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Howdy, folks! I’m back at it for Day Two of the SQLPASS Summit in Seattle.  Refresh this page in your browser every couple of minutes if you’d like to see the latest additions.  No pictures today – I left my camera at the hotel.

8:42AM – Rushabh Mehta, the next PASS President, is getting things started by talking about the 2009 financials by saying, “Let’s talk about why you didn’t get free drinks.”  You can log into sqlpass.org/governance to review the past revenue & expenses and the future budgets.

8:44 – Projected revenues in FY 2010 are $3.2 million, a 15% drop in revenues, while doing a 40% increase in community spending.  67% reduction in IT expenses.  The European PASSCamp is projected to be profitable on its own.

8:48 – Rushabh is encouraging attendees to speak at local events and volunteer for your local chapter.

8:50 – Wayne Snyder coming onstage to announce the PASSion award winner for this year.  He asked for Tim Ford (Blog – @SQLAgentMan) and he’s not in the room, hahaha.

8:54 – Now recognizing Grant Fritchey (Blog – @GFritchey), who’s wearing a skirt kilt, and Amy Lewis, but I can’t see if she’s wearing a skirt from here.  Recognizing Jacob Sebastian, the PASS Outreach Program leader in India who’s helped start 5-6 chapters.

8:59 – The PASSion award is broken up into 2 categories this year. The International winner is Charley Hanania (@CharleyHanania)!  Congrats, man.  You totally deserve it!

9:01 – The North American PASSion Award winner is Allen Kinsel (@SQLInsaneO)!  He had to review over 150 PowerPoints as part of his work on the Program Committee.  What a great pick.

9:06 – Tom Casey of Microsoft coming onstage.  He’ll be doing a Q&A afterwards through Twitter.  Address your questions to @MS_SQL_Server.

9:11 – Tom’s recapping the MS Information Platform Vision slide that they recapped last year and yesterday to bring folks up to speed.  Initially I cringed, but given yesterday’s stat that 42% of attendees are first-timers, it makes sense.

9:13 – Tom’s selling optimism for DBAs: we need to be optimistic about our future career prospects because BI will be adopted by more users, and we can manage it with the skills we already have.  He’s bullish on the gains caused by commodity hardware, yet saying our skills won’t be commodities.

9:15 – Introducing Ron VanZanten of First Premier to tell his success story.  They consider their 25 terabytes of customer data helps differentiate their business.  They’re having to find new income streams, and their BI stack was the engine where it all comes from.  Every single employee (of their few thousand) gets some kind of information from their data warehouse.  Nice.

9:19 – With Madison, some of First Premier’s hour-long queries run in under a minute.

9:23 – Tom’s discussing a similar theme from last year’s keynote – the skunkworks BI projects.  Superhero power users go grab the data they need without IT’s help.  They grab a connection string and make magic happen with Excel (or Access, but Tom didn’t say that.)  Sorry I don’t have more frequent updates here – it’s just all marketing stuff you don’t really want to read.

9:29 – Amir Netz of Microsoft coming onstage to demo PowerPivot.  Querying millions of rows in Excel and it returns super-fast even on a laptop.  The demo is using a 133 meg Excel file.  It’s stored compressed, and it’s sliced and diced in memory in columnar format.

9:35 – Amir’s adding his own user data via a linked table.  Whenever he updates his Excel data and his source data, they all hold hands and walk down the beach with happy music in the background.  Always live data.

9:38 – Amir’s explaining joins to us.  Joins.  To database administrators.  On the bright side, he’s also showing us a new language we have to learn in Excel.  “All these things that you’re used to doing in MDX, you can now do in Excel!”  Of course, the language is different, but…

9:41 – Demoing Excel 2010’s new slicers feature.  It lets Excel power users create dashboard-style reports that are extremely interactive and easy to use.  Part of me is glad I didn’t dive too deeply into SSRS, because I’d much rather play with this.  Very cool stuff.

9:44 – Demoing SharePoint 2010’s new PowerPivot gallery.  Extremely attractive report gallery.  Tom’s walking over to “his office” – a different desktop, a Win7 touchscreen machine.  Very attractive.

9:45 – The touchscreen Win7 machine doesn’t have Excel, only a browser.  Showing how you get beautiful Silverlight user experience of flipping through a Rolodex of reports like an iPod scrolling through reports.  Looks like it was Bogdan, one of the guys behind the cloud-based data mining add-in for Excel.  I gotta buy that guy a beer.

9:48 – Tom did a great segue into explaining why we need to focus on the experience of interacting with our data.  That demo was extremely captivating – and our reports can be too.  This is the key to making SQL Server sexy to C-level executives.

9:49 – Showing how IT can manage the data refreshes.  When the documents are moved into SharePoint 2010 in the gallery, the IT staff can control when the workbooks refresh their source data.  I’m very interested to see how this scales – IT folks don’t want to click one at a time per PowerPivot document.  We need to schedule documents to refresh sequentially so they don’t all overwhelm the servers at once.

9:53 – Showing motion bubble charts.  I love this stuff.  Extremely attractive.  It works like Google Analytics’ motion charts.

9:55 – The detail of a particular PowerPivot report shows who wrote it, what data sources they used, AND, more interestingly, who’s USING it.  You can see who else finds a particular report interesting, and interact with them.  Making BI more social.

9:56 – Everything shown requires Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2.  That’s quite a leap for implementation.  I know a lot of people still struggling on old versions of Office.

9:57 – Demo over.  Today’s keynote flowed much better than yesterday, especially since it focused on telling a couple of stories start to finish.

10:01 – Showing customer-submitted PowerPivot reports. They look pretty impressive.  They look pretty, period.

10:04 – Tom’s announcing a PowerPivot Tweet-to-Win contest for an XBox.  Follow @PowerPivot and tweet this:

RT@powerpivot: Want to learn more, go to www.powerpivot.com and sign up for CTP#powerpivot

10:06 – First time in 10 years they’ve simultaneously shipped a version of Office and SQL Server.

10:07 – Tom wrapped up by saying it’s up to us to build new experiences with our data.  To some extent that’s true, but it’s also up to the C-level executives who will authorize us to implement Office 2010 on the client side.  That’s one heck of a project in big companies.

All done!  Meeting with Andy Warren next….

By the time you read this, I’ll have given out a bunch of maple bacon lollipops at the PASS Summit.

I ran across these at Whole Foods and immediately bought the entire box.  Erika thought I was crazy.  (Well, I mean, to some extent she’s thought that for years, but this kinda reinforced her case.)  They’re all-natural maple-syrup-flavored lollipops with flecks of bacon inside.

BACON. IN A LOLLIPOP.

When strangers want to lure grown men into vans, this is what they use – as evidenced by the laptop’s name, “Man Bait.”  I’ll give you a moment to wash that thought out of your mind.

I taped my Moo Cards to the back, and I used these as bait to entice SQL Server professionals to race to the SQLServerPedia booth.  My evil knows no bounds.

You can buy your own maple bacon lollipops at Amazon for less than a buck apiece.  This has to be the cheapest bribes you’ll ever use.

I’m in Seattle at the annual Professional Association for SQL Server Summit. Today marks the first day of the 3-day summit. Monday was a day of preconference sessions and volunteer sessions capped off with a welcome reception and a Quiz Bowl.

You can refresh this page in your browser whenever you’d like to see my latest notes with timestamps.

Opening Remarks by Wayne Snyder

Wayne Snyder is the current President of the PASS Board of Directors. In January, he’ll be replaced by Rushabh Mehta, the current Executive VP of Finance.  Here’s the new PASS Board lineup.

8:00 AM – Wayne’s explaining how things used to be, and how connecting, sharing and learning is different in the age of social networking.

