in some small way. They want eye contact from the presenter, but much more than that, they want to feel a sense of belonging and bonding with both the presenter and their fellow audience members. They want a session that engages their brain, shows them something interesting and new, and gives them something to talk about.

My Kind of Keynote

Think about how you engage at the ball game. Whether it’s our kids playing soccer or a visit to a baseball/basketball/football/drinking game, we engage. We talk back to the announcer on the loudspeaker, we yell at the players, and we share our feelings with the people sitting next to us. If we’re lucky, we interact directly with the players by catching balls or catching their eye as we sit courtside. We build up rituals like the seventh inning stretch.

Presentations are spectator sports. We pay for tickets (sometimes), root for the home speaker, share our thoughts on Twitter, and hope to catch a thrown t-shirt. Engagement gets harder as audiences get bigger, but it’s still possible. As I walked into my “Tuning T-SQL Step by Step” presentation at Connections Orlando this spring, I realized my session had been moved to the developer track, not the typical SQL Server track. When the big room filled up, I took a show-of-hands poll to see the mix of developers versus database administrators. Since it turned out to be a diverse audience, I engaged the audience throughout the presentation by pitting them against each other. I’d say things like, “Well, you developers know how those DBAs are – they’re control freaks, aren’t they?” I tried to pick on (and promote) both sides evenly so that everyone in the room would feel like I’d taken their side at least once.

If it’s a blowout or a bad session, we vote with our feet. When I first started going to conferences, I heard the experienced veterans say the same thing over and over: “I’m skipping the morning keynotes – they suck.” I understood the motivation – many of us partied late into the night – but in my wide-eyed naïveté, I showed up each morning hoping to see the home team knock it out of the park. Unfortunately, many of the keynotes I’ve attended have just plain sucked.

Which brings me to a question for you: what should we tell new speakers? What makes a good session or keynote?

Brent Ozar

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Dealing with Presentation Criticism

Written on March 28, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

I just had a champagne moment.

Dozens of good feedback forms, and one not-so-good one.

Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) blogged about having these champagne moments in his life, times when he was almost-but-not-quite-ready to pop the champagne open because he still wanted to take things higher. My standards aren’t quite so high – I recognize certain achievements as being champagne-worthy, and this is one of ‘em.

My presentation at SQLSaturday Chicago last weekend was probably one of the best presentation experiences I’ve ever had. To explain it, I need to step backwards through time starting with a pile of feedback forms. I’ve got a little stack of papers on my desk (pictured at right) from dozens of attendees. When I review feedback, I break it into two piles: good comments and bad comments. The pile on the left? All good. I got one and only one piece of negative feedback:

“Just OK. Only theory. Need to be more in depth and practical session.”

I can live with this because every single part of it is incorrect. Sounds horrible for me to say, but bear with me and I’ll break it down:

“Only theory” – nope, I’ve lived all of these lessons, and there’s nothing in this deck that I haven’t validated via experience.
“Need to be more in depth” – I can’t go into more depth when the session is only an hour long. The only way to go into more depth is to reduce the number of topics covered, and the abstract specifically explained the number of topics that would be covered.
“Need to be more practical” – I finished up with a checklist of things you need to do when you get back to the office and a set of links to do them. It simply doesn’t get any more practical than that without me visiting your office and doing it for you (and I’ll be happy to do that for a price, but you don’t get that for free at any conference.)

That’s the only single bad comment I got this time, and I’m fine with it. I consider this my most successful presentation so far, but it’s not because of the stack of good comments.

The Key to Getting Good Comments

Getting positive feedback on your presentations is really simple: get bad comments first, then make your presentations better. My stack of good comments today are the result of me constantly paying attention to yesterday’s bad comments and figuring out what I need to improve. Here’s a tour of some of the good comments I got this time, and how they came about.

“Great information I can use on Monday morning! The take home checklist is much appreciated!” – Recently I was going back through my notes from the MCM training and I noticed that I’d made a lot of notes about things I wanted to address with my own servers when I got back to work. It hit me – I was building a checklist. Why not finish up every presentation with a list of things the attendee should do when they get back to the office on Monday? Rather than recapping what I’d told ‘em, I gave them a list of things to do. This weekend’s presentation was the first one I finished that way, and it was a smash, generating a lot of good feedback.

