A few months ago I made a huge change in my career and stepped out of my role as a production DBA and into a new career working with new databases. The more time I spend with these databases, the more I realize that they need an exciting, vibrant community like we have here in PASS. I want to help these communities grow and thrive, but there are only so many hours in the day. I have enjoyed the time that I’ve served on the PASS Board of Directors and I will continue to be involved in the community, but there are new communities that need what we have at PASS.

This has not been an easy decision to make, but I am stepping down from the PASS Board of Directors.

Just so you don’t think it sounds contrived, here it is again:

I love PASS and I love the SQL Server community. Being a part of PASS has given me a phenomenal sense of community. The SQL Server community has readily welcomed new members and new technologies and continues to grow the meaning of being a SQL Server professional. The community has embraced knowledge sharing in a way that many communities should envy. I keep learning so much every day from all of your blogs, presentations, books, and white papers.

And this is where things get difficult. I love what I’m doing with PASS, but I also love what I’m doing outside of SQL Server. There is a lot of knowledge there, but it’s silo’d and stuck in people’s heads. That knowledge needs to get out into the wild. One of the easiest ways to spread knowledge is to help it spread through communities. It’s difficult building a community from the ground up. Hell, maintaining an existing community is difficult. Doing both at the same time is impossible.

I asked myself how I could help when I started with PASS several years ago. I jumped in and started a chapter, then I took over a virtual chapter, and then I ran for the Board of Directors. Along the way, I met a ton of people who were kind, helpful, thoughtful, and more than ready to help out. As I slowly came to the realization that I couldn’t build a new community and grow an existing community at the same time, I also came to the realization that there were a lot of people ready to step up and help PASS grow.

Knowing that so many of you care and want to help made it a lot easier to come to this decision. I know that no matter what, there are a lot of people who will steer PASS and help it grow.

PASS showed me a wonderful community and I want to share that community with other people. I’m not running away and I’m not leaving, I’m just spreading the love around.

• Every speaker has 5 minutes
• Slides are optional
• No demos
• When the 5 minutes are up, the speaker is done.

So, in order to pull this off, we need three volunteers from the audience. All you have to do is work an egg timer. Whenever a speaker starts talking, you start the egg timer. When they’re done, you cut them off, shoo them off the stage, and then introduce the next speaker. You can think of the job as being like an M.C. because that’s what it is (parachute pants will not be provided by PASS). One bonus is that you’ll get to hobnob with the speakers and/or embarrass when you introduce them. It’s all good fun until someone falls off the stage!

If you’d like to volunteer to moderate one of these sessions, let me know. Send an email to jeremiah.peschka@sqlpass.org. There are only three sessions, supplies are limited. Act now!

Update: I want to thank everyone who got back in touch with me about this, and there were a lot of you. We have our moderators selected – Matt Velic, Lance Harra, and Noel McKinney will be emceeing our Lightning Talks

Guess what? It is a Microsoft exclusive event no longer!

We’re opening up the Chalk Talk sessions to community speakers. There’s a catch, though.

• You are currently attending the PASS Community Summit.
• You are not speaking at the PASS Community Summit.
• You submitted a session to the PASS Community Summit that was not accepted.

That’s pretty stringent requirements. So, what do you get in return? Unfortunately, we can’t offer comp codes for this. But we’ve got something special in store.

Lightning Talks

Yeah, that’s right: Lightning Talks. We’re doing them at the Summit this year. Just in case you don’t know, a lightning talk is a short, prepared talk. We’re going to aim for 5 minute talks. That should keep things moving quickly.

We like this idea so much that we’ve dedicated one session every day to nothing but lightning talks!

All of the details aren’t finalized yet, but we’ll keep you posted.

How Does This Help You?

If you’re not going to get a comp code (BOO!), how does giving a Chalk Talk help you?

1) You get exposure – You can put on your speaker resume that you spoke at the PASS Summit.
2) You get exposure – You’ll be presenting a lightning talk with other speakers and it will be witnessed by a boatload of people.
3) You get exposure – see points 1 & 2

Should I Submit the Same Abstract?

I would say “probably not.” Chalk Talks are a different format than a standard 75 minute session. They’re shorter (only 40 minutes) and they involve more audience participation (a lot more). Feel free to submit similar topics, but be prepared for a different audience and delivery.

We’ll be pushing out an official announcement soon. Stay tuned!