8:01 AM – Summit registrations (not incl. pre/post-conferences) down from 2,445 in 2008 to 2,200 in 2009.  PASS’s goal was to be down just 15% from last year’s registrations, but they’re only down 9%.  Congratulating Bill Graziano and the PASS marketing team for maintaining momentum.

8:02 – 42% of attendees are first-timers.

8:03 – 98 SQL Server MVPs are here.

8:04 – Wayne is thanking Jorge Segarra (Blog – @SQLChicken) for his mapping of the user groups.

8:06 – “Our regional events are always without conflict.”  Hmm – not sure what that’s supposed to mean.  I’m probably reading too much into that.  PASS is going to fund and promote as many local and regional events as possible, even when they’re not official PASS events (like SQLSaturday.)

8:07 – 24 Hours of PASS had 50,123 session registrations from 3,524 people from 70+ countries.

8:08 – Relaunching SQLServer Standard as PASS’s flagship publication as a free area of premium content on SQLPASS.org.  First article of 2009 posted this week, all back issues will be available online.  Encouraging people to submit content and get paid for it.  (For the record, I’m nervous about a user group paying people to write content for a free magazine – that doesn’t scale well.)

8:11 – Come meet the board members for an open Q&A on Wednesday in room 6E from 4:30pm to 6:15pm.  Will be moderated by Joe Webb.

8:14 – You can get your free copy of SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition at the Product Pavilion.  Don’t forget that, really valuable benefit.

8:18 – Microsoft’s Bob Muglia taking over the stage.  He’s telling the story of Microsoft’s original SQL Server announcement back in 1988.

8:21 – Microsoft just handed us a press release.  SQL 2008 R2 will have a November CTP, and there’s two new editions coming – Datacenter Edition and Parallel Data Warehouse Edition (formerly Project Madison.)  PDWE (as I shall name her) will be available on hardware from Bull, Dell, HP, EMC, and IBM.  Not clear who’s providing SAN gear versus hardware – curious to see who’s using which pieces.  Datacenter Edition (above Enterprise Edition) supports up to 256 logical processors and unlimited virtualization.

8:25 – Bob’s showing SQL 2008 R2 on IBM x3950 M2’s with 192 CPUs.  Custom demo screen lets him spin up more or less CPUs – jumping from 64 to 128 cores.  I’ve managed the old x460s that did similar daisy-chaining to get tons of CPU power out of a single box, and while I’m really impressed with the technical achievement, I’m nowhere near as impressed with the cost practicality.  I’ll blog more about that later.

8:29 – Announcing that they set a benchmark world record for TPC-E of 2,012 tspE, plus a record data warehouse on Windows TPC-H 3TB 102,778 QphH.  He’s emphasizing that SQL Server can handle almost anything.

8:31 – Bob’s saying it’s a transformative time for IT because new workers are used to using Twitter, finding things on the web, and using social computing.  We as data professionals need to empower them much more effectively.  I think he’s about to announce Microsoft is acquiring Tweet-SQL.  (I’m kidding.)

8:34 – If you want more info about the IBM servers that daisy-chain together, here’s an IBM PDF whitepaper on the older version of the servers running SQL Server 2005.  It’s got info on the NUMA setup and how to scale SQL Server with it.  Keep in mind that these servers were usually deployed with single-core CPUs, so scaling was a little different back then.

8:38 – Edwin Yuen, Senior Product Manager of the MS Virtualization Team is taking the stage to show Live Migration in Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

8:41 – Live Migration is pretty unimpressive if you’ve been using VMware ESX for the last few years, but it starts getting more impressive when they throw in phrases like “move to the cloud.”  Just dropping hints though.

8:43 – Bob retook the stage, and he’s talking about private clouds. I’m psyched for the long-term impact of this if it adds more than virtualization.

8:46 – They want to provide a coherent programming environment across all platforms – your datacenter, a virtualized datacenter, private cloud, and public cloud.  Bob says your SQL skills will continue to pay off.

8:48 – They’re learning things with SQL Azure that will pay off for SQL Server later.  For example, the Data-Tier Application (DAC PACK) is focused on the cloud first, and SQL Server second.

8:50 – You need to transform your role into data professionals – helping the business make decisions with data, not just being custodians of it.  Get jiggy with your data.  (My words, not Bob’s.)

8:51 – Bob’s handing it over to Ted Kummert, the Senior VP for all business platforms (apps plus SQL Server.)

8:54 – Ted’s explaining how all the team’s hard work is coming to fruition in the next 6 months with the release of so many things – Azure, the new Parallel Data Warehouse Edition, R2, etc.

8:56 – Ted’s top 5 reasons of why it’s great to be at #SQLPASS 2009:

1. You’re part of the world’s largest gathering of SQL Server professionals.
2. You can take your questions to the source – MS employees, product team, SQLCAT team, etc.
3. Wayne Snyder and Rushabh Mehta.
4. You can work hard and play hard – Microsoft’s GameWorks party should be great.
5. You will build skills & knowledge on the #1 database in the world.  (Unit leader in database market worldwide, fastest growing RDBMS, leaders wave from Forrester, magic quadrant for Gartner for data warehouse & BI, etc.)

9:02 – Cheerleading over, talking about the next year of releases.  Okay, no, wait, more cheerleading – this time about needing less and less fixes in each service pack.  They now have standalone service pack uninstall – says that’s the most wanted feature since the release of v6.5.  I must be out of touch with what features people want.  DBAs, TEST YOUR SERVICE PACKS IN DEV AND QA FIRST.  I’m not playing.

9:07 – Bringing on a customer, First American Title, to talk about SQL Server.  Now’s my chance to run to the bathroom.  Dear God, when will I learn to whiz before the first day’s keynote?

9:12 – I’m back.  The IBM demo machines behind the stage must have been left running the demos, because the fans have become deafening.  That says a lot in a room this big.

9:18 – Dan Jones is onstage to demo multi-server management.

9:22 – They’re demoing the same things I showed in a SQL 2008 R2 video tutorial back in August on SQLServerPedia, except now it’s feature-complete.  Looks great, but they’re now talking about shrinking files as “freeing up space for other applications.” Noooo!

9:28 – Demoing Visual Studio’s ability to define rules about where a DAC Pack gets deployed.  For example, you could require clustering or x64 servers.  The challenge with this for DBAs is that in order to see what’s going on inside the DAC Pack, you’ll need to bust out Visual Studio.

9:31 – Woohoo! The latest build of Visual Studio creates DAC packs that you can apply to existing deployed applications, and upgrade their schema.  For example, in Visual Studio you can add a middle name to an existing schema, and generate a new DAC pack.  Hand that DAC pack file to a client’s DBA, and it will automagically look at their schema and upgrade it to the new one – no schema comparison required, no guessing on what the schema last looked like.  Much easier app upgrades.

9:33 – Bob’s back onstage talking about developer-focused features around the Entity Framework, BI-focused features like consuming data feeds from SharePoint, and platform-focused features like interoperability with other languages.

9:34 – Pablo’s onstage to demo DAC packs and the Entity Data Model in Visual Studio Beta 2 with the .NET Framework 4.  I’m not gonna lie to you – it’s flying way over my head. Or around my interests, something like that.  Couldn’t care less.  I’m not seeing excitement on the Twitter feed either, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one.  When Pablo says things like, “You can either build the app or the data model first,” it makes my ears hurt.

9:42 – I’m still kinda stunned that they’re spending so much time on Visual Studio at the day 1 PASS keynote.  If you had any doubt about Microsoft’s focus on developers, you see it now.

9:45 – StreamInsight will release in SQL 2008 R2, and the programming interface will show up in Visual Studio.  Talking about how McLaren uses StreamInsight to pull performance data off Formula 1 cars.  Now THAT would have made a compelling demo.