"He'll be on in just one more minute..."

My Opening Act

“Brent O always gives a fun and informative presentation” – I don’t think you can present successfully with a sense of shame. I’ll wear a Richard Simmons costume to talk about weight stats – I mean wait stats – or I’ll show contortionist photos as I explain good filegroup design. Don’t take yourself seriously. Do you enjoy reading Books Online with all information and zero humor? My attendees sure don’t, and if I don’t keep things lively, they zone out. I keep watching my slides to see if I’ve got enough fun injected into my information. If I don’t have at least one fun slide for every 10-15 informational slides, I get nervous.

“Good presentation and humor and always down to earth.” – For me, being down to earth means that I try to identify with every person who asks a question. There are no stupid questions, because at some point in the past, I asked the exact same question. When I hear a question, I about the point in my career when I wondered the same thing, and I think about what was on my mind at the time. For example, at SQLSaturday Chicago, an attendee asked for clarifications about why we shouldn’t separate clustered indexes and nonclustered indexes onto separate filegroups. I’ve been there myself! I remember reading similar advice on the web, thinking it was a good idea, and applying it to some of my databases. It keeps me humble. Experience doesn’t mean I’m better than anybody else – it just means I’ve made more mistakes.

“Great content available online is good.” – More and more attendees are bringing wireless gadgets with ‘em. They’re bringing iPads with cellular data connections or they’re tethering their phones to their laptops, and they’re surfing the web during the presentation. It’s not enough to tell attendees that the slides and the code will be available sometime next week: they want it right freakin’ now. Before your presentation starts, create a page on your blog with your presentation resources. Put one or two links on there, and upload the PDF version of your slide deck. Give attendees a short, easy-to-remember URL with bit.ly or the WordPress GoCodes plugin. Good comments will ensue.

“Great approach to simplifying complex concepts” – Even though I don’t cook, I like watching the cooking show Good Eats by Alton Brown. He uses crazy props like a life-size cow made of foam to illustrate how science improves cooking. I don’t leave Good Eats with a degree in science, but I know more than I need to know in order to improve my cooking. (If I cooked.) I try to take that same approach with databases by teaching you what you need to know, yet not boring you with the minutiae that doesn’t actually improve your skills.

“More detail than expected which was excellent.” – When someone does want to know more than what’s on the screen, and if I’m running ahead of schedule, I’ll go deep or off-topic in order to satisfy questions. I have to balance the questions with the clock, so I also have to maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of links with more info. I use the WordPress GoCodes plugin to save my favorite resources on all kinds of topics. For example, if someone wants to know more about the file cache problems on Windows, it’s easy for me to remember BrentOzar.com/go/filecache instead of http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2009/02/06/microsoft-windows-dynamic-cache-service.aspx. Attendees love it when you can give a 30-90 second answer to a question, plus write a whiteboard link for much more detail about the topic.

“Only complaint is that Brent only had one session.” – On the surface this is an awesome comment, but there’s a dark side. As a presenter, if you see this as a negative comment and you try to get more sessions, you’re doin’ it wrong. Relax and enjoy the event as an attendee. Network with your other presenters, because they’re like your coworkers. I only had one session this time, so I was able to veg out before my session, help another presenter get feedback, and then start my session relaxed and focused. That brings me to the next phase of our backwards-in-time journey.

The Keys to the Zen Energy Balance

Me at SQLSaturday Chicago

As I took questions from leaving attendees, Allen White asked me, “Did you know you started about fifteen minutes early, and you ended about fifteen minutes early?” Yep – perfect timing for length on that one. I’d started early because there was literally no space left in the room! With fifteen minutes before go-time, people were standing in the aisles and sitting on the floor. No sense in waiting around for more folks to come in, because no one else could have crammed in without filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Allen himself had taken the presenter’s chair – not that I would ever present sitting down anyway. I’m one of those running-around-wildly presenters. I’m one espresso short of screaming, “DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!”

