Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, SQLPASS, and other random things

Program committee task--Speaker terms revisited

By Allen Kinsel, 10 days ago

This one has been sitting on my to do list for a very very long time, actually its been on my list since nearly the day after the 2009 SQLPASS Summit closed.

Admittedly Im not a PASS «Chapter leader», nor do I attend the meetings in person more than a few times a year (its 3 hrs roundtrip to the local group during lunch) but, Im always looking for ways we can improve processes at PASS and Ive heard too many times to count over the years that we dont do a good job of helping chapters connect with speakers, or even providing a way for the chapters to contact potential speakers.

The other day I contacted Andy Warren about an idea I had for getting a simple speaker bureau off the ground reasonably quick since I know he's had that on his mind lately.  I'd like to think that his post on that subject was  part of the fruits of that brainstorming session but, Ill never know.  In order to make some of the things we want to do for the community «easier» we need to rework (in a small way) the speaker terms and conditions to allow for it.

Speaker Terms

Every speaker who presents at the PASS Summit is required to sign a contract that protects PASS as well as the speakers, its pretty simple really, even I can read and understand it.  What id like to do is integrate a few «optional» opt in type items that would give PASS the ability to manage the connection between speakers, their submitted abstracts and the chapters that need speakers.  The other day, I had to tell the Appdev VC that I couldnt refer speakers to them nor could I contact a few speakers on their behalf because we had never asked if we could contact the speakers in situations like that.  I suspect many speakers would be ok with occasional contact from PASS HQ when speakers are needed.  This should at least give us the ability to do a better job of making that connection

Help needed

I need a couple of people to hopefully form a small group & decide how best to accomplish this goal.  With any luck someone out there would also like to lead this small group in making this happen.

leave a comment here or contact me at if you're interested in helping

Related posts

Share this post

PASS Program Committee--Defined

By Allen Kinsel, 11 days ago

I get asked quite frequently about the different PASS committee's and how a person goes about volunteering for them.  I thought I'd take a little time and explain what the program committee does and a little about how they do it.

The program committee

The current program committee could easily be renamed «The Summit Committee».  This group of community volunteers are responsible for most pieces of education at the annual SQLPASS Summit.

Committee Members

Every year PASS sends out a call for volunteers for the program committee (usually in Jan-Feb).  This call is actually quite formal with a few questions asked in an online survey.  The answers to these questions are used to match volunteers to tasks within the committee

The Program Committee Structure 2010

PASS Board Member (2010 Jeremiah Peschka)

PASS HQ Elena Sebastiano & Craig Ellis

Program Manager (2009-2010 Allen Kinsel)

Program Leaders (2 or 3 for lg projects)

Abstract review team members
Tasked team members

    PASS BOD Member

    The program committee always has a BOD member in charge of overseeing everything, they are usually expected to come up with great ideas, keep everything running smoothly and handle the «problems» as they arrise.  Actually the BOD members that get tricked into taking over program are very involved in so many decisions I don't even know what they are!

    PASS HQ

    These 2 are the backbone of «getting things done» and making sure we volunteers stay on task and on schedule.  In program, as with most high profile projects, once the deadlines start they never seem to stop and if they start to slip its not good for anyone!

    Program Manager

    Thats my current job, I wish I could find a job description.  Id surely like to see it!  Essentially, I like to consider myself the glue that holds the group together and keeps us moving in the right direction.  Sort of like a project manager that actually works on the work of a project <zing>

    Program Management/leaders

    These are high level volunteers that work to meet more difficult goals.  Such as define criteria and make selections of pre/post-con Sessions and spotlight sessions.  Develop speaker resources, develop better evaluation procedures and various other similar things.

    Abstract review teams

    This group of volunteers, usually 11 people, is split up into teams by track (DBA, BID, BIA, AD, PD) This group gets the daunting task of reading and ranking every single submitted abstract.  Then they are asked to choose not only the accepted sessions but alternate sessions.  This process is several months long and the bulk of the work usually happens from Mar-May

    Tasked Teams

    This year I intend to change the requirements of the volunteers on the committee and split up the work a little more.  Every year the program committee is asked to do more work since the conference grows annually.  So, I've been looking for ways to split the work up even more.  This has 2 benefits, one its less work for any one person or group of people.  Two, it allows more people to get involved in a great organization.

