Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

What I'm doing to evolve the Program Committee next

By Allen Kinsel, 12 days ago

Since I wrote about how we've been evolving the Program Committee in the past, I thought Id write about some of the ways we're trying to change the Program Committee in the future.

But first, I want to clarify something that someone else pointed out to me.  When I write about the Program Committee, I always say «We».  When working on something as complex as the program for the summit, it is necessary to work as a very cohesive team.  This leadership team I am a part of is who makes all of the tactical decisions about the way we manage the education at the Summit.  I always refer to «us» as «we» because I cannot (and will not) take all of the credit for putting the Summit education together.  Without the team, the committee wouldn't be half of what it is.  While I have been the overarching member of this team (the 1 they cant seem to run off) , the others are always there when we have work to do.  Well, except Jeremiah, He's got this new gig where he's a turtle hunter or something....

We've been working hard over the last 2 years to bring some exciting (well, exciting to me anyway) changes to the program committee.   A couple of these changes you should start seeing official announcements about any day now but, I decided to be a tease...

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PASS Program Update #3

By Allen Kinsel, 4 months and 17 days ago

Its been a while since I wrote an update about whats been happening in the PASS Program Committee.  I just havent had time to write about it with all of the work thats going on in addition to my regular day job.  Hopefully Ill have time now to do a better job at this!

The annual content survey was sent out and the results are in, I'd like to go on record now and say, Im not a BI user/admin/developer.  We took the BI questions from last year's survey (which were obviously from 2008).  Unfortunately, while going through them and updating the questions I didnt reach out to a BI person and get a gut check for the BI questions.  So we wound up with some out of date info in that section.  I swear we like BI @ PASS, I just goofed, there's not some secret conspiracy, and YES to the 1 of you who asked, I do read all of the comments .  The good news, for those that asked, the survey results will be released as soon as we can get them collated and readable (any day now)  **UPDATE** The survey responses are here there are definitely some very interesting tidbits to be mined from this.

We are making progress in working on several projects, from redoing the speaker resources, to developing a new system to house the speaker evaluation data.  As with all things volunteer driven, these tasks are taking time but thats not unexpected.It has to be better than this

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More PASS Speaker Thoughts

By Allen Kinsel, 5 months and 13 days ago

I've been kicking around several ideas in the program committee and a couple of them have to do with what information PASS releases, specifically information about the speakers.  The general question I've been trying to come up with ideas about, and the subject of this blog post  is:

Should PASS Release Speaker Evaluation Scores to the public

As with all things, there are goods and bad's to releasing this data.  And there are even more possible ways to release the data.

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Growing the pool of speakers

By Allen Kinsel, 5 months and 27 days ago

Following up to Andy's series about growing the pool of speakers, I thought I would detail an idea we've been kicking around for this years summit.

First some history

In 2009 PASS accepted 585 community abstracts submitted for a total of 113 community sessions slots that were available (including 10 pre/post conference sessions) of those 80 were regular sessions, and 23 were spotlight sessions.  We had 30 speakers give 2 sessions including the 10 pre/post conference sessions.  We normally ask that speakers accepted for a pre/post conference session also present a spotlight session, so that every attendee of the conference gets access to these high caliber speakers.  This left us with 20 regular speakers presenting 2 sessions in 2009.

The big idea

In order to give more speakers a chance to present at the annual summit, were proposing limiting all community speakers to 1 primary session per summit.  There would obviously have to be exceptions for panel sessions and co presenters since we wouldn't want to discourage those types of sessions.  The benefits as I see them are that we'd open up 20 more slots, give or take from year to year, to new speakers thus allowing others in the community an opportunity to present.  The downsides (or risks) as I see them:  We stand to potentially loose coverage if we receive no abstracts on a particular subject that would be a currently chosen speakers second session.  Cost, that is 20 extra comped admissions to the summit.  Pass would need to decide if the value of these extra comped admissions are worth the expense.  What I mean to say is if we spend money on those extra comps, that money couldn't be used on some other priority. 

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  • Allowing effective developer access to SQL Server:
    • Karen Lopez: Another approach I use: Be generous in granting privileges in the DEV database (but still lock down the server environment), but don't let Devs promote any DDL to the next environment. Only the DBAs can deliver/apply DDL to the next (usually QA) environment. So if the devs modify their tables/columns without the architect...
  • PASS Summit Community Choice Session results revealed:
    • Andy Warren: Allen, nice job on this. Great to see the community get a chance to participate in building the program and share in the excitement of the upcoming Summit. Andy
  • Community Choice Sessions at the PASS Summit 2010:
    • Allen Kinsel: Thanks, We hope that this will be a good test of community selections, and hope to expand it a bit in the future
    • robert cook: glad you decided to keep blogging and gracias to you and your amigos for giving an opportunity to the sql community for direct involvement with session choices
  • Sql Server and SSPI handshake failed error hell:
    • Robert L Davis: I agree about the reboot. That's why I check SPN's before DC/Kerberos errors. An SPN can be fixed without rebooting, but if the issue is DC connection and no one can log in to the SQL Server, you're down anyway so a reboot shouldn't be out of the question. The problem with having a...
    • Allen Kinsel: I guess should have worded that a little differently, in my experience in a lot of environments kerberos isnt used since its not configured, so it always falls back to NTLM, with only NTLM and no Kerberos in the result list, its usually safe to say that SPN's arent the issue. I...

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