During the presentation, I’d had a good balance of energy and calmness. I’d relaxed before my presentation by sitting through Erin Stellato‘s good presentation on baselining, and I’d snuck out about fifteen minutes before the end in order to grab coffee. Over the years, I’ve figured out that a shot of adrenaline – err, caffeine – helps get me upbeat, attentive, and focused right before a presentation starts. When the presenter’s zippy, the attendees are zippy. I sat back in her session, drank my zoom juice, and opened up my slide deck.

The moment Erin Stellato finished her presentation and the room’s doors opened, suddenly attendees started flooding in. People had been waiting outside to claim a seat. I hustled up to the podium because I like hooking up my laptop right away to make sure everything works, and when I looked up, the room was chock full of nuts. That’s a fantastic feeling for a presenter, knowing that people really, really wanna see this particular topic. Despite a lack of caffeine and music, I found myself totally energized and pumped up, and that wasn’t anywhere near what I expected.

See, months earlier, when SQLSaturday crew picked this abstract, I was actually disappointed. This wasn’t my favorite presentation. Sure, I was happy with it, but it wasn’t the kind of presentation that really made me proud to be a presenter. But whaddya know – it ended up being one of my best presenting experiences.

This week, I’m presenting at Connections for the first time, and then it’ll be time to read comments again, and keep sluggin’ through the bad ones. I look at presenting the same way I look at database administration: being good means you’re never good enough, and you’re constantly trying to find the next way to up your game. That’s what Scott Adams meant in his champagne moments blog post, and he’s absolutely right.

But I’m still drinking champagne as I write this. Cheers!

If you liked this post, you might also like some of my past posts about my quests:

Brent Ozar

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How to Get Paid to Take a Cruise

Written on March 7, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

As a database expert, I regularly travel to speak at conferences. When I travel, I try to time my trips to take advantage of other opportunities to see sights, visit friends, or relax. When my speaking schedule put me in South Florida last summer, I thought I’d take a cruise out of Miami afterwards.

SQLCruise 2010 Classroom

Suddenly I wondered, “What if I offered training on board the cruise ship and got paid for it?”

Since other database people would be in Miami for the same user group event, I thought maybe I could entice them on board for training whenever the ship was at sea. I’d charge $300 for the training – a relative bargain for 10-14 hours of highly technical training, plus I could have plenty of side conversations about the attendees’ personal challenges with their databases. I didn’t want to book an entire boat – quite the opposite. I wanted a small, intimate group of just 15 people max who could hang out, build relationships, and learn cool stuff.

I fired off an email to a close friend of mine, Tim Ford, and we started SQLCruise.com. We sold out our first cruise, made a profit, and proceeded to start a series of cruises. If you’ve built a popular blog, this is a great way to monetize your blog by charging for a premium audience experience, and I’d like to share my experiences to help you do it too.

Why People Would Pay Us for Training

For those of you who are new around here, Tim and I both write blogs about Microsoft SQL Server, a popular enterprise database platform. Over 250,000 people have signed up for the Professional Association for SQL Server, indicating a strong user base, and my blogs target highly technical users. I write about performance tuning issues, high availability, and disaster recovery. I’ve spoken at SQL Server events around the world, and my online events often draw over 1,000 live attendees. At the time we decided to launch the cruise, I had about 3,000 RSS readers and 5,000 Twitter followers.

My online brand revolves around the quality of my writing and presentations. I’ve won awards and high praise around the world for my sessions, including 2 of the top 10 sessions at the international PASS Summit. My audience already believes I’m delivering premium SQL presentations and articles, so I didn’t have to do a big marketing push to convince them that I could deliver good content. They knew I could present, but I had a different challenge: getting them to pay for training aboard a cruise ship.

SQLCruisers ordering drinks on the back deck

Training on a Cruise Ship? Really?