    This year I hope to pull together several task based groups (with leaders) to do things such as pull the session evaluation data together for all years available (2005 onward), review the session powerpoints, revamp the speaker terms, design and test our >proposed< new summit speaker tool, group abstracts, and several other tasks.  There should be plenty of work to go around the biggest issue I normally run into is finding volunteers willing to take on leadership of these tasks which leads me to my 2010 program goals.

    Goals for 2010 -- I have 1 goal other than a successful summit program, that is to recruit several people into leadership positions within the program committee.  It is my opinion that the only way everything PASS needs to accomplish will get done is if I can find a few good volunteers willing to lead tasks & projects.

    Related posts

    Share this post

    How did I get here?

    By Allen Kinsel, 11 days ago

    There's a meme going around that I thought I'd take my turn at answering.

    Better late than never I suppose, Work always seems to have a way of getting in the way of posts like this!

    It all started with a CAT3 cable

    It all started on a dark night in the middle 90's, I was enrolled in college sitting in my dorm room trying to connect my brand spanking new Pentium 133mhz computer to our college network so I could partake in what was at that time a huge LAN group playing Warcraft/Diablo/Duke Nukem.  The problem was no one on the campus apparently knew how to connect to the network, yes it was a smallish campus.  The only piece of guidance that could be found was in the welcome doc.  «Network connectivity can be established in the bookstore»  after contacting the bookstore and procuring the required 10baseT network card (~175$) they basically said, take this wire and plug it in the wall, everything else will work automatically.  Well, even today we know things rarely work that easily.   The cable that was sold to me by the bookstore was a regular phone cable because apparently the bookstore managers didn't know any better, it wasn't their fault though since the public campus network was less than a year old at that point.  Somehow I spent enough time trying to get the correct table that I was lucky enough to get hooked up with the «campus nerd» who happened to live in the dorm 1 floor above me.  He set me straight, told me where to get the required cable and handed me a scribbled list with the required connection info.  Many late nights and much tinkering later I was successfully connected.  Being the natural tinkerer I shortly figured out all about the network and what it took to get win 3.1 and 95 connected.  Shortly, I became the «campus nerd» and when it was apparent to me that I was naturally inclined with computers, and not so much with coursework I wasnt inerested in, I quickly gave up school and began bartering computer work.

    Then there was a book

    A short while later I had landed a job as an all around network guy.  I was doing everything and anything for a relatively small business.  One day my boss proudly announced we were going to be getting a new server with a Database (SQL 6.5)!  Apparently we had outgrown our existing business systems and the decision had been made to install what was essentially a combined financial/payroll system.  A few short months later, in the middle of a payroll processing cycle our SQL server decided to do what SQL 6.5 did quite often, it got corrupted.  Since I had a grand total of 4 months experience in SQL a consultant was called in and she fixed our problem.  More importantly she brought with her a copy of the latest and greatest SQL book and as luck would have it, she left it behind.  For the next 6 months I studied that book inside and out.  A «database geek» was born

    Finally, a chance meeting

    In 2004 I was attending my first precon (given by Kimberly Tripp) at my first PASS Summit when I was looking for some lunch and happened to sit with 2 guys, Pat Wright and Tom Larock that are to this day two of my closest PASS friends.  There is little doubt that the experience of meeting these 2 and attending the volunteer «roundup» lead by Wayne Snyder has had a profound impact on my career (this blog is a testament to that impact).  A «volunteer geek» was born.  Being a volunteer for PASS and participating in the SQL Server community has taken my skills up at least 2 notches, for that I am thankful.

    These are the technical moments of my life that led me here, since I'm nearly the last one to answer this, I thought id go ahead and tag my friend Pat Wright since I noticed he hadn't answered yet.  Otherwise, I have enjoyed reading everyone else's paths to a very similar outcome!

    Photo Courtesy of Darren Hester

    Related posts

    Share this post

    How do you do Disaster Recovery

    By Allen Kinsel, 12 days ago

    Going through the process of a large scale multi-location disaster recovery made me stop and think about all the different incarnations that can be used to recover database servers. 

