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What I Do At PASS

May 5, ’10 10:00 AM

I haven’t blogged about what I do on the Board of Directors until now. I didn’t think people would be interested in it because there are times when it’s not the most thrilling thing on earth to me – ask your manager to describe the most thrilling part of his job, I guarantee that it isn’t going to be “getting into fights with panthers.” Just in case you don’t know, I’m on the PASS Board of Directors where I am currently the director in charge of the program for the annual Summit. I have expanded that portfolio (using the jaws of life and about 85 gallons of expanding marine epoxy) to include education in general. When I’m not working on the PASS Summit I’m making school children read Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming.

Here’s what I do during my week.

Program Committee

PASS Summit Planning HQ

The PASS Program Committee is the group of people that work to bring you the sessions at the PASS Summit. There are a lot of volunteers involved in the entire process, but Allen Kinsel and Lori Edwards help out on a weekly basis. Many of you know Allen from his previous involvement with the PASS Program Committee. Lori came on board this year to help out running a lot of the projects and teams that come up around the program selection process.

What do we do, exactly? Well, we have a conference call every week. On this conference call we (Allen, Lori, and Elena and Craig from PASS HQ) work through the processes and challenges around the PASS Summit. This year we’ve done a lot of work around changing the vendor we partner with for the abstract submission process.

There are a number of smaller committees for each of the session tracks and pre/post conference sessions. In order to get everything working, we had to re-work the handbook for each of the committees to use to select abstracts. The handbook is designed to help everyone select the best abstracts and outline all of the processes used to select the abstracts.

After the phone call I usually go down to Don Pablo’s for a rockin’ good time.

Certifications

One of the things that I took on when I was elected to the Board of Directors was working on the certification process. A lot of people have expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. I’ve started working with Microsoft Learning on ways to make the process better. So far we’ve had a few conference calls, emails, and I’ve spoken with a few people in the community about this whole process.

This is slow going, it takes a lot of time and effort to look at what people want, put it together in a meaningful fashion, and then build a plan of action. I know that there’s some frustration in the community around this, I’ve read the forum post on SQL Server Central, I’ve talked to you guys at SQL Saturdays, and I’ve traded emails back and forth. If you want to get involved or if you’ve got an opinion, shoot me an email or sound off in the comments.

Speaking

There are a lot of people in the community who would like to share what they know. But they don’t. I’ve thought a lot about why people don’t get up and share what they know. The best way for me to think about it is to remember how I got started.

I first got started presenting several years ago at a previous job. We held regular lunch and learn sessions because it’s a good way to get people together and it’s a good way to share what you know. After a lunch and learn the organizer would sit down with the presenter and go over the results of the evaluation. This was incredibly helpful. The organizer might not have been an expert presenter, but then again I’m not an expert presenter either. The important part is that someone was there to help me and guide me through those early, introductory, steps.

Where is this leading? I’m not sure yet. Elena, my counterpart at PASS HQ, and I are working on some ideas that we think will bring a lot to the table and give everyone the opportunity to contribute and learn.

Summary

So, there you have it – this is what I do in the 10+ hours a week I spend working on all of my Boardly (Directorish?) duties. It’s a lot like middle management but without the pay or corporate parking spot.

Comments (4)

Submit to PASS!

Apr 26, ’10 8:00 AM

The call for speakers is rapidly approaching and to help everyone get ready, we’ve got a special treat for you. Chuck Heinzelman, of PASS Board of Directors fame, has agreed to put on a presentation - Intro to Speaking At PASS: Creating a Winning Abstract (If I Can Do It, Anyone Can!).

What’s the point of all of this? Well, we all have problems writing abstracts, especially when we first get started. Good abstracts are key to getting your talks accepted at events. You could have the greatest presentation in the world but nobody will know if you can’t write an effective abstract.

Tune in on Tuesday 4/27 at 12pm Central time for this LiveMeeting event. Members of the PASS Program Committee will be online to answer your questions.