Cruise costs compare very favorably with typical conference hotels. I usually end up spending $1,300-$1,500 for a week of lodging and food when I attend a conference, but I can get a 4-night cruise for two for under $1,000. Conference organizers have huge costs for hotel meeting rooms and lunches, which cost way more than you might think. Much of conference prices come down to the room & food cost. Cruise lines don’t jack up the room and food prices, though – they’d rather use meetings as bait to get people on board the ship, then take money from them in other ways, like shore excursions, spa packages, and gambling in the casino.

Unfortunately, those last few phrases are also why managers think training aboard a cruise ship might be a joke – nothing more than an excuse to get together and party on the company dime. Since I wanted my attendees to get their training, travel, and cruise costs paid by their employers, I faced a challenge. I thought we had to market the cruise in a way that both cruisers and companies would appreciate.

We differentiated ourselves from traditional training conferences in two ways. First, we offered much longer sessions. Instead of a blizzard of one-hour sessions, we offered only 3-hour deep dive sessions. We wanted to spend much more time examining each topic so attendees came away with a solid explanation of the topic rather than a brief introduction. Second, we emphasized the relationship-building aspect of the cruise as much as the training itself. We capped attendance at 15 people, and we marketed the cruise as a chance to get to know the presenters in a very casual, all-access environment. Cruisers had the chance to ask for advice from me and Tim on any topic – their SQL Servers, their job challenges, or their personal brand.

Field trip to the beach

On our first cruise, we sold out all 15 spots a month before the cruise left port, and our cruisers told us they’d signed up for exactly the reasons we’d expected. They wanted longer sessions, and they wanted to build relationships with us. Even better, the cruise turned out to be a great way for them to build relationships with each other. Tim and I watched with joy as the junior SQL Server people talked shop with the more experienced ones, conversed about their challenges, and formed bonds.

Our Second Target Audience: Sponsors

As we built our marketing plan, we realized we had another target audience: sponsors! We were building an event that would generate a ton of buzz in the community. Even if SQL Servers couldn’t convince their bosses to pay for training aboard a cruise ship, we knew they’d be watching closely from ashore. We wanted to be the talk of the town – the kind of event you really wanted to attend, but probably couldn’t. We offered sponsorship positions to vendors because we hoped our event would be all over Twitter and blogs. Normally SQL Server vendors would never sponsor paid training classes for just a few attendees – they want to reach more people – but we hoped we had a unique message that would reach even non-attendees. The buzz about the event might be more valuable than the event itself.

The small size of the event made it an unusual sell for sponsors. Sponsors want to pay as little as possible in order to reach as many people as possible, but we were pitching a quiet, tight-knit event with a little over a dozen people. We wanted vendors to send representatives aboard the boat because they’d have the chance to build very close relationships with some of the most influential people in the SQL Server community. Our attendees were bloggers, presenters, and user group volunteers – people who wouldn’t ordinarily spend hours on end having drinks and relaxing on the beach with vendor employees. I saw this event as a really unique way to bring these diverse people together. On the first cruise, no vendor employees attended, but we convinced two to come on the next cruise, and four on the upcoming SQLCruise Alaska. I’m really excited to see what comes out of the 2011 cruise season.

SQLCruise 2010 docked in Mexico

We sold more sponsorship spots on the first cruise than we’d expected, and we were able to make a very (very) small profit. We didn’t make anywhere near as much money as we’d normally earn in our day jobs, but for us, the important part was that we were getting paid to have fun on a cruise. It wasn’t as relaxing as a vacation, though – in fact, it was hard work in the weeks leading up to the cruise.

Handling the Mechanics of Registration

I originally wanted to use EventBrite to handle registrations – it’s a site that lets you sell event tickets using their tools for registration and credit card processing. I really liked their ability to cap registration at exactly 15 tickets even if I wasn’t around to shut down registration, because I’m on the road and inaccessible a lot. My worst registration fear was that 20-25 people would register before I got the chance to shut off registration. However, I couldn’t deal with one showstopper – EventBrite doesn’t release the attendee funds to the event organizer until after the event is over. I needed the cruisers’ funds to organize travel for me & Tim and to get the swag. I wasn’t about to go thousands of dollars into the red gambling that I wouldn’t have a problem with EventBrite.

