Every year, Microsoft hosts an MVP Summit event at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. MVPs pay their own airfare to get to the event, but once you’re there, Microsoft picks up the tab for food & hotels. MVPs have to share a room, and I think that’s fine because it emphasizes the community portion of the event. By the time you’re an MVP, you should know at least one person well enough to share a hotel room with ‘em.

Last week, I attended my first MVP Summit and loved it. You know those people in your office who always know about the coolest web sites, phone apps, and software programs before everybody else? The ones who know a million shortcut ways to do things faster and easier? Over a thousand of those people were in Redmond last week, walking around from one meeting room to another, sharing their knowledge and excitement.

And you know those people who have the highest standards for software and infrastructure? The ones who always seem to say, “That’s not good enough – go back and build it again, but this time here’s how to do it better.” Those people were in Redmond too, and perhaps not surprisingly, they gave Microsoft a lot of that kind of feedback. “Product X isn’t good enough,” they’d say, “and you need to build it again, only this time add more cowbell.” If you were going to send community representatives to Microsoft to speak on your behalf, MVPs are a great group of people to send.

And you know those people who have really strong opinions about technology?  They were hanging out in Redmond hallways having wild discussions, challenging each other in new ways.  Sean McCown and I had a loud, passionate debate about database mirroring, log shipping, and replication.  Think about that for a second – when was the last time you had a passionate debate about high availability?  And no, arguing about whether or not Access is highly available does not count.

What Happens at the MVP Summit

The MVP Summit puts MVPs in touch with the product groups.  We get to ask questions about upcoming technology, and Microsoft gets to ask us if they’re doing it right.  It’s really good for relationship-building on both sides.  In some sessions, the development groups asked – and took – a lot of feedback about how specific features could work better.  I had to pinch myself and say, “Am I really getting a voice in what’s coming in SQL Server?  Am I really going to see the product change in the next release?”  Sure, there’s Microsoft Connect, but I never really felt like Connect requests got taken seriously.  And heck, for all I know, the feedback in these sessions may not be taken seriously either.

Attendees got a lot of future-direction information that helps them focus on where their career should go next.  After a couple of sessions, I found myself saying, “Knowing ____, now I won’t invest any of my time learning ____, and I’ll focus on learning ____ instead.”  Now I understand how people can bring out books and training so fast.  It’s not enough to play with the CTP releases the day they come out – you need even more heads-up advance warning than that to produce quality content, and the MVP Summit can provide that.

The most useful thing about the Summit for me wasn’t the sessions, though.  My favorite moments were talking with Buck Woody in the hallway, having breakfast with my MVP lead Ryan Bolz, and getting face-to-face time with my SQL peeps that I don’t get to see often enough.  Next year, I’ll do two things different; I’ll attend more non-SQL sessions like SharePoint and Visual Studio, and I’ll create my own side sessions before and after the MVP events.  I’m thinking about organizing a SQL breakfast on the first morning because so many East Coast folks were sitting around bored at 6am.

It wasn’t all unicorns and candy, though.

The M Doesn’t Stand for Mature

Before I was an MVP, I got so pissed off about MVPs who would tweet things like, “I’m seeing cool stuff, but I can’t tell you because it’s NDA.” Now that I’m on the other side, I have even less tolerance for that. Sure, MVPs see cool things, but they’re not going to be in production for months or even years, so why breed resentment with the public?  Stunningly, some absolute boneheads go so far as to violate their NDA by tweeting the confidential news:

The First Rule of MVP Club

It gets even worse.  We had at least one incident where an MVP (not a SQL Server one, either) got carried away at a party and screwed around with someone else’s Twitter account.  Stunts like this hurt everyone’s reputation.  You might think that MVPs are the cream of the professional crop, and that these kinds of things wouldn’t happen in such a group of consummate professionals.  You’d be wrong.

If you want to get the MVP award, you don’t need maturity and good interpersonal skills.  But if you want to stay one….

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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Here’s my bookmarked links for September 25th through October 2nd:

SQL Server, Cloud, and Tech Links

• Viva la Famiglia! – Brad Schulz shows how to use T-SQL to determine family relations. This is freakin’ awesome.
• PASS Board 2009 Slate of Candidates – Candidates are Brian Moran, Jeremiah Peschka, Matt Morollo and Thomas LaRock.
• PASS Elections and UStream | SQLRockstar – Tom LaRock is on the ballot again this year for the PASS Board of Directors, and you can ask him questions live in a video chat.
• Vote for Mr. LaRock – Grant Fritchey, author of SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Distilled, endorses Tom LaRock for PASS Board.
• Off-Hours Work: A Guide For Managers – If you have to rally the troops to work after hours, here’s how to do it with minimal morale loss.
• Interview with Kevin Kline – Tom LaRock interviews the former president of PASS.
• One Million Pageviews – StackOverflow hits the one-million-pageviews-per-day milestone. And yes, the back end is just one single SQL Server on relatively cheap commodity hardware with local disks, not SAN.
• HOW TO: Get Started with Google Wave – I think I’m the only guy who’s not jumping up and down clapping about Wave. I think it’s technically awesome, but it doesn’t solve challenges that I can’t solve right now with other methods. I’m going to ride this one out (get it – ride – wave – okay, maybe not) and wait a couple of months to see if it has staying power. (This from a guy who signed up for Twitter the instant he saw it years ago.)
• ROI from MCM: A look back 6 months later. – A Microsoft Certified Master talks about the changes it’s had on his billing rates and negotiations.
• YES WE CAN!!! – Jen McCown’s announcement about winning the SQLServerPedia Dream Trip contest. Very cool.
• DPM 2010 Beta is available now – Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager is a very different way of backing up your databases (among many other things) and I’m interested to see what they brought in this new release. Says “can backup SQL servers with ~700-800 DBs” – makes me wonder what that bottleneck is.
• The ABCs of Management Studio Shortcuts – List of keyboard shortcuts for SSMS. Control+I is a neat trick.
• The old INNER JOIN syntax vs. the new INNER JOIN syntax – I got lucky – I started with the “new” syntax years ago and never looked back. It’s way better.
• Sessions for new DBAs at PASS – Bill Graziano suggests which sessions make sense for first-time attendees and new DBAs.
• Free Training in October at the Quest Connect vConference – Kevin Kline and I will be doing presentations and taking questions in our booth.
• Pre-Compiled Stored Procedures: Fact or Myth – Grant Fritchey plays Mythbuster.
• Inside Amazon’s Cloud: Just How Many Customer Projects? – An analyst estimated customers are launching 50,000 virtual servers a day on Amazon EC2.
• SQL Management Pack Survey – Live on Connect – Use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (the artist formerly known as MOM)? Now’s your chance to influence development of the SQL Server management pack.
• Google Docs OCR – Another example of how cloud computing changes everything. The more we move services like this into the cloud, the more we can find creative uses for the data.
• Strong Password Generator – Uses T-SQL code to generate strong passwords. Interesting example.
• Consolidation Planning – Mike Hillwig is looking for feedback on his server setups.
• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines – Lots of “ah-ha” moments about how to make your web site look better and attract more permanent visitors.
• SQL Server Best Practices: Guard the Backup Files – You know the deal: the only reason we do backups is so that we can do restores. Buck Woody talks more about it.
• First Look: Zipcar app for iPhone hits the road – Find nearby Zipcars with your iPhone, then unlock them. I gotta play with this now that I’m in a city with Zipcars.
• Windows 7 coming to netbooks in all its myriad forms – YES! We won’t have to put up with the bullshit 3-app “Starter Edition” on netbooks – you can get ‘em with any version of Windows 7.
• Random Gradient Wallpaper Generator – Does just what it says on the box. Windows only though.
• Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD – Talk about cutting edge – people are talking about running their virtual servers on SANs that are being deduped. That would reduce the storage footprint required for a lot of Windows machines, for example, that all share a lot of the same binaries.
• How do checkpoints work and what gets logged – By Paul Randal.
• No, I will not do your homework for you – When posting forum & StackOverflow questions, think about phrasing them in a way to make sure nobody thinks you’re posting homework assignments.
• SQLIOSim Parser by Jens Suessmeyer & Yours Truly – SQLIOSim pushes load through your SAN storage and can simulate SQL Server IO patterns. However, like SQLIO, the problem is interpreting the results, which get dumped out to text or XML. Now there’s a utility to make it easier.
• Mississippi leads the way: 3 MCM’s a requirement in State IT RFP – Mississippi is requiring Microsoft Certified Masters if a consulting company wants to compete for a particular project. Wow. Just wow.
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition and Virtualisation – When you use Enterprise Edition, you can install 4 OS guests for free. Andrew Fryer explains.
• Heard it from a friend who… heard it from a friend who… – Yet another hilarious blog posting from Colin, aka @BenchmarkIT. This guy’s on a roll. This time, he’s talking about a daisy chain of purity check info.
• Toys and Tools – Mike Hillwig’s favorite SQL Server utilities. (And yes, there’s a lot of Quest stuff in there, and no, I didn’t put him up to that.)

Writing, Blogging and Networking Links

• Books or Blogs: My Perspective – Scott Lowe, a published author, talks about whether or not writing books still make sense. I’d add that books force you to a higher level of technical accuracy due to the number of editors you have to get through.
• Tips for Networking at PASS – Great tips on how to meet fellow database administrators and why it can pay off.
• Shirts for Speakers? – Of everything in my closet, my very favorite shirt is my PASSCamp Germany polo with my name monogrammed on it. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Christoph and Oliver gave that to me. It made a huge impression, and I’m still really proud to wear it.
• 9 Ways to Make Your Writing More Compelling – Does what it says on the label.
• Tweet 2001: A Social Media Odyssey – OCDQ – Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality – A ton of links about how LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks can work for data people.