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How can we grow the pool of Summit speakers?

Mar 12, ’10 10:13 AM

Allen Kinsel, my brother in arms for the Summit 2010 Program, posed a question about how to grow the pool of speakers for the PASS 2010 Summit. Allen has proposed that in order to bring in more speakers, we limit things to 1 session per speaker. With 168 sessions across the board, that’s a lot of potential speakers. Currently, we limit things to 2 sessions per speaker.

What are your thoughts?

This poll will close on Thursday, March 18 at 8AM EST and I’ll publish the results in a separate blog post.

[poll id="2"]

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Goals for 2010

Dec 31, ’09 7:12 AM

Thomas LaRock thought it would be fun to tag me in yet another round of blogging bingo, this time to answer the question “What are you Goals and Theme Word for 2010?”. To tell the truth, I have not made any kind of New Year’s Resolution for a number of years. I usually review my goals on a regular basis, but let’s put them out here for everyone to see.

Theme word? I don’t have one, “f*%#ing rad” is two words, thank you very much.

Communication

Become a Better Writer

A long time ago, I went to college for four years, took out a bunch of loans, and got a degree in English, Non-Fiction Writing. I did exceptionally well in my English classes and did even better in the writing classes. I love writing and, frankly, the quality of my writing has not been up to par recently. I want to change my focus as a writer this year. I want to switch from writing short, highly technical, blog posts and change to creating longer article and essay length pieces. There’s nothing wrong with shorter, technical, posts but that is not where my interests lie. I want to focus on improving my writing so I can effectively teach more advanced concepts through writing as well as through public speaking. I was a good writer before and I’ll be a good writer again.

Become a Better Presenter

I have no doubts about my abilities as a presenter – I have a lot of room for improvement. Over the course of the year I’m going to team up with a number of people to improve my presentations. I want to get better at better content and delivery as well as meticulously practicing my presentations until I can deliver them in my sleep. I know that a lot of improvement comes from repetition and I would like to speak at least six times this year. With my current upcoming speaking schedule, that shouldn’t be difficult at all, but we’ll see.

Self-Employment

I don’t intend to be self-employed by the end of 2010, but I plan on being well on my way. How am I going to get there?

Writing

I’m writing stronger blog content. That’s not going to be enough. I want to get my name in a more places – magazines, guest blog posts, paid content, white papers, and a book. I’ve been shopping an idea around to various publishers and I’m hoping to have a book written and finished by the end of 2010. None of these things pay big bucks, but they all add to the bottom line.

Consulting

I haven’t done much consulting in the past, of course it was difficult when my day job was being a consultant – there’s an expectation that you will bring the business back to the company. Things have changed, I’m a full time employee now. My employer and I have had the talk – I’m allowed to do consulting work as long as I don’t help out our competitors.

This year I will take on several clients that require a small amount of time (10 – 20 hours each) every month. This isn’t to replace my existing job, this is to supplement it and provide additional income. Before I go completely solo, I want to have a substantial savings buffer built up and doing work on the side makes this a lot easier. I don’t plan on going at it alone – I’ve discussed this several co-conspirators and we have plans to get started this year.

Personal Ventures

I have an idea for a business that will make me tens, maybe even hundreds, of dollars. I plan on fully pursuing this over the course of 2010. Honestly, I have incredibly high hopes for this business and we have already thought of multiple ways to monetize our business. That’s not to say that it’s sure to happen, I have a lot of hard work ahead me, but I’m looking forward to it.

PASS

As many of you know, I was elected to the PASS Board of Directors and subsequently put in charge of the Summit program portfolio. This is the heart and soul of what I want to do over the next 12 months. I am going to make sure that the 2010 Summit program committee has my full support and that we’re can make the summit the best event possible.

Inky Mess

This is a personal one: I want to finish both full arm tattoo sleeves this year and, hopefully, start on my legs.