It’s Going to be a Busy Week

This week is going to be an incredibly busy one. On Saturday I’m very honored to be presenting twice at SQL Saturday Nashville.

Fundamentals of SQL Server Internals: Want to know what makes SQL Server tick? Ever wonder what SQL Server is doing when you run a query? Ever wonder which parts of SQL Server are responsible for specific functionality? Want to know what a HOBT is? I can’t promise answers to every question, but I can set you on the path to knowledge about the inner workings of SQL Server.

Taking Control of Your Career: Raises, promotions, and job offers don’t happen by accident; you need a plan. Through careful planning you can create and reach impressive goals. But what’s the point of reaching your goals if nobody notices? “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply when you’re building your career.

“But Jeremiah,” you say, “you are clearly a slacker. Getting ready for two presentations can’t be that difficult for someone with as much ego as you!” And you would be correct; getting ready for two presentations isn’t difficult (mainly because I’m amazing). This week I am also travelling to beautiful Nashville for the PASS Board of Directors meeting.

The BoD meetings are always a good time, but they can be a little tiring (as do most meetings). This meeting promises to be a good one. As best as I recall, we’re going to be talking about PASS at a much higher, strategic, level. There will be less “down in the details” discussion and more “head in the clouds” type of talk. It’s good to put aside worrying about nitty gritty details and focus on the future of an organization. Too often we don’t do that.

What is Kendra going to be talking about?

Stay Agile, Stay Sane

Agile software development emphasizes continuous depolyment and its methods do not directly include long term planning. DBAs must ensure data integrity and have a long term view for application scale, so Agile methods present challenges. Come learn about successful real-world practices iteratively developed in a high transaction internet service environment over the last five years. We have create a flourishing Agile shop while meeting high requirements for uptime, customer response, and data consistency. In this session we’ll cover key habits for success, practices to avoid, how and when to get started, and why Agile development can be a great thing for DBAs. Topics will also include how “Testing in Production” can be a huge benefit.

About Kendra

Kendra Little is a Senior DBA in the online advertising industry who has spent ten years nerding out on SQL Server. Kendra works closely with an Agile development team to deploy frequent incremental changes to scale and improve a busy production environment. She likes tuning production servers, developing tools to automate tasks, building SQL Reports for trending, and secretly enjoys writing troubleshooting guides and documentation. Kendra has a Masters degree in Philosophy and a salt shaker full of certifications, but all the best stuff she’s ever learned has come from her smarty-pants colleagues and the SQL Server community. Read her blog at http://littlekendra.com.

What Do These People Want From Me?!

When I stepped up and ran for the PASS Board of Directors, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I wanted to help make PASS better. Better how? I had a few ideas. We were going to change the world! There would be speaker mentoring and education for all! A chicken in every garage and mittens on our feet! It turns out that my chickens and mittens proposal isn’t going so well, but we’re working on a speaker mentoring program and I’ve been working with Microsoft to get your feedback to them about certifications.

Enough about me! More about you!

Have a Plan

So, this Board of Directors thing, you should have a strong idea of what you would like to change. That could be changes to how we’re governed, increasing our revenue streams, or finding a new Summit location. The point is that you should have a vision of the future. Beyond a vision, it would be helpful if you have some ideas about how you’re going to fulfill that vision. You don’t need to have a complete business plan, although that never hurts.

I can’t stress how important having a strong vision is. The goal is to have Board members act in a strategic role. Rather than plan things and implement them, you should be coming up with broad plans. Once you’ve come up with plans and goals you’ll work with PASS HQ and a few key volunteers to implement things. That isn’t always how things work out, but that should be the goal.

Without a strong vision, it’s very easy to get swept along. This is a two year commitment. if you’re being swept along for two years, you’re going to feel very lost, purposeless, and burnt out. Make sure that you know you have something that you plan to accomplish. When you’re finished with your term you can look back and say “I did that and I’m damn proud of it.” I know that when I’m done, we will have happily gone through and codified and documented more of the abstract selection process. There will be less tribal knowledge and more of it will be available for easy public consumption. I’m going to be happy about that. Know what you’re doing. Have a goal, make a plan. Don’t be afraid to revise it.

The Time of Your Life

People always say that you need to be willing to donate “a few hours a week” of your time if you want to be on the PASS Board of Directors. (They say this for just about anything else, too.) So, how much time does it really require?

