SQL Saturday 42 has been and gone. I don’t have a ton to say, but I wanted to try to post my thoughts on the event before they were completely gone from my mind.
The people who put this event on – Dave Schutz, Stuart Johnson, Marc Kuyper, Jim Stoltz, and John Jakubowski – deserve a big round of applause. They put together a very strong event and it seemed like they were incredibly well prepared.
Despite Brent Ozar suffering from incredible jet lag, and another speaker not showing up, things went off well. Allen White and I were able to cover Brent’s time slots, but not his presentations. This led to the funny moment of an attendee walking into the room and saying “You’re not Brent Ozar.” I replied, “No, I am not, but I’m talking about SQL Server Internals, it’ll be fun.” They just said, “Oh,” and walked away. So, apparently, I’m nowhere near as engaging as Brent talking about his stupid and dangerous T-SQL tricks. Clearly they don’t know that I’m just stupid and dangerous.
Outside of that, things went very well. My Dynamic SQL talk went over well, although I think I need to re-work it. I felt like I was flipping back and forth between demos and code a bit too much. It gave the entire experience a jerky feel. I suspect I’m overly critical of the presentation since I’ve given it a few times, but it’s always good to improve.
My internals presentation wasn’t well attended – this is probably due to me not being Brent Ozar. However, that didn’t stop us from having fun talking about SQL Server Internals. If anything, having a room of 6 people made the topic more fun to talk about. We were able to digress onto different topics, delve a little bit deeper than normal, and have a lot of fun watching me not trip over an extension cord.
Last but not least was my Indexes and Other Free Performance Boosts. I had a full room on this – I suspect it had something to do with the word “Free” in the presentation title. This is a really fun presentation because it’s a whirlwind tour of indexes, keys, statistics, and how they work together to coax SQL Server into giving us data faster. Once again, I think I need to smooth up the code samples, but on the whole things went really well.
I don’t have any of the evaluations, but I hope the SQL Saturday team is able to get those out to the speakers soon. From the ones I glanced at, I did a passable job. I’m looking forward to the next event in Columbus.
Comments
Your Dynamic SQL presentation at SQL Saturday 31 in Chicago was fantastic and I liked the mixture of demos and code. I’m not quite sure where the improvement might be hiding in there. I’d probably need to see it again with a more critical eye to have any kind of useful feedback. Anyway, thanks again Jeremiah for coming to Chicago and sharing your knowledge with us!
Thanks for the kind words. I’m always reconsidering my presentations to see how I can make them smoother and flow better. I know that moving between slides and demonstration can be really tricky and somewhat jarring for both the attendee and the presenter. It’s tough to do and I haven’t figured out the best way to do it.
I always feel like a jack in the box when I’m wandering around and then sitting to do a demo and then standing then sitting then standing then sitting. I suppose that’s more visually interesting and probably gives my legs one heck of a low intensity work out.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad that my presentation still holds up in your memory after a few months.
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