SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps
SQLPASS
Why I will vote to move the PASS Summit in 2013
Feb 4th
Oh no, not again!
Seems not a day goes by that I dont have a discussion somewhere with someone about the Summit Location in 2013 or 2014, or even occasionally about the location this year and next.
If you need background, a couple of my PASS BOD Cohorts have already weighed in on the various ways they are thinking about this decision Here, Here, or Here, additionally Grant Fritchey and Andy Leonard both weighed in as well. Much additional conversation seems to happen regularly on twitter as well…
Ive been a member of the PASS Board for exactly 35 days and so far I’ve really only been shocked by one thing. Its almost beyond baffling to me that the #1 issue the SQL community wants the Board (and PASS by proxy) to solve is the location of the 2013 Summit. Honestly, I can think of at least 10 things that are more important for PASS to be focusing energy on than where the Summit is going to be located. But, alas that clearly illustrates that it is a VERY important issue to many community members
I want to be perfectly clear
The location of the 2013 Summit has not been decided yet
The decision is expected to be made in the March BOD meeting.
This post wont go into all the 1000′s of ways a person could look at this issue, and trust me there’s more than 1000. Instead I’m going to tip my hand, and skip all the mumbo jumbo because I believe everyone on the Board already knows how I feel about this issue. So the only possible people who dont know are the 2 of you reading this.
I will vote to move the Summit out of Seattle in 2013
Now that the beans have been spilled (no big shocker there I hope) id like to at least outline how I’ve come to this decision so hopefully you can agree or disagree with me but, at least respect that the reasons are my own, and that I believe they represent whats best for the organization as a whole.
First a tiny caveat – yes I’m putting the fine print first, its important — If by some freakish accident there is no conference space available (within a reasonable $$ limit) in the finalist cities then I may be forced to do something different. — that fine print is merely the DBA in me practicing for every possible outcome in a disaster. Even though I dont plan for it, I cant ignore it might happen.
- A large portion of the community feels so strongly about this that many feel almost disenfranchised by the very group that they have been an integral part of.
- PASS’s #1 Mission is to serve the community, how better than to occasionally have THE SQL Server Event of the year in a location thats more accessible to different parts of the country
- Microsoft has pledged their Support for the conference no matter its location
- To the average “newish” DBA the difference between having 150 MS people at the Summit and 400 is nearly nonexistent
- We’ve moved The Summit before, this isn’t unprecedented, PASSHQ is easily able to do this, the procedures should already exist.
- My portfolio (Summit Program) would likely be the most effected by this change. Maybe marketing would have a large impact as well but, as far as BOD work, Program would likely take the brunt of a move.
- If the majority of the Microsoft presence is traveling, they wont have their homes to sneak off to at 5:00. so they would presumably be more likely to continue to interact after Summit session hours
- Selfish Reason — Moving the summit would force Microsoft to lock in their speaker lineup earlier which would make my job coordinating that easier
Now for the limits of my support
- I think the Summit should be in Seattle more often than not, say 2 out of every 3 years or 3 out of every 4. Based almost entirely on SQL release cycles
- Until it proves detrimental to the organization — I am a risk taker by nature, as evidenced by living on an island in the path of hurricanes (site of the worst US natural disaster ever) but, everyone has their limits
Id like to take a second and ask you Mr. or Mrs. SQL Community Member reading this to do me a personal favor. Find one of those “other” really important things you wish PASS was better at, something we should be focusing on, and leave a comment here or send me a message in email or twitter about it and sling out some ideas, or better yet solutions!! Approach that with the same level of enthusiasm as the Summit location and we should be able to get some real movement on other things that are important to the community. If I get any responses to those “other things” Ill build them all into a a future blog post and make sure they get some attention.
I wrote the above mainly so the community that elected me to lead would know that I’ve spent a long time listening and trying to come up with a decision on this. Now with this decision behind me, I can move on to worrying about other PASS (Community) business without the community wondering if I’ve been paying attention.
Reflections of a Board Meeting
Jan 26th
Ive officially been on the Job as a Director for PASS less than a month and already I’ve had the chance to participate in 2 in person Board meetings. 1 at the summit (non-voting) and 1 this past week in Dallas. Ill be the first to admit, I didnt really know what to expect going in but, I had some ideas.
Going in to the 2 day meeting last week I figured there would be some good conversations, a bit of brainstorming, a fair amount of arguing, and at least touch of indecision. What I found was roughly what I expected in that regard.
The Specifics of the actual meeting were by in large important but boring for the casual observer, so I wont be spending countless bytes that you wont want to read rehashing everything. After the meeting minutes are published (2 weeks im told) I may revisit this post with thoughts but until then I figure I can wait a few months to rock the boat on details that werent overly “interesting” to the community at large.
Things I learned at last weeks Board Meeting
- When you have an Ipad in the meeting room, expect plenty of offhanded comments
- We’re doing a whole bunch of really good things in a piss poor less than optimal way
- The SQLRockstar who brought bacon to breakfast on the BOD wont eat it as he’s a Bacon Snob
- That a person can be a Bacon snob
- The ability to give a backhanded compliment is an art form best demonstrated during meetings
- Takeout Mexican food consumed in a hotel lobby will get strange looks
- Coups have been attempted (successfully??) in some user groups
- Getting 11 people to agree to a place for dinner is sometimes harder than getting them to agree about PASS Direction
What I was surprised the most by wasnt the funny quips, or the amount of good discussions, nor was it the ability of the board to identify problems. Nope, I was totally expecting to find that the board really does “get it”, and for the most part on whole I think they(we) do. What I was surprised the most by was the fact the hotel we were meeting at was channeling its inner Bush Garden:
no SQLKaraoke to be found but, Serious business instead
What is PASS to me, what is it to you?