That all depends on how much work you take on, how much you can delegate, and your own personal comfort level. The amount of time that I spend on my own portfolio is not typical – that’s not to say that they work less, it’s just that my time commitments come in spikes where I’ll be incredibly busy for three or four months and then a lot of the year things are very quiet. I’m hoping that other Board members will comment here and put forward their opinions and help to add to this article and clear things up for the people who are thinking about running for the Board of Directors. The point is: there’s no fixed amount of time. It’s as much or as little time as you want to put into it.

There’s a one hour conference call once a month. As often as once a quarter there will be an in-person Board meeting. You’ll typically spend a day traveling to and from the meeting and two days on site. This ends up being four week days, in my experience. Of course, one of these in person Board meetings ends up being the PASS Community Summit. So that’s one less week that you have to take off from work.

Skills in Magic

What kind of skills do you need to be on the PASS Board of Directors? We’ve already covered one: planning. You should be reasonably good at planning. You don’t need to be a genius strategist, but you should be able to put together a simple plan and execute on it. These are the skills that you’ve built as a DBA or database developer. You know how to make a list, prioritize, delegate, and execute on that list. If you can do that effectively, you’re halfway there.

The other skills that you would use in running a business the size of PASS… it would help if you had them before starting, but they’re not necessary.

The Free MBA

The PASS Board of Directors is the cheapest and most entertaining MBA program I have found. Nowhere else will you find the opportunity to manage a 7 figure budget while dining on bacon.

You can quote me on that.

One of the greatest things about the PASS Board of Directors is that it really is like an MBA program. I’ve learned about budgeting on a 7 figure scale, about how decisions play out, how to think strategically, how to plan, delegate, project, and all of the other things that they talk about in fancy business classes. Instead of one instructor and a few students, you’re one student with many other instructors. There are five other board members, three members of the Executive Committee, four vendor board members, the immediate past president, and let’s not forget our non-voting representative from Europe. Right there, you’re going to be learning from fourteen other people.

In the last seven months, I’ve learned more about my abilities as a manager than in the rest of my career. I was speaking with a friend recently, and he asked me what I thought about the PASS Board of Directors. Knowing that this friend was in management I said “It’s an awful lot like being a manager without the benefit of a company car and a reserved parking space.” After a hearty chuckle, we proceeded to play golf using a corporate AmEx. Okay, maybe that was a lie. But we did talk about the experience. The one thing that struck me is what I’ve mentioned here – it’s been the greatest education about business and about myself. There are days when I joke that I don’t know why people complain about being managers, all you do is tell people to do something and wait until they get it done. There are other days when I want to shove my head in a mailbox and scream.

The biggest thing that I’ve learned is how to listen. I don’t always see eye-to-eye with my fellow board members. But I’ve learned to listen to what they’re saying and to try to understand where they’re coming from. Sure, we all say things like this, right? That’s what marriages and friendships are about. When you’re making large decisions about the PASS Community Summit or a spring event or a budgetary decision, you suddenly realize how little you listened before and how much you need to listen. You want to know something funny? I don’t find myself agreeing with people any more than I did before I started listening closely, but I do find myself understanding them. That alone has made a huge difference for me professionally and personally.

The Round Up

That’s not a ringing endorsement, but there are bad days. The good days and the learning experiences far outweigh the bad days and the stress.

In the end, it’s been worth it. If I had to do it again, would I still run for election? Absolutely.

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.

I’m excited about the presentations I’m giving – I haven’t given the indexing presentation in a long time and it should be a lot of fun. And the Dynamic SQL presentation is one of the first in the day. It’s a nice easy way (I think) to get your day started.

A Dynamic World Demands Dynamic SQL

Dynamic SQL is a misunderstood and much maligned part of a DBA’s tool kit – it can be used to solve difficult business problems, respond to diverse data needs, and alleviate performance problems. Many DBAs reject dynamic SQL outright as a potential source of SQL injections, being poorly performing, or just for being a hacky solution in general. Not so! Jeremiah Peschka has been making extensive use of dynamic SQL throughout his career to solve a variety of problems. He’ll set about dispelling these misconceptions and demonstrate how dynamic SQL can become a part of every DBA’s tool kit.