9:49 – Ted’s back and talking about pervasive insight – end user access to BI.  Touching on Master Data Services in SQL Server 2008 R2.

9:51 – They’re demoing Master Data Services in a web browser.

9:58 – Demoing scale-out loads of a 10 terabyte data warehouse with 60 billion rows.  They loaded 60 million additional rows in a matter of seconds, did aggregations of several billion in a matter of seconds, etc.  Just looks gorgeous.

10:00 – Showing visualizations off the massive data warehouse using Report Builder with sparkline graphs and bar graphs.  Reports running very quickly off a 20-node, 336-core system.

10:03 – Ted’s talking about Azure. Says it’s not a new platform – it’s a new method of delivery for an existing platform.  Azure is feature-complete as of today.

10:08 – Azure demo starting onstage, but everybody in the crowd is leaving.  Sessions start at 10:15, and everybody needs seats in the sessions because they’re first-come-first-serve.  Even some of the bloggers left.

10:09 – Showing SQL Azure Data Sync – sorta like 2-way replication between your database and the cloud.  Uses a background agent to manage change.

10:13 – Demoing connectivity between Visual Studio and Azure, so you can deploy your DAC Packs from within Visual Studio.  (Not SQL Server Management Studio – think about that for a second.  Deploy databases as a developer without getting DBAs involved.)

10:14 – Ted hints that Parallel Data Warehouse Edition will be delivered later than SQL 2008 R2.  Makes sense, because there’s hardware vendors involved.  Looks like you have to buy it in a package from the hardware vendor.  I’ll ask more about that.

That’s all folks!  Off to the SQLServerPedia booth.

Last month, I joined forces with Andy Warren (Blog – Twitter) and Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter) to recognize you, dear blogger, for doing such a great job with your blogs. We wanted to give thanks to the community for churning out so much top-notch material, and there were definitely a lot of great nominations. We spent hours reading and rereading some really phenomenal blogs. Just because you don’t see your name here doesn’t mean you weren’t good – some of these came down to tenths of a point out of a 30-point scale.

With no further ado, here’s the best of the blogs this year:

Best Blog Series (Multiple Posts):

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Disk Performance Hands-On Series (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Tie:
  Aaron Alton for SSMS Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Aaron Bertrand for Bad Habits to Kick Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)

Best Business Intelligence Blog Post:

• Winner: Chris Webb for Implementing SSRS Drilldowns (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: Michelle Ufford for Using Variables in SSIS (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Best New Blog:

• Winner (Tie):
  Aaron Alton for The Hobt (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Michelle Ufford for SQLFool (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)
• Runner-Up: Jorge Segarra for SQLChicken (Blog – RSS – @SQLChicken)

Best Professional Development Blog Post:

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Off-Hours Work Guide for Managers (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Sean McCown for Landing That Job (Blog – RSS – @MidnightDBA)

Best T-SQL Blog Post:

• Winner: Aaron Bertrand for Stored Procedures Best Practices Checklist (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)
• Runner-Up: Grant Fritchey for Unpacking the View (Blog – RSS – @GFritchey)

Best Unusual Blog Post:

• Winner: Alex Kuznetsov for Reproducing Deadlocks with One Table (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: John Magnabosco for Encrypting Large Values (Blog – RSS)

We’re going to put together a badge for the winners to display on their blogs, and we’ll be doing some email interviews with the winners. If you’re at #SQLPASS this week, congratulate these bloggers for the killer work they’ve put out, and if you’re not, take a moment to subscribe to their blogs and send them a congratulatory tweet. They’re doing this just for the love of the community, helping out folks like you and me, and we need to recognize them for working so hard.

Late-breaking news from the PASS Board this weekend: they’re putting on a live Q&A session at the Summit.  On Wednesday from 4:30PM to 6:15PM in room 6E, you can bring your questions and suggestions.  Attendees are welcome to live-blog it, tweet it, even record it with webcams and Ustream it live.

I’m going to be in the SQLServerPedia booth until 5pm, but then I’ll be joining the Q&A session after 5.

If you can’t make it to the live Q&A session, you can write down questions and put them in a suggestion box in the PASS booth.

The PASS Board is made up of volunteers who want to serve the community, and they were elected by the community.  Please keep that in mind when you ask questions.  Don’t use accusing tones, don’t refer to them as “The Man,” don’t spout off about how they’re trying to keep you down, and please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t ask why so many of the BoD members are bald.  It’s just not polite.  Besides, they look great bald, especially when they tattoo their heads.

Next week at the PASS Summit, I’m presenting a session called “Yes, I’m Actually Using The Cloud.” I’ll be talking about what’s out there, why I use it, and why you might want to use it too.

Brendan Cournoyer of SearchSQLServer.com interviewed me recently about the topic and asked questions like:

• For those who are relatively unfamiliar with cloud computing, what is the case for cloud-based databases? Is it all about performance?
• Aside from questions about security, what are some other reasons why folks might be hesitant to deploy cloud databases?
• What about other cloud database options? Relational databases in the cloud are rare. From a SQL Server perspective, how does Azure compare to the other options that are available?

You can read my answers in the interview at SearchSQLServer.

Amazon RDS: New Azure Competitor

Today, Amazon announced a new competitor to SQL Azure: Amazon Relational Database Service.  It’s got some compelling advantages:

• It’s basically MySQL with some added goodies. If you already know and love MySQL (I don’t know it well, so I don’t love it – yet), it’s easy to love RDS.
• Amazon handles basic management. They do patch management, backups, restores, and export performance statistics to Amazon CloudWatch for free.  To some extent, they’re providing production database administration as part of the cost.
• It leverages Amazon’s storage for snapshots. You just tell Amazon how many days of history you want to keep, and they handle it for you without you understanding anything about recovery.
• Coming soon: high availability with replication. You’ll be able to replicate your MySQL databases between Amazon’s different datacenters without a fancypants database administrator.

If I was a MySQL production DBA, you’d hear my eyebrows raising.  I’d be worried about my long-term job prospects.  From here, it’s a race to the bottom.  Suddenly there’s a service out there that provides some of the same functionality that production DBAs provide, except it’s available by the hour.

What’s the Cheapest Way to Solve a Problem?

If I was the project manager for an app with a MySQL back end, you’d hear my sigh of relief.  If I could move my app to Amazon RDS, suddenly performance issues have a completely different solution.  I could either pay a MySQL DBA to find the root cause, or I could simply choose a faster/stronger/better Amazon instance size.

A “small” instance is 1 core with 1.7GB of memory.

A “quadruple extra large” instance is 8 cores with 68GB of memory.

The price difference between these two is roughly $3 per hour.

How much do you think a MySQL DBA costs?  It’s gotta be more than that.  Why would you pay a DBA if you can simply ramp up hardware capacity?  Now, of course as DBAs, we know that model doesn’t scale forever.  You can still run into performance problems at the Quadruple Extra Large instance level, but project managers will gamble that their apps will still survive long enough for Amazon to introduce faster instance power.

The Best Kind of Cloud Service

This is my favorite kind of cloud service.  It’s not vendor-specific, so you can build your app with a MySQL back end without committing to using Amazon RDS.  If Amazon pulls the plug on RDS next year, no biggie – you can still run it on any hosted MySQL service.  You can’t do that with Amazon SimpleDB, which is proprietary. Even better, Amazon RDS is full-blown MySQL, not hobbled in any way.

SQL Azure falls into an odd niche, because you can develop for it without worry.  If Microsoft pulls the plug on Azure, you can still use your app with “real” SQL Servers, because Azure is just a crippled SQL Server implementation. (That’s a good thing and a bad thing.)  However, if Azure dies off, you’re stuck with moving to SQL Server, not exactly the cheapest solution around.  Microsoft offers free-for-a-while licensing with BizSpark and WebSpark, so you can at least buy time, but sooner or later you’re going to face licensing costs.