Instead, we handled registration with a WordPress contact form. As each person registered, we emailed them an invoice with a PayPal link for the registration fee. We kept track of the attendee details with a Google Docs spreadsheet, and as the event date got closer, we shared the spreadsheet with the cruisers so they could add in their travel details, excursion plans, and share rides to/from the airport. We used an email list so the cruisers could ask questions, and we found that most of the time, the other cruisers did the answering for us.

SQLCruisers Eating Ashore

Bonding Between the #SQLCruisers

The first round of cruisers shocked us by taking initiative in marketing the event too! Karen Lopez, one of the cruisers, got the event covered by IT Canada Weekly, and another attendee almost got us on a Seattle TV show. Our attendees’ willingness to help market our event surprised us so much that we weren’t able to keep up with demand! We had a full plate just trying to get our presentations ready for the cruise. Their efforts didn’t stop when they board the ship, either – they wanted to thank the sponsors for making the event possible, so they blogged and generated buzz even while we were at sea.

We think the small number of attendees was a big part of the event’s success. Long before boarding, the cruisers got to know each other via the mailing list and Twitter, thereby building close bonds. We know we could sell more spots on our next cruises, but we don’t want to sacrifice what made the event so special. At the same time, having a large number of watching but non-attending people also helped. SQLCruise generated great tweets and excitement in the SQL Server community, and that enabled our sponsors to get their moneys’ worth.

Things We Learned Along the Way

The most disappointing lessons all came from the legal side of SQLCruise. We started the event without requiring sponsor contracts because we’d never used them in our user group transactions with sponsors. We sent the sponsors a list of sponsorship packages, they picked one, and they sent us payment – case closed. By the second cruise, though, we realized we had to start getting sponsors to sign on a legally defensible bottom line to protect ourselves from changing whims.

SQLCruise swag bag in Key West

We need to institute a non-refundable deposit due immediately to reserve a spot in the training, too. We managed to sell out SQLCruise Alaska in just twelve hours, but after the initial sellout, we had one cancellation after another. As of this writing, we’ve still got 3 spots left. That sucks as an event organizer because you only get one chance to do a first push to fill up the cruise. Now I’m faced with mounting another marketing campaign to fill up those last few slots.

We even need to rework our relationships with the cruise lines. We’ve faced some hurdles getting the comp rooms and meeting rooms that we were promised by the cruise lines, and because our group isn’t huge, we’ve even had our meeting rooms downgraded in order to make room for a bigger group. (Damn you, weddings.)

Bon Voyage!

I can’t complain because as this blog post goes live, I’m on board the Norwegian Dawn sailing away from Miami along with a dozen cool SQL Server people. It’s been hard work getting to this point, and it hasn’t been all sunshine and margaritas, but looking back it’s been worth every moment. I’m really proud of what we’ve built, and I’d love to see more bloggers take on special events like this to help build up communities around their blogs. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from organizing your own event – and indeed, there’s people like me who would love to share our knowledge with you. Maybe your event will be a cruise – or maybe it will be a retreat, a Grand Canyon camping trip, or a wine country tour. It’s not just about making money – it’s about building close relationships with your readers and your virtual friends. Just as hundreds of volunteers organize their own user group and SQLSaturday events around the world every year, you can do the same for traincations. Talk to your close friends, decide where you want to go, build a plan, and open it up to the public. I’ll drink to your success.

Hmmm, I wonder if the meeting room staff will bring in room service margaritas….

Brent Ozar

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The Joys of Tech Editing

Written on February 10, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

I like tech editing because it sharpens my skills. I think of it as honing my BS detector. When I read something that surprises me, I’m forced to go dig much deeper into SQL Server to find the real truth. I can’t just call someone’s work wrong – I have to be able to prove it, and that teaches me things.

I learned something today, too:

When Documents Go Bad

Wow. High score!