Indexes And Other Free Performance Boosts

The database is often viewed as a major performance bottleneck. There are a number of quick, easy, painless techniques that can increase the performance of an application not just by a small amount, but by orders of magnitude. These techniques includes simple indexing techniques, T-SQL techniques, and general database application design patterns that give great gains in performance. In this session, you will learn how to look at a database to identify these problem areas and how to resolve common issues that you will encounter.

What else?

Let’s say you’re interested in something else. What should you go see? Well, Michael Swart (blog | twitter) put together a nice little blog post about How I plan to spend my weekend.

If you like business intelligence, I suggest you hit up Dave Rodabaugh’s presentations. I cannot speak highly enough of Dave’s work. Not only is he one of the brightest BI people I know, he’s also been a teacher, friend, and mentor to me for a long time.

There will be some kind of dinner/drinks/whatever going on afterwards at Barley’s Smokehouse (map). I plan on being there for a little bit. Even if you can’t make it to the event, head on over there around 6:00PM. I’ll be there.

I loaded the data using the PostgreSQL COPY command to bulk load the report output and then did some data mojo using PostgreSQL. Most of it was exactly the same as it would be for SQL Server with a few differences. Here’s the code that I used:

SELECT  COUNT(*) AS total_sessions
FROM    abstracts;
GO
-- Yup, I used the GO statement separator. This is a byproduct
-- of the client that I use, not because of PostgreSQL.

SELECT  COUNT(DISTINCT first_name || ' ' || last_name) AS name_count
FROM    abstracts ;
GO

SELECT  job_title,
        COUNT(job_title) AS jt_count
FROM    ( SELECT  job_title,
                  first_name,
                  last_name
          FROM    abstracts
          GROUP BY job_title,
                  first_name,
                  last_name
) AS x
GROUP BY job_title
ORDER BY jt_count DESC;
GO

WITH c AS (
  SELECT  job_title,
          first_name,
          last_name
  FROM    abstracts
  GROUP BY job_title,
          first_name,
          last_name
)
SELECT  SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%engineer%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS engineer_count,
        SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%manager%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS manager_count,
        SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%developer%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS developer_count,
        SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%consultant%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS consultant_count,
        SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%business intelligence%' THEN 1
                 WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%b.i.%' THEN 1
                 WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%BI%' THEN 1
                 ELSE 0 END) AS bi_count,
        SUM(CASE WHEN LOWER(job_title) LIKE '%architect%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS architect_count
FROM    c;
GO

SELECT  COUNT(DISTINCT company) AS company_count
FROM    abstracts;
GO

SELECT  DISTINCT
        category,
        track,
        COUNT(track) OVER (PARTITION BY category) AS the_count_by_category,
        COUNT(track) OVER (PARTITION BY category, track) AS the_count_by_track
FROM    abstracts
ORDER BY category, track;
GO

SELECT  AVG(author_count) AS author_average
FROM    ( SELECT  DISTINCT
                  first_name,
                  last_name,
                  COUNT(session_title) OVER (PARTITION BY first_name, last_name) AS author_count
          FROM   abstracts
        ) AS x;
GO

-- You might be weirded out by this string_to_array and array_upper.
-- PostgreSQL has an array data type. We're using an array of strings
-- to get an accurate word count
SELECT  AVG(CHAR_LENGTH(abstract)) AS avg_char_count,
        STDDEV(CHAR_LENGTH(abstract)) AS char_count_stddev,
        AVG(array_upper(string_to_array(abstract, ' '), 1)) AS avg_word_count,
        STDDEV(array_upper(string_to_array(abstract, ' '), 1)) AS word_count_stddev
FROM    abstracts;
GO

-- Hey, look at that, we can use a single TRIM function to do all work
SELECT  SUM(CASE WHEN TRIM(BOTH FROM presented_before) = 'YES' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS presented_before,
        SUM(CASE WHEN TRIM(BOTH FROM presented_before) = 'NO' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS never_presented
FROM    abstracts;
GO

SELECT  level,
        COUNT(*)
FROM    abstracts
GROUP BY level
ORDER BY level;
GO

The Live Meeting starts at 1PM EST and will last for around an hour. You can click on this glorious link to attend.

Title: Taking Control of Your Career

Abstract: Raises, promotions, and job offers don’t happen by accident; you need a plan. Through careful planning you can create and reach impressive goals. But what’s the point of reaching your goals if nobody notices? “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply when you’re building your career.

In this session I will show you:

• How to set achievable goals
• The importance of planning your career
• Methods for recording and communicating your accomplishments