I love announcements like this because I see it as an exciting time to be a solutions provider.  Like I blogged yesterday, DBAs are always consultants, and we need to view ourselves as providing a service.  Amazon RDS, like other tools, is something that can either compete with us or be part of our toolset.  Figure out how to use it as part of your skillset, or else you risk getting displaced by it.

In this session at the PASS Summit in Seattle, I’ll talk about the options for SQL Server in the cloud today and how I’m using them for my projects.  I’ll talk about how to choose the right cloud-based solution for your needs, and I’ll do a live demo of working with SQL Server in the cloud.

Here’s a video preview of me walking through the first several slides in the deck:

I’ll be giving this session on Thursday, November 5th at 1:00pm – 2:15pm in room 201.  This is the smallest capacity room at the summit, fitting only 128 people as opposed to 300-500, and I got a huge laugh out of that.  Tells you something about the demand for SQL Server in the cloud knowledge or my presentation skills – or both!

Update: SearchSQLServer.com published an interview with me about using SQL Server in the cloud.

I don’t reread blog posts after I’ve read ’em once.  If there weren’t comments when I first read the blog post, I’m not likely to go back to check later to find out what’s going on.

However, I published one post recently that you might want to reread.  I interviewed Matt Morollo about why he’s running for the PASS Board of Directors, and over a couple of days, comments really piled up.  Matt did a fantastic job of staying engaged with the other commenters, leaving a lot of responses to address questions and concerns.

If you haven’t voted yet, take the time to read through the comments before you vote.

The PASS Board of Directors election starts on October 12th, and we’ve got four really well-qualified candidates to choose from:

• Brian Moran (Twitter)
• Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter)
• Matt Morollo (Twitter)
• Tom LaRock (Blog – Twitter)

You can read their bios at the PASS Candidate List, and they’re good, but I wanted more. I emailed each of them with a set of interview questions to satisfy my bizarre curiosity. Today’s response comes from Matt Morollo:

Brent: First, thanks for volunteering to dedicate your time to the community. What made you decide to run for the Board of Directors this year?

SQL PASS represents the type of Media organization that matches the type of vendor which aligns with my ideals of a highly reputable B2B Media porvider; one that would be a thrill to be a part of. Over the last 14 years my career has been committed to providing IT and App Dev professionals best-of-breed Media with integrity and enthusiasm.   As a veteran Media professional that has built successful contemporary IT focused B2B businesses, my hope is to add value to the future strategy of PASS and also come away with some great experience and new professional acquaintances – people that share my passion for this work.   PASS is a Media organization first and foremost and needs the next generation of Media professionals at the table to navigate through this very unique time in business Media.   My aspirations match their goals and objectives, and few are as uniquely qualified in Media; this is what I do and have done all my career.

Walk us through one of your typical workdays. What do you do?

The Media business is extremely deadline oriented, dynamic, and very competitive.   As many Media vendors, 1105 Media works in a virtual environment (7 offices in 10 states plus a large number of home office employees) so communication is critical to what we do each and every day; it is well orchestrated, disciplined, and highly complex.  Keeping up my meeting and publishing schedules is what my day initially revolves around.   When not traveling, my time is spent strategizing with sales, marketing, editorial, working on operational issues, meeting clients, developing partnerships, closing issues, forecasting, and working toward our revenue objectives.   All this requires a lot of teamwork/meetings and working through day-to-day challenges as they surface.  Organization and prioritization is critical in Media.

What parts of your day-to-day experience will make you a better Board of Directors candidate than the other candidates?

If this has not been stressed already; PASS is a Media organization serving a very influential community of SQL oriented professionals.  Nothing is more important than serving the audience/community and content environments with the right information and asset types.   My job is largely about keeping our business relevant and navigating through the murky waters of modern Media so the business is able to continue to sustain profitability and growth (my parent company, the Redmond Media Group now includes MSDN and TechNet in addition to all the Redmond branded assets in print, online plus Face-to-Face events and Virtual Conferences/Expos). Again, as someone with a track record of success, and someone who has been part of a team that has built Redmond Media Group, the most successful Media organization serving Microsoft- oriented IT and App Dev communities, no other candidate matches the experience required as the PASS BOD has outline to me.

I’ve heard that the PASS Board of Directors is a time-consuming hobby to say the least, and at this point in our careers, none of us have tons of extra time. What other projects or things do you expect to have to cut back in order to make time for the Board? (I’d just like to give the readers an idea of how tough it is to prioritize things.)

Having spent the last 14 years strapped to a PC, speaking with audiences, advertising partners, and traveling on airplanes, you cannot be successful in Media without a strong work ethic, and more importantly a passion for this business.   I’m not saying being a SQL Administrator is not a hard job, but the Media business is a much different occupation – in fact given the complexity and competitive nature of the business, there is a high attrition rate and very few people and companies have had the kind of success that 1105 Media continues to have (just last week Questex and recently Cygnus filed Chapter 11 for example – B2B Media woes are in the news daily – its no secret).   PASS can expect that kind of work ethic and enthusiasm from me.  This business excites me and I’ve always been able to ensure the business strives and is successful through good times and bad (my personal sense is this is one of the best times as change is the most constant variable in Media and now is the time to build off that momentum).   The reason why the BOD position is such a strong match is because hard work is what makes a Media business successful, and with a passion for serving Microsoft-oriented professionals, making time is something that the BOD can expect and is something that was expected upon my initial application.

I believe social networking and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, Facebook, and StackOverflow are changing the way DBAs interact with each other, get training, and solve problems. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

(No answer)

Do you blog and use social networking tools? Where can DBAs find you online?

Yes: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.   I am also a member of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Executive Council on Sales and that community puts out a lot of community based information via SmartBrief.  Social Networking represent great marketing assets in my opinion.  They are also great tools for communicating, and guiding participating communities to key areas of the web.   For Media organizations specifically, they help keep the community up to date with information they might not otherwise find as well as sharing ideas and other information resources.   Again, as a BOD member, any DBA can certainly reach me, but my role would be mostly transparent to them; the PASS board is not a platform for me (that is a key distinction as a candidate) to be a key figure in the community of SQL professionals, but rather a role where it is possible for me to ensure the PASS community gets the best information assets in the market.   The goal is to help guide the PASS strategy and make it the most relevant Media vendor and community for SQL professionals.   Just as a publisher, the audiences don’t know me, our editors on the other hand they are intimately familiar with.  They are out there in the “mosh pit” mixing with audiences.  The role of a business professional in Media like myself, is to put the best content makers on a pedestal, keep them visible and available to the core community and audiences served.

Do you have any conflicts of interest that may pose a challenge?

None; the opportunity dovetails with my ambitions, aspirations, and more importantly my ability.  My track record demonstrates this as do my prior statements.

If PASS put you in charge of increasing new memberships, what specific steps would you take?

New membership is critical to all Media organizations; maintaining a qualified membership community and providing best-of-breed content are essentially, or to net down, one the core objectives of any company in the business of niche B2B Media.    As a publisher who has spent years and years building communities, I’m familiar with all models including qualified, paid, SEO/M, social networking, alliances, and contemporary Audience Development (AD) practices.   There is no silver bullet here and there are a number of methods in order to accomplish this key objective.  I can’t sit here and tell you what exactly I can do; no one can unless they are familiar with the resources and budgets that PASS has.   What I can tell you, is that I will, and am extremely qualified in the practice of Audience Development and that PASS can expect that my skills will be applied along with my experience to the best of my ability.  The best and most modern AD practices will be applied with creativity and enthusiasm.  My experience also involves global expansion and my understanding is that is a core PASS objective (my BA from GWU in International Communications is also relevant).