Once again, I think I’m supposed to pick victims. I’m going to pick Matt Nowack, Rick Kierner, Jeff Blankenburg, and Jorge Segarra

I also want a chainsaw on my hand like Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness. That would be f*%#ing rad.

Comments (5)

How Do You Use SQL Server

Dec 2, ’09 9:00 AM

Grant Fritchey took it upon himself to tag me in his most recent blog post about how we use SQL Server. The best part about this is I was just hired Senior DBA, so I can write with the unbridled enthusiasm of someone who is showing off a new car.

Here’s a little bit of background – my employer provides freight, utility, and telecom expense management services. In short, we pay your bills, we hand key your bills, we figure out how to EDI your bills – we do everything we can to process as many bills as possible every second of every day of the year. We were also a bank – expenses can be justified but you better have a damn good reason for wanting to spend 27k per CPU for Enterprise Edition vs 7k per CPU for Standard Edition. My production servers all run Standard Edition.

In a way, though, I’m very lucky. I have a homogenous environment. From development to production, everything is running on SQL Server 2008 sitting on top of Windows Server 2008. Every server gets patched on the same day.

On to the reason why you came here: how we actually use SQL Server.

Most people have an application tier that sits on top of some kind of data access layer that eventually talks to an RDBMS through some kind of query generation engine. The application tier makes decisions and does most of the work and talks to the database to get a result set and then pukes that into a grid on a screen somewhere. We don’t really have that.

Long before I arrived a decision was made to treat SQL Server as an application platform. SQL Server is the core of our business. Before someone gets all up in arms, let me explain.

When I said that we process a large quantity of bills I want you to think massive piles of paper bills being hand keyed by an army of people. Bills are being typed in, scanned in, sent in via EDI, pigeon, and Star Trek teleporter at all hours of the day. We are doing everything we can to process as much data as we can. We do batch processing. We do single line item processing. We do all kinds of crazy transformations on the data.

Guess where that all happens. That’s right: in the database. Sure, we have an application layer that sits on top of the database, but it accesses the database through stored procedures and views. Yes, there is logic in the stored procedures. I am very strongly of the opinion that universal data logic belongs in the database. We make heavy use of stored procedures, constraints, views, indexed views, summary jobs… all the traditional aspects of RDMBS development. We’re leveraging SQLCLR to keep some heavy lifting in SQL Server but move it into the CLR where it belongs and also to give us the ability to create high performance ad hoc reporting capabilities.

Things are very much in their infancy right now, I’m the first full time DBA at this company. Are things smooth right now? Not always. We’ve had runaway processes bring a production machine to its knees for hours. Our SAN isn’t configured optimally and I/O waits account for 1/3 of the time waits on all of our production machines.

Data is still coming into the database from a legacy mainframe application written in COBOL. The monitoring is still largely a collection of hand written scripts that were thrown together by myself and the previous DBA – my manager. On the bright side, both my boss and his boss were DBAs at one point. They understand my pain points and they’re willing to give me the time to get things up and running the way they should be.

In a few years, we’re replacing it with a brand new .NET application. We’ll still be using stored procedures for data access and business logic, but we’ll be expanding to use even more SQLCLR. We’ll also be picking up SQL 2008 R2 or maybe even SQL11 by that point and leveraging new technology like StreamInsight and Master Data Management. Hopefully I’ll be implementing things that were new in 2005/2008 but haven’t had the opportunity to use like Service Broker, Change Data Capture, and Performance Data Collector.

To me, this is heaven. SQL Server is in the place it should be – at the core of the business.

Victims, victims… I need victims… I’m going to tag Tim Benninghoff and Mladen Prajdić.

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SQL Server Presenters on Twitter

Nov 25, ’09 8:00 AM

I put out a call a while back for a list of SQL Server presenters who are on twitter. A fair number of people responded. I kept it quiet because I was busy doing my day job, but I was secretly plotting… Plotting to put this list together and share it worth the world! (evil laughter)

Not only did I put this list on my blog, I also put it on twitter. Behold, my SQL Server presenters twitter list.