    Living with a datacenter in Hurricane alley, We've been doing disaster preparedness(recovery) on a small scale for many years but this year we've been working towards recovering all of our assets to an offsite colocation.  That part of the decision is easy, the actual method used to do these recoveries is definitely up in the air and I fully expect our processes to change for the better, every time we redo our disaster testing (many times a year going forward).

    In exploring the recovery process we quickly realized that our «hardware failure» recovery documents weren't going to work effectively in a datacenter failure situation.  So, it was time to design a new set of criteria for success.  I thought Id share our thought process and how we plan on tackling this always fun experience.  Its worth mentioning in a side note that no SQL replication is wanted/allowed for in our case.

    1st thought:  Bring up blank OS builds for the database servers, load SQL Server, Patch it to the correct level while the tape restores of the database backups are happening, Recover the system databases then kick off the individual restores(that are scripted with the regular nightly backup jobs)

    • Benefits to DBA: clean, repeatable, documentable process that we are mostly in control of.
    • Drawbacks: Time consuming, potential version match issues, recovering system databases is always «fun»

    2nd thought: Use a windows snapshot to restore the OS/Sql Binaries and Sql System databases then recover the user databases using the aforementioned scripts. This also buys us the nicety of having litespeed already installed

    • Benefits to DBA: Faster, System level recovery done in a standard (for our system group) method
    • Drawbacks: system/SQL recovery out of our (DBA) control

    Since our Systems engineers are already asking to go the snap route (because thats common for other application servers), and we expect this method to take less overall time, we are planning on trying that first.  Depending on how that test goes, we will likely have option 1 as a backup plan or potentially try that next time thats why we're testing it, so that we can make sure we have it right.

    As always, there's more than 1 way to accomplish the same outcome so my question is how do you do off-site disaster recovery (testing)?  Or maybe the better question is do you do disaster recovery testing?  If not why?

    Related posts

    Share this post

    Using Aliases with SQL Server

    By Allen Kinsel, 18 days ago

    Even an old dog can learn new tricks

    Where Can I get a dog like this?
    I had an Aha! moment recently.  For my entire career as a DBA I have generally considered aliases for connections a workaround for bad behaving applications.  Whenever someone said «alias» my mind immediately heads to SQL Server client configuration aliases which I try to avoid if at all possible (since they are configured on each client)  It never snapped to me until recently that DNS aliases may be a good solution to a few problems  we're currently experiencing.

    For disaster recovery reasons, as well as for manageability reasons we have decided to start using DNS aliases for every application connection to database servers.  This should allow us to have the luxury of moving databases from server to server without having to reconfigure multiple applications which would normally be a whole process in itself since the code was already migrated to production which is locked.

    Using DNS aliases should also allow us to swap highly important applications over individually to a remote datacenter, which could have less computing power, without having to switch every application and thus kill the performance of that standby server.

    There are certainly limitations to this, if for instance you want to move applications from one named instance to another.  In our current environment this isnt much of an issue since many of our production instances are indeed default.  The other major limitation to this is any change will have a small amount of downtime while the DNS changes are propgated throughout the network.

    One more «gotcha» that weve already run into is vendor applications (surprise surprise) that resolve the DNS name to an ip address and then store that inside the application configuration.

    We decided on working out a naming standard that looks like this:
    For direct database access, where an application only connects to 1 database the following is used
    dsDBNameEnvName
    i.e. dsCustomerProd
    for an application (like sharepoint) where many databases are going to be accessed we change it a bit
    dsAppNameEnvName
    i.e. dsSharepointProd

    While this isnt necessarily a «new» idea, it was certainly a different idea in our environment and I suspect there are other «DBA's»  out there like myself that dont have a habit for using our network skills on a regular basis

    Photo courtesy: Ronn Ashore

    Related posts

    Share this post

    PASS Processes and Results posted

    By Allen Kinsel, 24 days ago

    How a Bacon Explosion is Made

    Openness

    Ive been encouraged to blog openly about the Volunteer work that I do for PASS and the processes we use to get the work done.  This blog is the first in what I hope to be a long series that will outline the different things that have to be done to bring a >somewhat< seemless experience to the SQL community