What do you think PASS is doing right to improve the day-to-day lives of database administrators?

This BOD work is a great example.   The team is looking for the best from  a strategic business perspective.   What I can tell you, is that each nominee, unless they have a decade plus experience in building, growing, and leading B2B organizations has really has no idea what kind of challenges and how hard the work is involved in growing a Media organization like PASS.   Everyone I’ve seen on the ballot may make a great speaker, writer, or be a world-class SQL DBA, but aren’t experienced in the business of Media to the extent that I am.   With respect to all of the nominees, they are highly skilled SQL technicians.  That’s great, but PASS is Media company serving communities with information resources that keep them captive  In my opinion, based on what I know, the PASS BOD needs a MEDIA PROFESSIONAL experienced with Microsoft and IT publishing/events.  The reason PASS appeals to me, and to answer the question more directly, is that PASS has a strong reputation as a provider of best-of-breed information assets with integrity, and has access to the most innovative community of SQL based content providers.   The challenge is the web has  opened up a whole new set of opportunities for communities to find information.  The Redmond Media Group for example references SQL and supports every key vendor in this market, employs some of the best contributors who produce articles, white papers, webcasts, speak at our events on the subject, but it is much broader and focused on providing information to the MCP, Developer, IT, & Partner communities across all Microsoft disciplines.   Again, let me stress that PASS is in an extremely competitive marketplace, needs to remain relevant as a key information provider, and has to work on building the communities in the midst of a highly competitive and complex environment.  PASS has two key competitive advantages; a) the organization is recognized globally as the most targeted and credible community reaching top SQL Professionals b) SQL is poised to grow as the information boom continues to accelerate at a pace that is almost impossible to describe; SQL is, and will remain fundamental to the data revolution.   This excites me and is why I’m so keen to be a part of PASS.

What do you think PASS could do better, and how?

This is a question for the community and one that is mission-critical as PASS evolves and grows as an organization.  B2B Media organizations rely on the communities they serve to provide this kind of feedback on a regular basis via show evaluation forms, surveys, and other research.   Dialogue is also important and to borrow a phrase, the community and vendor partners must be treated “like family”.   They are vital in providing this kind of information and shaping the organization.   The first thing I’d hope to do as a Board member, is to dive into the community surveys, research, and other data (even if its verbatim) and  speak with key members in person (via email, phone, in person at local chapters).  Knowing and listening to the community is the most important thing the Board and team at PASS can engage in.  The community represents the future, and the work that needs to be done revolves around them.   Finally, to borrow another phrase in Media “content is king”.  As long as PASS remains committed to providing the best and most relevant content, PASS will continue to be successful and have the communities” attention.

Sum up your goals for PASS in 140 characters or less:

Understand key objectives, challenges, and work to assimilate myself with the board, staff, and community.  Help support PASS and ensure the organization remains relevant,  poised for growth, and stands alone as THE SQL Media vendor in a landscape that is complex, and dynamic.

If you groan when you read the words “social networking,” you’re in the right place.

I’m a practical guy.  If a tool doesn’t help me get my job done better/faster/cheaper, I’m not interested in screwing around with it.  Today, I’m going to explain how some social media tools help me, and why I don’t bother screwing around with others.  Jason Massie (Blog – Twitter) and I are going to be talking about variations of this at the PASS Summit in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

Twitter: My Virtual Peer Group

IT people often work in isolation.  Database administrators don’t have other DBAs to use as a sounding board.  BI architects don’t travel in packs either.  The higher up you go on the IT ladder, the less peers you have at a company.

Right now, there are dozens – maybe hundreds – of people with your exact job on Twitter.  If you follow them, you’ll have a virtual peer group available around the clock.  I follow interesting database administrators, architects, and people at Microsoft, and as a result, my Twitter feed is intensely interesting to me.

As a blogger, I like Twitter because my readers can give me fast feedback.  Some people will catch your blog post when it hits Twitter, read it immediately, and ask questions over Twitter.  It’s a fast forum for questions and answers that feels more lively than leaving comments.

If I followed people that I thought were boring, then I’d find Twitter boring.  If you find yourself in that situation, start unfollowing everybody who doesn’t make you smile, and only follow people that really, really, REALLY interest you.  Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean you have to follow them back – at the moment, I’m following around 500 people, but over 2,500 are following me.  I’m sure the other 2,000 people are really interesting, but if I followed them all, Twitter would be a firehose that I could no longer consume.

Ping.fm Broadcasts Stuff Everywhere Else

I have a lot of friends on a lot of different social networks.  Some people prefer Facebook, some like Myspace, some love Twitter.  When I post a status update on Ping.fm, it posts that same update across all of the sites I’m going to describe next.  Ping makes it easy for me to be everywhere at once.

When I start work in the morning, or when I have a significant event that I wanna tell everybody, I’ll post it on Ping.  It’s not a tool to carry on conversations – it’s just for broadcasts.  I highly recommend using the plugin PingPressFM on your WordPress blog: it automatically sends a ping whenever you publish a new blog entry.

Additionally, when I want to post a photo of somewhere I’m visiting (or more often, something I’m eating), I’ll email it from my iPhone to my Ping.fm address.  Ping takes the photo attachment and uploads it to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Brightkite, and all the other sites I’m on.  It doesn’t handle video (yet), unfortunately, so for video, I use 12Seconds.  12Seconds does the same thing as Ping, but only for videos.  I can email videos from my iPhone to 12Seconds, which then posts it to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. (As soon as Ping handles videos, I’ll abandon 12Seconds.)

If it wasn’t for Ping.fm, I wouldn’t bother using most of the rest of these sites, frankly, especially starting with Facebook.

Facebook Helps Me Avoid Friends and Family

Yep, I said it.

Before Facebook, I used my blog to stay in touch with friends and family.  I posted what I was up to, and they read my blog to stay informed.  Now, they’re all on Facebook, so I can just post my status to Facebook (via Ping.fm) and they can keep tabs on me.  Even better, because it’s so easy to just dump notes in there via Ping, I’m able to stay in sync with even more people – high school classmates, college buddies, former coworkers, you name it.

I gotta be honest – I dump content into Facebook, but I almost never go to the site.  I don’t play web games, I don’t tag my friends in personal-top-10-lists, and I don’t care who’s dating who.  I do like Facebook because it’s real-name-based (as opposed to Twitter, MySpace, etc) but I don’t spend much time reading it.  For a while, I tried consuming Facebook news updates via an RSS feed, but even that got too time-consuming.

Yammer Connects Me To New Coworkers

Yammer is just like Twitter except that only people at your company will see your updates.  Account signups are done via email – when you sign up for a Yammer account, you’ll see updates from people at the same domain name as you.  Since I’ve got a Quest.com account, I see other Quest employees.

I use Ping to post my updates to Yammer, and Yammer emails me whenever anybody else posts.  That way, I don’t have to run yet another desktop client or go to yet another web page.  Yay!

Yammer is a chicken-and-egg problem: if you’re the first person at your company on Yammer, you might be posting there for quite a while before you’ve got company.  I think I posted on Yammer for maybe six months before anybody joined me, and now it’s gathering momentum.  The cool part is that I get a window into other parts of the company that I might not ordinarily get the chance to see.  Product managers for other divisions post notes about what they’re up to, and we get to share opinions and ideas on cool technologies.

Flickr Stores My Photos and Videos

Facebook does a decent job of photos, and I like Facebook’s ability to “tag” people in photos.  I can mark several peoples’ faces in a Facebook photo, and they instantly get notified that new pictures of them are online.  However, I don’t like anything else about how Facebook handles photos, so I use Flickr instead.