The Junk Drawer

• The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia « Copybot – Good way to blow an hour and learn stuff.
• Nine Workspaces Where Famous Folks Get Stuff Done [Workspaces] – Most of these are publicity shots, but they’re still useful to see how people like Steve Ballmer set up their offices.
• Penny Arcade! – The Distinction – What if football was an RPG? Wait – it is! Final Fantasy Football….
• Tokyo Preview: Honda EV-N concept is retro-adorable, has unicycle storage – Please, please build this car. Let the world have an electric car that has some semblance of personality.
• 9 Secrets of Truly Happy People – You don’t become happy by saying “Yes” to people in an effort to make them happy. You have to pay attention to yourself and your own needs too.
• Me, Darth Vader’s brother, Guy Kawasaki and the hijacker from The Usual Suspects. Just, you know, hanging out. – In which The Bloggess comes up with alternate versions of The Little Engine That Could, like “The little engine that can’t take a hint.”
• Eff You, Penguin – Not safe for work – uses funny animal photos with NSFW captions.
• Penny Arcade! – Love Bombs From On High – Jesus loves me, this I know, because he gave me Gyromancer and…

These bookmarks are automatically imported from my bookmarks at Delicious.com. If you’d like to get up-to-the-minute updates on what I’m bookmarking, you can subscribe to my bookmark RSS feed.

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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I ran an April Fool’s post about becoming a Microsoft Natural Keyboard MVP, and things spun a little out of control.  The MVP announcements actually did come out on April 1, so some folks saw the blog post (“I’m Finally a Microsoft MVP!”) and congratulated me without actually reading the article.  I think I caught most of ‘em to explain that it was a joke – but not everyone.  I’ve had several comments over the last couple of weeks asking why I wasn’t on the MVP directory, or why it’d taken me so long to get accepted.

No, I’m not an MVP.

And that’s totally and completely okay.

In my How to Start a Blog series, the very first thing I talk about is motivation: are you blogging to make money, to get recognized, or for your career?  I stress over and over that I’m doing it to help people, and to further my career.  If I was doing it for recognition, I would have done a lot of things differently along the way.

How the MVP Process Works: Mysteriously

I’ve heard people complaining that it doesn’t seem to make sense who gets approved for MVP and who doesn’t.  In my case, I was told by a few MVPs that I’d have made it if I hadn’t started blogging at the now-defunct Bacon Bits and Bytes, but I don’t buy that – after all, two other BBnB authors were awarded MVP.  I’ve also been asked if we disbanded BBnB to please the MVP folks, and rest assured that’s not the case either.

I love that the MVP process is a bit of a mystery to outsiders.  If it was as simple as a checklist (write 10 blog posts per month, answer 20 forum questions per week, bench press your body weight) then people would race through the steps just to win it.  Making it mysterious raises the bar a little, and forces everybody to compete a little harder to bring their A-game to their daily work if they want to be awarded MVP.

I wouldn’t do anything differently about the blog entries I choose to write, the presentations I give, the ways I volunteer my time or anything else about my career in order to become an MVP.  I understand why other people do, and why people keep offering their sympathies, but really, I’m not in it for any awards.  Whenever anyone says they’re shocked that I haven’t made MVP yet, I immediately laugh and think of something Jimmy Buffett says between songs on the 1990 CD “Feeding Frenzy”:

“I have never, ever won an award for any music that I’ve written, but I don’t really care when I have fans like Parrotheads.  You’re reward enough.”

Amen.  Fast forward 13 years to 2003, and he won a Country Music Award for “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” – the very first award he’d ever won in his 30-year career.  (Unless you count his bank statement. If I was making $100m per year, I’d frame that and call it my Grammy.)

But Whaddya Know, I Won Something

Last week, SQLBatman posted his first round of SQL Server blogger rankings, and I made the “Masters” section.  Hooah!

My first response was to ask him, “How do I move up higher in this list?”  He replied, “Change your name, because they’re in alphabetical order by last name.”  So I’ve got the paperwork in – I’m about to become Brent Aardvark.

I really like how he organized the list into groups, and not just because I’m in Master.  There’s several of us who just blog, present, and teach for a living, and it’s our job to educate the community.  I wouldn’t want a simple Top 10 list without separating the educators-for-a-living from the people with real jobs.

When you’re looking at his list, stop for a second to think about which ones have day jobs as database administrators, and then look at the quality of their blogs.  These people are doing amazing work, knocking themselves out to help the community.  They’re writing tutorials, giving presentations, volunteering at PASS, *AND* they have day jobs.  That’s awesome.  (Either that or they have the kinds of jobs that don’t require any work, and in that case, that’s awesome for a different reason.)  If a DBA gets to the point where they’re in the Masters group, that makes one hell of a statement – it means they’re putting out as much good content as those of us who put out content for a living.

I applaud SQLBatman for building this list because it encourages everybody to raise their game.  I’m already thinking about how I need to write a “How to Use Google Reader” post and bundle in an OPML file with SQLBatman’s blog rankings.

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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