Jan 24th
For all of the years Ive been involved with PASS it seems like one of the struggles has always been in defining what PASS is. From the very early days, I don’t think PASS has always done a good job describing in words that we can all understand what the goal is. Sure theres lots of management speak, and other marketingspeak on the PASS site but, it has never really done a good job of actually explaining it. I thought id take a quick try at it
<the views that follow are mine alone>
In a single sentence I think Id sum it up like this:
PASS is all about enabling our SQL Community to grow via education and networking.
Details details details
PASS has essentially one job, that job is to enable the many dedicated volunteers across the SQL community to execute on those core values we hear PASS throw about “Connect, Share, Learn” Unfortunately, enabling these volunteers isnt always the most exciting work, and sometimes its down right benign.
PASS Enables this connecting, sharing and learning several different ways
- PASS Summit
- PASS SQL Rally
- 24 Hours of PASS
- SQL Saturday
- Virtual Chapters
- Regular Chapters
Every one of these has at its core a very strong group of (generally) under recognized volunteers working to make them happen. PASS has varying levels of involvement in making these different “community events” happen. Some like the Summit require an extreme level of involvement, others like chapters get very little help. Sometimes the ratio of “glue” used to hold these things together is incorrect and we try to structure things too much in some places and too little in others. I think this is a normal occurrence in most established organizations, the pendulum swings to far one way or the other and needs to be pushed back a bit.
PASS divided
PASS the organization is merely the infrastructure that holds all of these pieces together. PASS the organization is nothing without the community volunteers that put their mark on these different community events.
PASS the community is all of the volunteers that support the organization from the BOD, Speakers, SQL Saturday leaders, chapter leaders, etc. In many cases the same people serve many of these different roles. PASS is not the SQL Community, its merely a single player in the community but, it requires a large part of the active members in the community to be successful.
What do you see PASS as?
Hopefully, Ive done a decent job with this quick explanation of what I see PASS as but, as always Id love to hear from you if you have different views of what PASS is, or more importantly where it should be headed
Best of PASS Summit 2010
Jan 19th
The results are in!!!
After tabulating over ten thousand distinct session evaluations for the 2010 PASS Summit we are pleased to release the top 10 sessions overall and the top 5 sessions per track.
What it feels like after doing this for a while
Getting these session results generated and out to the speakers in a timely manner is always challenging. After taking until the second week of January 2010 to return Speaker Evaluations for the 2009 Summit we put in sweeping changes to prevent that from happening again in 2010.
Fortunately we were very successful in getting the data, We (Community Volunteers) designed and built a database to house the eval info, and designed a system that could be used to enter the evaluations quickly during and shortly after the Summit. This was a resounding success. Unfortunately where we fell short was in executing on delivering the data to the speakers and the community. When we designed these systems, the process to send out the evaluations wasnt really discussed, or possibly just wasnt finished (the perils of distributing work include less insight into exact issues). Either way, I wound up in the 23rd hour reworking last years SSIS package to fit the new database schema.
Success
We delivered Speaker evaluations to the speakers a full 3 weeks earlier than last year. This included additional info about overall speaker scores that we had never provided in the past. I realize a success to me (3 weeks sooner) is still a failure to others (4 weeks after the summit to get the data to the speakers) We’re going to be working on improving this for next years summit but for now, Ill take the wins where I can get them!
Failure
Getting the top 10 sessions posted has taken an extra 3 weeks. I take full responsibility on this one. I had the data on my laptop for the entire time, at first it was the holidays, then it was something shiny, after that I kept running into issues trying to make queries that werent just usable for this years summit, but would be able to generate similar results for any event we enter into this database. In the end though, I have a set of queries for this process that will be reused.
Future
This database/process was one of the projects a large group of OUTSTANDING Community members chipped in and worked on under the umbrella of the program committee in 2010. I have big plans to round up another set of volunteers and put a web based front end on the db and push its use out to all SQL events that would like to use it. The information that we’re gathering will be invaluable to both the speakers and to the community in the future.
Oh, Hey, Dear reader if you’re still reading this far into the babble I guess your looking for the Best of PASS Summit 2010 Link right? Without further ado…..
http://www.sqlpass.org/events/bestofpasssummit2010.aspx
PS: No, Adam Machanic it didnt take 257 weeks to get this out 
PASS Community Choice Session Change
Nov 1st
Ive been too busy lately mashing out the final details of the PASS Summit 2010 to spend as much time blogging as I intend too… But, thought Id take a few minutes to alert the 3 of you that read this slop about a change in the Community Choice sessions in the PASS Summit lineup
Unfortunately, 1 of the community choice speakers had to bow out of presenting.
Joe Kuemerle couldnt make the sumit this year so, we had to swap his encryption session with the second place session in the App Dev category. Luckily for us, the decision was easier because appdev race was the closest in the voting with only 2 votes seperating first and second place. The replacement session, Flush With Cache: What Really Happens Before That Query Runs by Chris Leonard, should prove to be very popular and is currently scheduled on Thursday from 4-5:15 in room 613-614. Because of this session replacement there was a cascade of 3 additional schedule moves that had to occur because Chris was already scheduled to present another session in the existing time slot. You can see the complete current schedule in xls here
Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Summit next week!!