Flickr makes it easier to organize photos with:

• Tags – a photo can be tagged with any words or phrases, making it easier to search for photos.  Plus, strangers can tag your photo.
• Notes – you (or anyone else) can draw boxes on your photo and add notes talking about what’s in that area of the photo.
• Sets & Collections – I’ve got collections for Travel, Places I’ve Lived, Family, and so on, and then each collection has sets for the city, the family member, and so on.
• Comments – the fun of photos is the sharing and the discussion.

I email my iPhone photos to Ping.fm, which posts ’em into Flickr.  When I take photos with my camera, I upload them to Flickr when I get back home, but I’m ordering an EyeFi Geo card.  It’s an SD card with built-in geotagging and WiFi; when you take pictures, the GPS location is added to the photo’s metadata, and then the photo is uploaded via WiFi whenever you’re in range.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about spicing blog posts up with images, I also rely on Flickr’s Creative Commons image search.  I try to return the favor by licensing all of my photos with Creative Commons as well.  If somebody wants to use one of my images to illustrate a point, more power to ’em!

Delicious Stores My Bookmarks

Whenever I add a bookmark in my web browser, the Delicious plugin automatically sends that bookmark to Delicious.com.  It asks me if I want to add a description or any tags for easier discovery later.

I can also see who else added that same bookmark before I did.  People who found that page interesting probably found other things I’d like to read, too, so I can dive into their bookmarks and even sift through them by tag.  It’s an interesting way to meet interesting people who read interesting things.

Other people can subscribe to my bookmark feeds and get instant notifications whenever I add a new bookmark.  It also crossposts to Facebook, so even people who don’t use Delicious can watch what I find helpful.

Social Media Services I’m Not Wild About

A few services out there seem vaguely promising, but not enough for me to devote time to ’em.  I have profiles on some of these, but I’m not an active user:

• Blip.fm and Last.fm – music sites that track every single song you listen to.  In real time.  Let’s say I’ve got 500 friends, and maybe 50 of them are listening to music at any given time.  If each of them listens to one song per five minutes, that means I’d be getting notifications like “Joe is listening to Guns & Roses” every six seconds.  This is why I almost always unfollow anybody on Twitter who posts their music tracks – it’s just too much information, and frankly, I don’t care what you’re listening to.
• BrightKite – BrightKite is location-based social networking.  When you check in at a physical location (a restaurant, a tourist site, an airport) you can see everyone else who’s been there recently.  This can be a neat way to meet people who like the same things you like, but there isn’t a big user base yet.  Even in cities like New York City and Chicago, I often find that I’m the first person to check in at a location or that no one’s checked in there for months.
• FriendFeed – FriendFeed sucks in all of your activity from all of your sites and puts it in one place.  Then, when people subscribe to you, they don’t have to know what sites you’re active on – they just see all of your activity from everywhere in a ginormous firehose.  When one of my FriendFeed friends adds a bookmark, takes a picture, posts a status update, or picks their nose, I know about it in nearly real time.  TMI.  I keep trying to get into FriendFeed, but it’s an absolute avalanche of information.  Some people go so far as to hook up their Blip.fm feed in FriendFeed, for example.
• LinkedIn – I think this is a great tool when you need a job, but the rest of the site (user groups, forums, questions, etc) aren’t intuitive for me.  If I want to ask questions, I’ll usually post them at places like ServerFault or StackOverflow.

That’s the state of the union for social media/networking tools as of right now.  The scene changes fast, though, so I’ll revisit this topic every year or so to talk about what’s changed.

Are there any social networking tools you rely on that I didn’t cover here?

More of My Articles & Posts About Social Networking

Here’s a few more posts you might like:

• Top 10 Reasons I’m Not Following You on Twitter
• My Twitter FAQ – covering topics like RT, OH, #FollowFriday and more.
• How to Get More Twitter Followers – and if you’re new around here, you might want to read down to the very bottom.  I can be a little subtle.
• The Whuffie Factor Book Review – I review the best social media marketing book out there and explain why it can help you use Twitter better.
• All my Twitter Articles

The PASS Board of Directors election starts on October 12th, and we’ve got four really well-qualified candidates to choose from:

• Brian Moran
• Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter)
• Matt Morollo (Twitter)
• Tom LaRock (Blog – Twitter)

You can read their bios at the PASS Candidate List, and they’re good, but I wanted more.  I emailed each of them with a set of interview questions to satisfy my bizarre curiosity.  Today’s response comes from Tom LaRock:

Brent: First, thanks for volunteering to dedicate your time to the community. What made you decide to run for the Board of Directors this year?

Because there is more work to be done. I have an idea where I want PASS to be, and I want to help get us there. Being on the board allows for me to help the PASS Community as a whole. In return I get board-level work experience. See, my company is not going to let me be the COO for the next two years. But on the PASS Board I get that level of work experience, which is where I want to be with regards to my own career path.

Walk us through one of your typical workdays. What do you do?

That depends on who is asking and who is reading. Let’s just say I am currently the Database Administration Manager for a global investment management firm. I am responsible for production and project support and have a team of DBA’s located in India that provide wonderful support. My day is usually filled with routine tasks, meetings, and I get to listen to some music every now and then.

What parts of your day-to-day experience will make you a better Board of Directors candidate than the other candidates?

I do not believe I can answer that question in all fairness, as I do not know enough about what the other three candidates do in their daily routines. It would be wrong for me to assume that my experiences make me any better than anyone else. I can, however, tell you what I feel makes me a strong candidate. I believe that my ability to lead a disparate team of DBA’s located in other cities and countries gives me the experience necessary to lead a global organization such as PASS. You have to juggle a lot of things when dealing with global entities and managing people all over the world. I have that experience, both here and for PASS already, and not many other people have that same level of experience.

I’ve heard that the PASS Board of Directors is a time-consuming hobby to say the least, and at this point in our careers, none of us have tons of extra time. What other projects or things do you expect to have to cut back in order to make time for the Board? (I’d just like to give the readers an idea of how tough it is to prioritize things.)

Since I am already on the board, I do not expect I will need to cut back on anything. I expect that in the next two years I will find myself saying “no” more often so that I do not overextend myself to the point that my duties for the board suffer. It seems that with each passing day I get asked to take on new projects and I do my best to keep the end game in sight.

I believe social networking and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, Facebook, and StackOverflow are changing the way DBAs interact with each other, get training, and solve problems. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

I agree that it has changed the way a subset of DBA’s interact with each other. And for those that use the tools it works great. I also believe there are many more DBA’s that are not as involved. While serving on the PASS Board I want to make certain we do what we can to get those people engaged and get them to contribute in whatever way they feel most comfortable.

Do you blog and use social networking tools? Where can DBAs find you online?

People can find my blog at http://thomaslarock.com, and I can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SQLRockstar, Facebook at http://facebook.com/thomas.larock, and LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/thomas-larock/0/67b/b37. I enjoying interacting with people both online and in person. I am a naturally shy person and find it difficult to network with others, but I am doing my best to get better.

Do you have any conflicts of interest that may pose a challenge?

Not at the moment. Because I am not an independent contractor or work for a consulting firm there is less of a likelihood of a conflict of interest. In other words, my motivations during board meetings are for the best interests of the community, without consideration for any possible company or personal benefits. My reward for serving is professional growth, not financial.

Of course there are other possible conflicts, such as if I have to be in two places at once. There have been times when I needed to attend a PASS function and a non-PASS function. PASS always comes first, it’s that simple. At least for me, it is. For someone that is independent they may need to take care of business before something for PASS, and I respect that very much. That’s why it is important the Board have a mixture of members; some independent and some not.

If PASS put you in charge of increasing new memberships, what specific steps would you take?

Everything PASS does is with regards to driving new membership. So, a better question would be to simply ask: how do you plan to increase membership? And what I can tell you is that I have an idea as to what I want PASS to become and it is my hope that if we get there the memberships will naturally follow.