I will be trying to maintain this list as more people come get on twitter and become willing to share their twitter info. I wish that I could give this twitter list over to the community to maintain, but I am more than willing to take list maintenance on until there’s a way to trade list ownership on twitter.

The whole point of the list is to make it easy to find presenters and presentations, both for the future needs of a user group as well as for your immediate needs (e.g. your speaker cancels at the last minute).

If you’d like to get on the list, hit me up on twitter or shoot me an email via the contact page.

Josef Richberg @sqlrunner
Brent Ozar @BrentO
Thomas LaRock @sqlrockstar
Kendal Van Dyke @sqldba
Tim Ford @sqlagentman
Lara Rubbelke @sqlgal
TJay Belt @tjaybelt
Todd McDermid @Todd_McDermid
Jack Corbett @unclebiguns
Kevin Kline @kekline
Colin Stasiuk @BenchmarkIT
Trevor Barkhouse @SQLServerSleuth
Ken Simmons @kensimmons
Aaron Nelson @sqlvariant
Jorge Segarra @SQLChicken
Joe Webb @JoeWebb
Glenn Berry @GlennAlanBerry
Pinal Dave @PinalDave
Sean McCown @MidnightDBA
Jonathan Kehayias @SQLSarg
Tim Mitchell @Tim_Mitchell
Eric Humphrey @lotsahelp
Artemakis Artemiou @artemakis
Wes Brown @WesBrownSQL
Aaron Bertrand @AaronBertrand
Adam Machanic @AdamMachanic
Jimmy May @aspiringgeek
Rob Farley @rob_farley
Brad Hurley @bradohurley
Rick Heiges @heigesr2
Chris Randall @cfrandall
Stuart Ainsworth @stuarta
Mladen Prajdic @mladenprajdic
K. Brian Kelley @kbriankelley
Arnie Rowland @Arnie1568
Buck Woody @BuckWoody
Ross Mistry @RossMistry
Grant Fritchey @GFritchey
Rod Colledge @rodcolledge
Denny Cherry @mrdenny
John Sterrett @johnsterrett

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Volunteering with PASS

Nov 12, ’09 8:00 AM

The PASS Summit just wrapped up and I’m riding a giant wave of excitement about the entire organization, not just the summit. I met so many great people over the last week who were excited to be a part of PASS. On top of that, there were even more people who asked how they could get involved in PASS.

Locally

You can start off by volunteering locally. This is probably the easiest way to get involved with the organization. If there is a local chapter or user group in your area, contact the person in charge and find out how you can help. User groups always need someone to set up before meetings, call sponsors and ask for money or swag, book speakers, or maintain the web site. The work isn’t always full of glory, but no volunteering work is. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, don’t despair. There are a lot of other things you can do locally, just talk to the leader of the user group and find another way to help out.

Of course, if there isn’t a user group in your area, you could always call PASS HQ and find out how to start up a PASS chapter. I’m not going to lie and say that it’s an easy process because it isn’t. This is how I got involved in PASS, I can tell you that it’s been a lot of hard work but it has been incredibly rewarding.

Virtually

In addition to the local chapters, PASS has a number of Virtual Chapters. What is a Virtual Chapter? A Virtual Chapter is similar to a physical chapter, it just meets virtually. The Virtual Chapters are currently focused on specific topics within SQL Server – Database Administration, Database Development, Business Intelligence, Virtualization, to name a few. Just like the physical chapters and user groups, Virtual Chapters need volunteers to find speakers, sponsors, and market the user group meetings. If there is a particular Virtual Chapter that you would like to work with, contact the person in charge of the Virtual Chapter, the Board member in charge of Virtual Chapters, or PASS HQ.

Internationally

So you’d like to help PASS out on the international scene, eh? Maybe you want to work on something for the Summit, maybe you want to make the PASS website better, maybe you know that you want to help on a grander scale but you don’t know where to start. If that’s the case, you should definitely call PASS HQ and tell them that you would love to help, but you’re not sure where to get started.