Brent Ozar

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InfoBoom: My Experiment in a Different Blogging Voice

Written on January 28, 2011 by Brent Ozar in Writing and Presenting

Back in November, IBM’s InfoBoom contacted me about writing for them. Normally I turn down those kinds of requests because I’ve already got a platform for my voice (my blog), and I’m a freak about controlling ownership of my content. InfoBoom made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I stepped back and took another look.

InfoBoom’s slogan is, “Validate, network, and share with a community of respected midsize business leaders and experts just like you.” That’s very different from how things operate here at BrentOzar.com, and the more I read the content, the more I realized I had to write differently. I decided to approach it as an experiment: what if I tried to write more like someone who gets paid to write? What if I was John Dvorak or Robert X. Cringely back before they jumped the shark? What if I purposely tried to write things to get people engaged?

Over the last two months, I’ve written articles like:

Systems Administrator Barbie – “Performance tuning is hard. Let’s go shopping!”
When Should You Change Hypervisors? – If you’re unhappy with VMware or Hyper-V, the problem is probably you.
CIOs Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – One of my clients puts every new server in virtualization, but doesn’t tell the end users about it.
Why Azure VMs Will Fail – I sincerely believe this is a total non-starter in its current form.
Virtualization at the North Pole – I interview Santa’s CIO, and it turns out elves love green computing.
How to Benchmark Cloud Databases – You go to market with the database you have, not the database you want.
Virtualizing Databases: Too Big to Fail? How to know when a SQL Server is too big for virtualization.

Now it’s time to take a breather and think about what I learned from my experiment.

Writing is hard work. My peak writing hours are 7AM to 10AM, and when I’m in the zone with nothing else going on, I can bang out two good posts. The problem is that other things are going on – especially these days when I’m doing consulting. I’m booked 2-3 months in advance right now, and I get new requests from existing clients all the time. “Can you just remote in and look at this one thing?” Every day, I have to choose between consulting and blogging, so blogging quite literally costs me money.

I can’t succeed without scheduling blog posts. Since I don’t get as much blogging time as I’d like, I usually schedule my stuff to publish in advance. I’ve got 2-3 weeks of blog posts scheduled at BrentOzar.com ahead of time, but InfoBoom’s blog platform didn’t have a scheduler. I ended up writing posts ahead of time in my own WordPress, but saving them as drafts, and then publishing them on InfoBoom manually. (I have this same issue over at SQLskills, which is why you don’t see me writing as often as I should over there either.)

I enjoy writing in a different voice. Looking at the collection, I’m really proud of what I wrote in the last two months at InfoBoom. It’s good stuff. Even though I like it, I wouldn’t have written those same posts here at BrentOzar.com. Writing for a different site with a different audience encouraged me to take a different look at topics. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about these posts that wouldn’t have worked at BrentOzar.com, but if I was writing for this site, I wouldn’t have ended up with those posts.

Other people are crafting their messages too. After writing a couple of InfoBoom posts, I started paying more attention to what other bloggers there were saying, and I started questioning why they wrote what they wrote. For example, when a tech journalist writes a post titled “The Social Media Hangover is Upon Us,” what’s his real motivation there? What’s going on behind the scenes that makes him want to write that, and what does he stand to gain by writing it? Because writing is such hard work, there has to be a gain involved in writing at sites like this, so what is it? I enjoy that mental exercise – not just reading their work, but parsing their personality.

There’s nothing wrong with using a different voice here. Working with InfoBoom encouraged me to step outside of my usual comfort zone and bring a different kind of post to BrentOzar.com – my Consulting Lines series. I figured that even though most of you aren’t consultants, you could benefit from hearing me talk like a consultant and kinda coach you into thinking like a consultant. I got my start on that more than a decade ago working as an internal consultant for a hotel company; they billed my time out to various hotels and departments, so I had to think about providing value for that billed amount. Ever since then, I’ve focused on providing value to my managers and coworkers. That sounds so sleazy, and I’ve never wanted to write anything sleazy here, but the reality is that focusing on value really works. It got me to where I am in my career, and me sharing it can help you too, so I just gotta find a non-sleazy way of doing it.

Brent Ozar

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