The simple version of my vision is to get PASS recognized as the best Professional Association for database professionals. When I was in graduate school I was automatically a member of the AMS (American Mathematical Society). As such, that was the association I would belong to if and when I became a mathematician. Now, imagine if every graduate student in CS, MIS, or whatever other tech field was enrolled as a member of PASS when they entered school? Over time we would be infused with new members, younger members, members who will stay members for a long time, members that will share with us their fresh ideas on how to make things better. Before you know it, PASS will be recognized as the same level as the AMS or even the AMA.

We can get there, and I want to help make it happen.

What do you think PASS is doing right to improve the day-to-day lives of database administrators?

PASS is an organization that is dedicated to the promotion of Microsoft SQL Server. There is more to SQL Server than just administration, so PASS is doing what it can to help all database professionals. And PASS does this by keeping three things in the back of their mind with every project: Connect. Learn. Share.

What do you think PASS could do better, and how?

Because PASS is a disparate, global entity there is one area that needs improvement and that is communication. We need to be able to communicate up and down the chain. I should mention that I feel we communicate better now than we have in the past, but we could always be doing a better job.

Sum up your goals for PASS in 140 characters or less:

Connect. Learn. Share.

Thanks for your time!  Readers – you can learn more about Tom and why he’s running at his web site.

The PASS Board of Directors election starts on October 12th, and we’ve got four really well-qualified candidates to choose from:

• Brian Moran (Twitter)
• Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter)
• Matt Morollo (Twitter)
• Tom LaRock (Blog – Twitter)

You can read their bios at the PASS Candidate List, and they’re good, but I wanted more.  I emailed each of them with a set of interview questions to satisfy my bizarre curiosity.  Today’s response comes from Brian Moran:

First, thanks for volunteering to dedicate your time to the community. What made you decide to run for the Board of Directors this year?

You know that I was a member of the inaugural PASS Board of Directors, right?

PASS launched 10 years ago. I was reading about PASS’s 10 year anniversary and thought “Wow, it doesn’t seem that long ago”. Then I thought that I must be getting old if 10 years didn’t seem that long ago.

I decided it might be fun to serve on the Board again. I use the word fun cautiously. Being a PASS board member is a serious commitment but I’m of the opinion that life is too short to do things that you’re not passionate about and don’t make you happy.

I’ve been working with SQL Server for the past 17 years. Yes, that makes me feel old too. I don’t want to sound corny; but I’m at a point in my career where I feel that I should be investing in the community that has helped shaped my professional existence and success for almost 2 decades. My experiences as a technician, an entrepreneur, and an executive will benefit PASS and the community. I’ll have fun doing it. So I decided to throw my hat into the ring.

Walk us through one of your typical workdays. What do you do?

Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) was built from the ground up as a virtual company. We have no dedicated office space anywhere in the USA, although now we do have some offices in other locations around the world. I work from home when I’m not visiting customers. Working from home is both a blessing and a curse. Typically it moves back and forth between those extremes multiple times a day.

I’m married and have two young (getting bigger every day) children. I try very hard to be around for breakfast and to help get them off to school, and I try very hard to stop work around dinner time and spend time with the family at least until the kids get to bed.

What’s my day like in between? It varies a lot. I do a lot of email. Virtual companies don’t have water coolers and conference rooms. We have Mentors and executives in most times zones around the world. I’m often doing email, while IM’ing one or more people, while listening in on a conference call.

I don’t spend as much time with customers as I did a few years ago. But I’m in the process of changing that. I liked playing boss man for a while. I joked with my wife and friends that it was like a grown up version of playing house. I swung a bit too far to the executive side of being an entrepreneur and I’m now swinging back a bit more towards my technical roots.

Among other things my current portfolio at SolidQ includes being the Business Unit Manager for our Relational Technology practice in the USA. That role requires a blend of tactical and strategic decision making. I interact with my peers on the executive teams around the world, our Mentors, our customers, and our partners. Most days it’s a lot of fun. Most days it’s very stressful. Most days I don’t get anywhere near the amount of work done that I had hoped to when I woke up that morning. Did I mention fun? Like I said, life’s too short to do things you don’t like.

Getting back to the curse and blessing of working at home. Sometimes I have to hit mute quick when I’m on an important call and the dog starts barking or the kids start fighting. At other times I feel incredibly blessed that I can take time out during the day to spend some time with my kids or readily go to events at their schools that would be difficult to attend if I had a ‘real job’. I’ve learned over the years that there are a lot of things that I can delegate to other people. I can’t delegate being a good husband or father. I prioritize those jobs on a daily basis even when I’m super busy with other professional responsibilities.

What parts of your day-to-day experience will make you a better Board of Directors candidate than the other candidates?

I’m not comfortable saying that I’ll be better Board Member than the other candidates. I know the other candidates, or at least know of them. All of the candidates are distinguished members of the community and have been very successful. We all have much to offer. The community will be well served by who ever is elected.

I’d prefer to focus on what makes me ‘me’ rather than what makes me better.

Did I mention I’ve been feeling old lately? “40 is the new 30” is my current mantra. I don’t ‘feel’ old (except maybe in the morning when I get out of bed, and definitely after the intense game of flag football I played a few weeks ago when I got stuck blocking a 6’9” 300 pound monster. ) But age does have it’s benefits. I’ve been a database professional for 19 years and I’ve been a SQL Server professional for 17 years. That makes me somewhat of an elder statesmen in the community.

Frankly, there aren’t many people in the world who have been doing SQL Server as long as I have. I moved to OS/2 based SQL Server from UNIX based Sybase and Informix back in the early 90’s when many people thought Microsoft technologies were toys suitable for hobbies and small mom and shop businesses. I always had a different perspective on the cost/benefit/feature set of Microsoft tools and I decided to plant my flag there. The old saying ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ holds true in many areas and oddly enough data management and architecture fits into this category. The technology has evolved in amazing ways over the years. But data is still data. It’s in my blood after 19 years. 19 years of being a data pro gives me incredibly valuable perspective for where our industry has come from and where it needs to go.

I have a few other unique value propositions besides simply being old.

Perhaps most importantly; there aren’t many SQL Server professionals in the world who have the unique mix of large company, small company, technologist, speaker, writer, evangelist, entrepreneur, and business executive that I do. This gives me a varied and well rounded perspective of what the community needs.

I’m rarely accused of being humble and I’m very proud of the fact that I was one of the world’s first SQL Server MVP’s and was able to hold my own among the best of the best SQL Server experts in the world. I loved that part of my life, but I also had visions for other things and have had tremendous fun being an entrepreneur and executive with SolidQ for the past 7 years. I like to joke that we’re the world’s smallest global, multinational company. With 100+ Mentors around the world we’re not exactly tiny but we’re also not Coke or Proctor and Gamble. We do have mentors based on 5 continents and close to 20 countries and we have formal subsidiaries in more than 7 countries. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about strategic thinking over the years above and beyond the technical skills I’ve picked up over 2 decades. I’m confident that this unique blend of experience will help me be a successful advocate for the SQL Server community on the PASS Board.

I’ve heard that the PASS Board of Directors is a time-consuming hobby to say the least, and at this point in our careers, none of us have tons of extra time. What other projects or things do you expect to have to cut back in order to make time for the Board? (I’d just like to give the readers an idea of how tough it is to prioritize things.)

Sleep is over-rated. Plus I can easily cut out at least one meal a day which will of course help me cut down on restroom breaks. Collectively this will free up several hours a day so I’m not too worried. Joking aside; the PASS Board is a serious commitment. I don’t expect to need to cut anything out of my schedule but I’ve given my candidacy careful and deliberate thought and I’m confident that I can invest the time that will be necessary for me to succeed on the Board.