    Pass Processes --what you (dont) want to know 

    The final PASS Summit session evaluation results have finally been emailed out to the speakers.  This brings an interesting month and a half of PASS to a close for me.  Back on the 24th of november I asked for some help to get the Session evaluations together and generate some results.  As it turns out I had a huge outpouring of support from everyone wanting to help (Thanks again) In the end though, I wound up working with 2 volunteers: Tim Mitchell and Christina Leo, as well as Elena Sebastiano from PASS HQ to make this work...

     

    To get to the end you have to start at the beginning

    I've been involved with the program committee in various ways since 2006 so I have eval counts going back to 2005.  We've tried various ways of upping the evaluation return rate over the years but until 2009 we have had little luck in improving it.  This is a classic example of be careful what you wish for because you just may get it.  We had an amazing 336% increase in return rate of the evals. 

    2005 -- 3518

    2006 -- 2114

    2007 -- 2991

    2008 -- 2379

    2009 -- 8008

    While the added evaluations will be of great use to everyone they created an unanticipated problem of having to manually enter these.  PASS hired a temp to enter the data and since we didnt have an accessible designed database to store the data in we decided to use zoomerang.  The sessions were entered directly into a zoomerang survey and the results were extracted into an excel file that was delivered to me. 

    Once we had the session results in hand Christina went through the rather painful process of cleansing the data and getting it into a format that could be used.  The data was loaded into a SQL Server database, where Tim spent his time building an SSIS package to extract the data and put it into individual excel spreadsheets that could be emailed to the speakers. Once this was complete, I took a preformatted email Elena had wordsmithed for me and built an additional SSIS package that would read the email addresses from the db and send the attached excel spreadsheet.  This was an excellent opportunity for me to expand my SQL Skills.  I dont get to use SSIS in my current position, I always learn better when I have a real problem that needs solving so I enjoyed the work.

    All was going perfectly, I was about to move on to my next task when the emails started to flow in with speakers asking where their results were since their spreadsheets were blank.  This caused me to absoluetly PANIC.  I immediately started to verify where the mixup was, when managing a process with so many moving parts theres always a chance that it was something in the process.  After verifying that the evals werent in the original dataset, I felt quite a releif as it wasnt something in our process that ate the evals, it was something far more sinister...

    The case of the missing evals

    I contacted HQ about the issue first thing in the morning and they were obviously thinking the worst as was I.  A few phone calls and emails later the options were «lost in the zoomerang DB», «entered incorrectly» or «lost in transit».  I wound up getting an email at about 9PM titled «Crisis Averted», even though the crisis want any of my doing, you can imagine the relief when I heard that the an envelope(s) containing just over 1400 evaluations had been found at HQ.  They were apparently misplaced during the transit of the hundreds (thousands??) of boxes returning to HQ from the summit. 

    Now comes the hard part

    About 48 hours later I got a new extract with all of the missing data in it.  I only assume because of the speed we got these 1400 abstracts that every free hand at HQ was working furiously to get them entered.  As it turns out Christina was in Europe and unavailiable to recreate what she had originally done and Tim was busy so I took on the task of recreating the process that was done the first time.  Luckily, I had the source to Tim's SSIS so that wouldnt be too much trouble.  After about 5 more hours of work I had the data loaded into the proper taables and ready to be reported on.  The process was updated and everything was re-run and with that, all the speakers got their evals and were happy, Success!!

    Reporting on the data

    I proposed that we generate a page for the summit09 site that had the top 10 sessions and other various data/matrixes for use primarily by the speakers.  In the end it turned out that this info is very valuable to PASS for generating interest in the quality of the educational opportunities at the summit.  Since there is a value add we had to work around how to «properly» release this data.  Not a big deal, just an aspect some members of the community might not have even thought of. (I know I hadnt thought of it) 

     

    The Grand Finale

     

    The link which I hope will be of some interest to both speakers and potential conference attendee's

    Here you should find the top 10 sessions overall, the top 5 sessions per track as well as all sorts of data that I extracted from the evaluation database.  its also worth noting that these pages directly link to the presentations (and recordings for summit 09 attendees) so you can relive the best of the best today.