There are two ways to get involved on the international stage – task based volunteering and project based volunteering.

Task Based Volunteering

Task based volunteering is, in many ways, the easiest way to get involved with PASS at the international level. You are paired up with someone at PASS HQ, a Board member, or another volunteer who gives you a specific task to accomplish. Then, hopefully, you do it and report back. It’s just that simple. If you aren’t sure how much time you have, this is probably the best way to get started – you can test the waters and see how this whole volunteering thing sits with you and make sure that you have the time to do it. If you don’t have the time, you can finish up what you’re working on and stop there. You can always come back once you have more time. Nobody will fault you for that.

Project Based Volunteering

This is it: you love PASS and you’re in it for the long haul. Well, you don’t need to be that enthusiastic, but it helps. Project based volunteering is very long term and is best suited for people who want to have a constant level of involvement with PASS. An example of this is the Summit Programming Committee. These volunteers work tirelessly from April until the last day of the Summit reviewing session abstracts and making sure that Summit attendees get top notch speakers and presentations. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, get in touch with PASS HQ. Board members have specific portfolios and initiatives that they are tasked with – you can take a look at the Board of Directors page and determine which projects you would might like to get involved with. If there’s something that catches your eye, get in touch with that board member and tell them that you would like to help out. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.

So, Remind Me – How Can I Help Out?

There are four main ways you can help out: locally, virtually, specific tasks, and special projects.

If you want to help out locally, contact your local chapter leader.

If you want to help out virtually, contact the virtual chapter leader, board member, or call PASS HQ.

Finally, if you would like to help out with specific tasks or special projects you’ll want to call PASS HQ or talk directly to a board member or the volunteer in charge of a specific project.

Comments (4)

LiveMeeting Tips and Tricks

Nov 3, ’09 8:00 AM

As a virtual chapter leader and presenter I end up using LiveMeeting quite a good deal. I also like to attend PASS meetings through LiveMeeting (free learning is free and learning). As I’ve presented and talked to other presenters, I’ve amassed a list of feedback, tips, and tricks for successfully using LiveMeeting.

  • Make sure you’re in a quiet place – You may not notice barking dogs, noisy cube neighbors on speakerphone, or a stereo on in the background, but these things can be distracting for the audience.
  • Lower your display resolution to 1024 x 768 – most people are watching this in a window or on their work computer or both. In my experience, work computers have low resolutions. My personal laptop has a 13 inch display at 1280 x 800 pixels.
  • Reboot your computer and only start the programs you need for your presentation – PowerPoint and SSMS, for example. Close everything you don’t need. Close all of the tray apps you don’t need. Shut down every service that you don’t need. Your computer is doing some heavy duty audio and video encoding and you don’t need anything else potentially eating up your CPU.
  • Increase your Visual Studio/SSMS font sizes to at least a 12pt font.
  • Upload your slide deck – click Content -> Upload a File. Your attendees will get much better results if you just upload the slide deck instead. This will fill their monitor, unlike your display which probably won’t match theirs. The downside: you won’t have your slide notes, so print those out ahead of time. Event when I’m presenting in person I do this, just in case I can’t get my laptop and the projector to play nicely and I have to mirror my display.
  • If you have multiple monitors and you want to share a single program, it needs to be on the primary display.
  • If you’re using the video conferencing feature, turn of any lights behind you and turn on lights in front of you. I also set my desktop background to a pure white background. This will light up your face and make you appear less like a member of the witness protection program.
  • Turn of your cell phone. Ever get a goofy galloping noise on your speakers at home? That’s the magic of GSM. That will play havoc with the audio in your LiveMeeting.
  • Speaking of phones – make sure your cellular or cordless phone is fully charged. Have a backup plan. This, of course, does not apply if you are using LiveMeeting’s audio stream.
  • Use throat lozenges to keep your voice working, especially if you are presenting or recording multiple sessions on a single day. Coffee will not do wonders for your voice.
  • Install LiveMeeting in advance. Preferably several days in advance. It takes about 10 minutes to install on a good day, so give yourself plenty of time.
  • Put a note in the slide notes every few slides that simply says “stop and ask for questions”. At that point in the presentation, click the Q&A button at the top of the screen and click Manage. You’ll see everybody’s questions. Remind the audience that they can ask questions throughout the presentation by clicking Q&A at the top of their screen.
  • If you have two computers, set them both up as presenters, but mute the audio on your secondary one. Then if all hell breaks loose, you can switch laptops and keep going.

