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

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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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

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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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

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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Time to take a look back at what happened in 2010.  Turns out I was pretty busy – here’s my favorite posts:

January:

• Book Week: The Politics of Writing Books – some of the challenges I faced writing for the first time.
• Book Week: The Economics of Writing Books – my favorite post in the series.  Explains why I’m not rich yet.
• LiveMeeting Presentation Tutorial Video
• SQL Azure FAQ – hard to believe it’s been less than a year since this product went commercially live.
• How I Got Here – part of a meme discussing the 3 things that brought me to that point of my career.  When I wrote that post, I was still working for Quest Software as an evangelist.
• Should We Hold the PASS Summit in Seattle? – the PASS leadership sent out a survey asking.  I (along with the majority of members) said no.  Spoiler from the future: the PASS leadership didn’t care what we thought anyway, and they decided to hold it in Seattle for the foreseeable future.
• Book Review: The Secrets of Consulting – my favorite book this year.

February:

• Top 10 Reasons MS Access Still Doesn’t Rock – some jackwagon bragged about the 10 reasons it rocked, and I just couldn’t hold my fingers still when I read that nonsense.
• How to REALLY Compress Your Backups – how we were doing it at StackOverflow.
• Working With Recruiters
• Why I Always Bill By The Hour – written when my consulting work was still only side gigs, and now that I consult full time, I believe even more in this.

March:

• I Tackled the MCM Program – I wrote a bunch of blog posts about the whole experience, blogging as I went through the program.  Spoiler from the future: I passed.
• Plagiarism, Inspiration, and John Dunleavy – in a year of rampant plagiarism, this guy was by far and away the worst.
• Proposed PASS Summit Speaking Requirements – I continue to bang this drum every time I talk to the PASS program folks.
• Tuning Transactions and Meetings
• Who’s Your Target Audience?
• Dear Blog Author – tips for aspiring bloggers.
• Fusion-IO ioDrive Review – fast. Damn fast.
• 2 Features of SQL Server You Should Avoid – in which I compare index hints to crystal meth.

April:

• Rock Stars, Normal People, and You – if you only read one post off my list, it should probably be this one.
• How to Make Readers Forget About You – I discussed the problems with the PASS SQL Server Standard magazine.  Spoiler from the future: it folded.
• Top 10 Developer Mistakes That Won’t Scale – video of the presentation.
• Unveiled my Free Simple Twitter EBook – I haven’t updated this as often as I’d like, but it was a successful fun experiment.  Gets a few thousand downloads per month.
• April Fool’s: Switching to Cassandra

May:

• Announcing SQLCruise – I thought for sure we’d only get a couple of people to sign up.  Spoiler from the future: we sold out, and the cruisers loved it.
• NoSQL Basics for DBAs – not an April Fool’s joke.  Covers the basic concepts without spin.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Review – in which I compare R2 to Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster.
• 5 Things SQL Server Should Truncate
• Why I Pimp Our Book
• Why You’re Not Telecommuting – why you rarely find work-from-home jobs on the intertubes.

June:

• I Joined SQLskills – I truly loved what I was doing at Quest Software, and I thought life couldn’t get any better, but as it turns out, it could.
• Four People Won Free SQLCruises – this just blew me away.  Between the new job and the first SQLCruise, I was tied up for a while, so blogging subsided.

July:

• Edward Tufte Wants to Change Everything – my review of his how-to-present presentation.
• Finding Free Pictures for Posts & Presentations – using Creative Commons.

August:

• GTD: Why Things Have Been Quiet Around Here – when I decided to make the big switch into consulting full time, I was terrified that I’d be eating ramen noodles for the first six months.  As a result, I took every possible gig that came my way, including more travel than I would have preferred.  When I finally figured out I wasn’t going to starve to death, things got a lot better, and my work/life balance returned.
• Jeremiah Peschka Joined Quest – and a bunch of other people started getting paid for community work in 2010 including Tom LaRock, Aaron Bertrand, Colin Stasiuk, and another player who is yet to be named.
• Why I’m Disappointed in the PASS Election Process

September:

• Find Slow Queries with sp_WhoIsActive – demo video of the coolest admin script out there.  Spoiler from the future: it won awards, too.
• SQL Servers in Virtualization: Don’t Touch That Maxdop – one of the reasons tuning SQL Servers really is different under virtualization.
• How to Buy Your First Mac
• How I Make Coffee And Servers – yet another cheerleading article about virtualization.

October:

• SQL Server on Power-Saving CPUs – this continues to bite people in the rear.
• Why I’m Sending My Clients to Your Blog
• PowerPoint 2011 Presenter View – one of the coolest Office features continues to get even better.
• My Bucket List

November:

• Changes to the Microsoft Certified Master Program – the biggest reason I left Quest.  If I’d have stayed there, I wouldn’t have been able to do paid training courses with as much flexibility as I can do with SQLskills.
• SQLCruise 2011 Registrations Open – Tim and I planned two cruises, an Alaska one and a Miami one.  Spoiler from the future: Alaska sold out in under 12 hours!  Still some spots open for Miami though.
• My Latest Experiment: Free-Con – like a conference pre-con, except, uh, free.  And we focused more on being a better blogger than on the technical side of the event.
• What I’m Telling My Clients About SQL Server Denali
• My Thoughts on SQL Server Denali AlwaysOn/HADRON – it rocks.
• My Thoughts on Microsoft Atlanta – it sucks.
• Plagiarism Week: Caught Another One – part of a whole series.  Spoiler from the future: he took the blog down despite defending his actions in the comments.

December:

• Twelve Days of SQL Series – my FreeCon attendees picked their favorite blog posts of the year, and I picked my favorites from the FreeCon folks.
• My PASS Summit Speaker Feedback – I was honored to be named a top-1o speaker again this year.
• Stop Tuning Your Queries – and look at the bigger picture.
• Interview with Jeremiah Peschka and Buck Woody – because this year Buck switched to Azure and Jeremiah switched to NoSQL (including a resignation from the PASS Board of Directors)
• Thoughts on Recording SQL MCM Videos – behind-the-scenes notes on the challenges of being the presenter.
• Virtualization at the North Pole – in which I interview Santa’s Chief Information Officer.
• Gave Away 10 iPads and Red Gate SQL Monitor – almost got 500 comments on this one blog post alone!

In addition to the blogging, I snuck in some travel photos:

• January – Caribbean cruise with Mom
• June – New Orleans for TechEd
• August – SQLCruise Miami
• September – Alaska cruise with Erika, Dad, and Caryl (my stepmom)
• October – New York City
• November – Seattle for PASS Summit
• November – Niagara Falls
• December – Washington DC

Whoa.  Looking back at this list, I’m surprised I wrote so many posts that I’m actually proud of, and the second half of the year was especially challenging.  I’m no longer paid directly to blog – as a consultant, I only get paid when I’m billing clients.  I’m blogging now because I really love doing it, and because it helps bring in new clients.  I’m tickled pink every time I get an email saying, “I liked your blog post about ___, and we were wondering if you could help us out with this problem we’re having.”

Blogging: win friends and influence customers.  Remind me again why you’re not doing it?  Oh, that’s right, you’re so busy working for that company you don’t even really like and who didn’t give you a raise again this year.  When you get tired of that, read my favorite post from this year – Rock Stars, Normal People, and You.  There’s a whole community of people who want to see you succeed, and we want to help.  Come join the community in 2011!

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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