    Did I miss something that you think is valuable?  let me know and Ill see about getting it added!!

    http://www.sqlpass.org/Events/BestOfSummit.aspx

     

    Takeaways

    PASS has some very «interesting» processes that backup the front end and thre is definetly room for improvement, the biggest issue is how do you improve a process such as this one without spend very much (any) money? 

    We need to design a database >gasp< to hold the speaker eval information and not rely on a 3rd party that only exports to excel

    We've already enacted a change for 2010:The registration group will enter the evaluations from the paper immediately after they are collected, this should kill the delay in getting results back to the community.  We >may< also go to a split online/paper eval process but, im hesitant to mess with a process that we had such a huge improvement , especially after earlier trying an online process with less than stellar results

    If we combine these 2 items, I think it would be outstanding to have a realtime update on the main PASS website during the summit of what the top 10 sessions have been, and maybe even a «reserved slot» for a repeat of the top session per track?

    The scoring system that we used to deliver the results (very poor, poor, average, very good, excellent) did not work well, we will go back to using only numbers 1-5 next year.

    I'd estimate that I spent somewhere between 50 and 60 hours completing this task, and ill admit that some of that was learning new things in SSIS, but youd be amazed how many emails it took to put this piece of info out for all to see.

     

    Photo courtesy of Kristin

     

    You're still here?  did you really read all of this? Well if you did, you should really think about taking up kniting or some other worthy passtime =)

    Related posts

    Share this post

    SQLPASS hidden gems

    By Allen Kinsel, 1 month and 1 day ago

    Photo By MuseumWales

    Hidden gems, you dont often find them but when you do, you should notice 

    I just got off a conference call with the great folks at PASS Headquarters.  While on the call I was out looking around the PASS summit site and I found this little piece of #SQLPASSAWESOMENESS

    Have you been to 1 or more PASS Summit's?  well your in luck!!!  This link is for you.  After logging in to the site with the email address you used to register for the summit and your password you should find a screen with every summit since 2006 that you've attended.  Inside these links are the gems (recordings/ppts for every session). 

    I know some of the sessions might be stale but the information is always valuable because everyone has at least 1 Piece of legacy code in their shop right?  NO, you say?  Well then I guess you'll have to be satisfied with going back and finding a Buck Woody session and learning a ton while laughing almost nonstop.  (Heres another Tip: His session in 2008 was on powershell and its Code was DBA-302-M)

    Related posts

    Share this post

    Happy Holidays, Tis the Season in review!

    By Allen Kinsel, 1 month and 17 days ago

    Whats your favorite time of the year?

    People often ask why I enjoy this time of year so much.  For me its very simple, the time frame from about Oct15-Jan1 is easily the busiest time of the year for me which I guess means that I thrive under pressure!!

    It all usually starts around the 15th of Oct when the last minute tweakings of the PASS summit are starting to fall into place, then usually the first week of Nov the annual PASS Summit happens and we get to see all of the hard work the dedicated PASS volunteers and speakers put in come together in a great display of SQL community and quite possibly the best quality SQL Server education opportunity anywhere! 

    In years past I have almost 100% dropped PASS work until the following January/February to give plenty of time to recharge before embarking on another marathon ordeal of working on the various committee's and such.  This year I have attempted to start working on PASS stuff almost immediately after the summit.  I'm not convinced yet that this is the right thing to do as the risk of burnout runs high when you have no «down» time.  We'll see how this works for this year and if it doesnt seem to effect anything, Ill continue down this road.

    The Fun Stuff

    As soon as the summit is over I head home and its prime time Yellowfin Tuna fishing season.  This means that I spend as many weather permitting weekends (60 hr trips) as possible headed out about 200 miles into the Gulf Of Mexico in search of fresh hard fighting Yellowfin tuna.  This is one of may favorite hobbies/vices and can quickly consume huge amounts of time, Just ask my family who have happily learned to deal with it.