I believe social networking and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, Facebook, and StackOverflow are changing the way DBAs interact with each other, get training, and solve problems. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

I would have disagreed until pretty recently. For better or worse, I’m OK admitting that I didn’t have a FaceBook page until about 3 weeks ago. My wife has had one for years. I set up a Twitter account just this past week. I had always thought; ‘heck, I’m on the computer all day. Why would I want to spend free time on the computer? I like FaceBook more than I thought I would.

I was on a conference call with SQL Server Magazine last week and a large topic of conversation was about the growing reality that Twitter is becoming a virtual, real-time peer support group for DBA’s and other SQL Pros. I was surprised to hear how valuable Twitter had become. I had always thought of Twitter as a ‘I’m about to eat a sandwich’ sort of waste of time. I’m starting to think that I’ve been wrong.

I was one of the world’s first SQL MVP’s and I earned that status by answering a bunch of questions on Compuserve. Who out there is old enough to remember Compuserve? I felt pretty good if I logged in to support the community 2 or 3 times per day. Tools like twitter are real time. Have a question? Ask it and maybe get an answer in a few seconds or a few minutes. Is that changing the way that DBA’s interact with each other? Absolutely.

I’d like to go on a tangent for a second. Don’t take this the wrong way; but I notice that a few of your questions ask about ‘DBAs’. I’ve heard a rumor that there are some SQL Server professionals out there who aren’t actually DBA’s. BI folks, developers, developers who are tasked with DBA responsibility but don’t think of themselves as DBAs? My past and current experiences in the SQL Server world have required me to pay attention to the varied demographics of people who think of themselves as SQL Server professionals. I’ll work hard on PASS to make sure we support all of those different types of SQL pros.

Do you blog and use social networking tools? Where can DBAs find you online?

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never blogged. Not once. Ever. My excuse is that I wrote the SQL Server Update commentary for about 8 years and had a weekly That’s not quite a daily blog, but it was a lot of work. Especially since I would respond to a large number of reader comments directly. So it was sort of like a blog before blogs had even invented. I eventually got a bit burned out having a weekly deadline. I now write an op-ed piece for SQL Server Update just 1 time per month which is a nice balance for me.

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog and most likely will in the near future. I have a FaceBook page and I’m briancmoran on Twitter.

Do you have any conflicts of interest that may pose a challenge?

Do I have potential conflicts of interest? Sure. SolidQ provides training and this is certainly an area that PASS might consider moving into at some point in the future. Will this pose a challenge? Yes and no. Over my 19 year career I’ve often had to wear many hats at the same time. I was a SQL MVP for about 13 years and a journalist with SQL Server Magazine for 10 of those years. I often got scooped by my journalist peers on SQL Server news that I had known for months or years prior to the scoop hitting the news wires. Why didn’t I write it up? I was under NDA with Microsoft as an MVP. What’s my point? I know how to wear different hats and respect the fiduciary and ethical responsibility of each hat.

SolidQ benefits from a growing and dynamic SQL Server community. PASS benefits from a growing and dynamic SQL Server community. A rising tide lifts all boats. Will there be potential for come competitive overlap creating a potential conflict of interest? Yes, but fundamentally SolidQ and PASS goals are aligned which will make it easy for me to wear my multiple hats and honor the fiduciary and ethical duties that each hat requires.

If PASS put you in charge of increasing new memberships, what specific steps would you take?

I see two main reasons people might not be members of PASS. The first reason is that potential members know about PASS and don’t feel that the value proposition is strong enough to join. PASS is free, so it’s pretty low threshold to demonstrate PASS’s value proposition to become a member. I don’t think this is the core problem. The second main reason people might not be members of PASS is that they might not know about PASS.

I was at a SQL Server user group meeting the other night and spoke for a few minutes trying to drum up support for my candidacy. There were about 35 people there. I asked how many attendees were PASS members. 2 or 3 raised their hands. I then asked how many people knew about PASS. Another 2 or 3 raised their hands. That means that just more than 10% of the attendees had even heard of PASS. I was disappointed but not surprised. It’s my experience that many members of the community, even people active in user groups, don’t always know much about PASS. It’s my experience that many Microsoft employees in the field, whose jobs revolve around the data platform, don’t know much about PASS. This needs to change.

The first step in my strategy to increase PASS membership would be to create an evangelism and brand awareness campaign to make sure that all potential PASS members at least knew about PASS. I’d also make sure that all key Microsoft data platform employees know about PASS and feel that encouraging their customers to join PASS would benefit the interests of Microsoft.

Convincing people to join once they know about it? That’s a relatively easy task since PASS membership is free. But with that said, I’m convinced there are people who know about PASS, know it’s free, and still don’t join. That says something about the way that the PASS value proposition is explained to potential members. Helping potential members understand how and why PASS members can benefit them would be the second prong to my member drive execution plan. Increasing the value proposition would be the 3rd prong of my drive.

Take a look at the PASS home page. There’s no information on the home page that explains why a potential member might want to join. There’s also no mention of the fact that PASS membership is free. I’d start my membership drive by ensuring the PASS home page has a big, bold, impossible to miss section that shouts ‘Here are the value added reasons you should join PASS’. And I’d make sure the home page shouts out that membership is free.

What do you think PASS is doing right to improve the day-to-day lives of database administrators?

First off; remember those SQL Server pros I mentioned above who aren’t DBA’s? Is it OK is I say SQLPro instead of DBA?

I think PASS does a fabulous job in providing the world’s best live SQL Server conference experience. There are other solid events out there; but year by year PASS has been adding more content and value added aspects to the Summit. It outpaces anything else offered IMHO. Education like that provides a lot of value to SQLPros.

I hope no one gets made at me for saying this; but I’m not sure that the vast majority of SQLPro’s think that PASS does day in day out to improve their daily lives. Maybe PASS can offer free concierge services, limo rides, and a butler to SQLPros. That would improve my daily life. Joking aside; I think this is one of the most important areas that PASS should address. Ie, adding value to SQLPros day in day out above and beyond the education and networking offered at the Summit.

What do you think PASS could do better, and how?

In no particular order of importance…

I’ll start with what I mentioned above. PASS needs to be a resource to SQLPros day in day out. I might begin addressing that need by actually asking SQLPros what they might want PASS to do for them.

PASS needs to greatly improve their international footprint.

I’d like to see PASS take a leadership role in providing guidance to leading universities on the types of real world experience that SQL Server professionals need to succeed in the real world.

Like I said above, I believe PASS’s Community Summit is the world’s premiere live conference event. But there is always room for improvement. If more than 100 sessions are good would more than 200 sessions be better? I think so. Are conferences forever destined to be shoe horned into the formulaic pre/post con with 90 minute sessions in between? I think there are ways that PASS could offer deeper, more pervasive educational experiences during the Summit that fall outside this traditional model. I also think that all of the Summit content should be available in an online delivery footprint to all registered Summit attendees at no additional cost. I’d want video, audio, and transcripts of the speaker comments.

I’d like to see PASS make an investment in providing free ‘virtual machine’ environments that SQLPro’s could use to learn new SQL Server technologies. Frankly it’s too darn hard for a relational engine pro to pick up BI skills and vice versa. I think that PASS should be a resource for making this easier. Providing virtual sandboxes for users to play in would be a huge boon to the community.

I’d like to see PASS offer more guidance to SQLPros who are considering moving from a purely technical career to a technical/executive/mgmt career that is focused in the data management space.

That list isn’t comprehensive and like I said it’s not necessarily in order of importance.

Sum up your goals for PASS in 140 characters or less:

Positively impact the daily life of a SQLPro. Positively impact the long term career, financial success, and happiness of a SQLPro.