    Wait there is more

    On top of all these «fun» things I like to do, there are those little things called Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New years.  Those 3 wonderful days that every employee (in the U.S at least) looks forward to if for no other reason than the time they get off work.  Some days around my office this time of year I have enough time to catch up on some of those «nice to have's» at work, other days its like the flood gates have opened up and there is no seeing the end of the torrent! 

    Get to the point already

    So whats the point of this post?  there are 2 points actually

    1: To wish all 2 of you that read this a Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you choose to celebrate. 

    2: To give you a slight timesuck and very big laugh for the day before your long weekend hopefully begins!

    This Bohemian Rhapsody is from the end of the first SQL Karaoke night when we ran the bar out of Jaeger got together and had a good time. Please be forewarned that there is quite possibly some NSFW language in this video.  How many of your SQL Server colleagues can you pick out in this video?  be sure to look to the right side where its dark and many of them were hiding!

    Next year at the PASS Summit in Seattle make sure you attend the #SQLKaraoke night(s) at Bush Garden and you too can appear here.  Hopefully, I'll get the minor editing done on the grand finale from night #2 of SQL Karaoke with 2 times the amount of SQL people up before the new year!

    You need to install or upgrade Flash Player to view this video, install or upgrade here:
    Get Adobe Flash player

    Related posts

    Share this post

    Big thanks to the 2009 PASS Program Committee

    By Allen Kinsel, 2 months ago

    The PASS summit 2009

    When building something as large as the educational content of the SQLPASS summit there are many people involved in doing it successfully.  As 2009 winds down I would like to take the time to publicly thank many of the people who were involved in making the annual summit this year quite possibly the best ever. 

    Program Committee

    In a post soon, Ill do better justice in explaining exactly what it is the program committee does and how we manage to pull of stuffing 160+ full length SQL Server sessions into 3 glorious days.   For now, the list of the people who helped in 09 and a brief  description of what they were involved with will have to do.

     

    Lynda Rab ( Twitter) - PASS Board of Director - In charge of everything related to the PASS Program committee

    Kathi Kellenberger (Blog / Twitter) - Abstract review site configuration

    Brad Mcgehee (Blog/Twitter) - Speaker resource and session evaluation configuration

    Tim Ford (Blog/Twitter) - Pre/Post conference submission criteria & selection

    Jason Massie (Blog/Twitter) Leader of the Database Administration abstract review and selection team

    Ayad Shammout  - Database Administration abstract review and selection team

    Colin Stasiuk (Blog/Twitter)- Database Administration abstract review and selection team

    Melissa Demcsak (Blog/Twitter) - Leader of the Business Intelligence abstract review and selection team

    Dave Fackler (Blog) - Business Intelligence abstract review and selection team

    Tim Martin - Business Intelligence abstract review and selection team

    Ben Debow - Leader of the Applications Development abstract review and selection team

    Todd Robinson (Twitter) - Applications Development abstract review and selection team

    Roman Rehak (Blog) - Applications Development abstract review and selection team

    Lance Harra (Twitter)- Leader of the Professional Development abstract review and selection team

    Mike Walsh (Blog/Twitter) - Professional Development abstract review and selection team

    Jeremiah Peschka (Blog/Twitter) - Abstract editing for grammar/spelling etc

    Nancy Hidy Wilson (Twitter) - Assembling the session evaluation forms

    Sheila Acker (Twitter) - Assembling the session evaluation forms

     I would be remiss if I didn't mention our wonderful support at PASS HQ

    Elena Sebastiano - PASS HQ - Elena was our dedicated resource at HQ for everything related to program.  I'm probably not stretching much in saying that we would not have a summit without her.

    Craig Ellis - PASS HQ - Craig has a hand in most everything for the summit and did a huge amount of work with logistics

    If you know any of these people please take a moment and give them thanks for all their hard work, without them, the SQL Community wouldn't have an event as great as the PASS Summit!

    #tsql2sday

    In order to showcase the hard work of the program committee in selecting good topics, and the hard work of our wonderful speakers in delivering good topics, and in the spirit of #tsql2sday, I'm going to link to a session from the 2009 PASS Summit that has had the video uploaded where you might be able to learn something about dates in SQL server.  (you had to attend the summit to get the video but the slides are available to anyone)

    Charlie Hanania delivers Understanding time zones and using them effectively in your database applications

    Related posts

    Share this post

    A call to arms, SQLPASS arms that is

    By Allen Kinsel, 2 months and 15 days ago

    I need help

     

    No not the mental kind, but the volunteer labor kind.

     

    I mentioned when I started this blog, that I was going to use it as a place to make calls for volunteers of all types.  I plan on having a need for «Committee based» volunteers, and «Task based» volunteers over the next year.  I figure that starting out, I should detail what my thoughts are regarding the different types of volunteers (these are my thoughts, not PASS's)

     

    Committee based volunteer: Someone who works for a long(ish) period of time on a series of assigned tasks, that usually culminate in some larger overall accomplished goals

    Task based volunteer: Someone who works for a shorter amount of time on a single task that needs to be completed by a predetermined deadline

     

    For this endeavour, I need a few volunteers that can help the program committee in a task based role.  We had a really great speaker evaluation response rate at this years summit (approx 15,000 evals returned, you guys rock!!) and while that's terrific for the speakers, and next years program work, its not so great for the people having to manually enter all 15000 of those responses.   <digression> Yes I know there is a thing called the web, and we should move to an online evaluation system, and if you've attended PASS in the past, you'll remember that we've had online evaluations before.  Our experience in the past has been that we get far fewer evals online than we do if we ask the door greeters to hand you paper ones. </digression>

     

    What I need your help with is taking all of the data that is being entered into the system and getting meaningful data for our speakers out. Yep, this sounds somewhat like DBA work to me so, this should easily fit some of our volunteers skills, until I tell you the data is in Access Excel.  Please dont let that scare you though, we can do anything we like with the raw data to get the information out, we just have to get it into something meaningful for our speakers.  While this whole process was supposed to be a fairly quick project so we could get results to the speakers quickly, we didnt anticipate the amount of evals we would recieve.  For a little perspective we recieved just under 3000 evals last year with a larger attendee base.  Im hoping that we can get this started, and finished in in a short amount of time, Im aiming for before the 15th of Dec.  I would estimate that no one person should spend more than 5-15 hours over the next few weeks working on this. 

    • Approx project deadline -- Dec 15 2009
    • Approx time needed -- 5-15 hours

    If your interested in helping, please send me an email @ 

    As always, PASS, the SQL Community, and I personally thank you for offering your time

    Related posts

    Share this post

    ← Previous 01 02 Next →

    Tags

    Allen Kinsel on Twitter

    Categories

    Most Recent Posts

    Subscribe

    Archives

    Next Posts

    Latest comments

    • How do you do Disaster Recovery:
      • Allen Kinsel: Funny you should mention a virtual DR Farm, I believe that we're doing something similar, but the problem as I see it is how do you physically get the servers recovered? regardless of the hardware, there has to be a better method of getting the software up. Since most DR sites arent permanent...
      • Brent Ozar: One of the slickest ways I've seen recently is to have a completely virtual DR farm. Run just a few VMware (or Hyper-V) hosts, and let each team build up their own virtual servers in DR. You have limited hardware horsepower in DR, but you only do testing of apps there, not full...
      • Pat Wright: What about mirroring? to another SQL Server somewhere else? Is that an option? Also what kind of time do you need to be back up in? That usually helps to determine some of your options as well.
    • Program committee task--Speaker terms revisited:
      • Allen Kinsel: The intent is definetly to get this in the app side of the process, fact is there are a few places that we need to change to make this work, I figure 80% of the abstracts that are submitted would make good sessions for any usergroup now all PASS needs to do is enable them...
      • Jack Corbett: I agree with Simon's comment. Although I think PASS should definitely hove those options on the Speaker contract.
      • Simon Sabin: I think it should be an option when people submit sessions, not just those that speak. That way you include the new speakers which are the ones that need to be speaking at usergroups to get practice.
    • How did I get here?:
      • Pat Wright: Thanks for Tagging me! Funny enough I just wrote my answer to this post today and haven't posted it yet. :)

    Most commented posts