Special thanks to Brent Ozar for collaborating on this list of tips. Do you have any LiveMeeting tips that you would like to share? Spread the love in the comments!

Bonus Tip: Use basic fonts for maximum readability – Core fonts for the Web

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AppDev Virtual Meeting Today @ 1:00PM Eastern

Oct 13, ’09 9:00 AM

I just wanted to get out a quick update about the AppDev Live Meeting today.

Josef Richberg will be speaking on the subject of SSIS Load Balancing. You can find more details on the Application Development Virtual Chapter home page. Or, at 1PM Eastern time (UTC -0400) you can head on over to LiveMeeting.

Abstract

How is it possible to aggregate 12,000,000 records of sales data in a short time window? In this presentation Josef Richberg will demonstrate the techniques used to randomize the input data and then use the SSIS threading framework to distribute the workload. These techniques make it possible to process a large quantity of data in a very short time frame.

About Josef Richberg

Josef is a DBA for HarperCollins Publishers working with SQL Server and SSIS. He has over 16 years experience designing, building, and tuning SQL Server. Josef is also the recipient of the ’2009 Exceptional DBA’ award and he actively blogs at http://josef-richberg.squarespace.com.

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PASS Board Platform – Detailed Hoopla

Oct 12, ’09 10:00 AM

PASS elections are just a few days away (from October 14th to October 20th). By now I hope that you’ve taken the time to read my, rather broad, position or Brent Ozar’s interview with me. If you haven’t, take a minute. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Now that you’ve read all of that, let’s move forward. A lot of that is pretty vague. One of my user group members pressed me for more details about what I would do if elected. Let’s just say that he was very insistent that I put my views online before the election.

My views boil down to three things: Knowledge. Growth. Connecting.

Knowledge

A Digression About Certifications in General

First off, let me say that I don’t think that PASS should get involved in the certification game. In the early days of the 21st century there were a number of Linux certifications available. Nobody knew which one was going to be the de facto certification at the time, so nobody got a Linux certification (well, nobody I knew got one). As a result of this cluttered marketplace, no certification had any value. Microsoft already produces certifications – they solicit feedback on how to make the process better. Rather than dilute certification market we should work with them to provide helpful, constructive feedback to make the certification process better.

That was all a sidebar. I’m not here to debate the merits and flaws of the Microsoft certification process. What I really feel strongly about is learning. More importantly, I feel that lasting learning is incredibly important.

Certification Guides

When I went out and took the exams for the MCITP: Database Developer certification, I used a certification guide. But what I found as I studied is that the guide taught me how to pass the exam. It wasn’t teaching me how to apply the exam concepts to the real world. Throughout the certification process, I ended up using the exam guide to guide my learning. I read Books Online about three times as much as I read the certification guide just to shore up the key points.

Most certification guides just prepare you for the exam. Frequently, they aren’t even useful as a reference once you’ve taken the exam. This isn’t to knock certification guides. They serve a purpose – to help you pass an exam. But what I’m getting at is that PASS is in a phenomenal position to create certification guides that meet the needs of database professionals – certification guides that teach the fundamental concepts in a real world context while they prepare you for the exam.

Training

How about training? How do you know that the person training you has any real world experience? How do you know that the person who wrote the training material has any real world experience? I’ve attended C++ programming classes taught by DB2 DBAs who were looking for some extra walking around money. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you’re investing in your career, or the career of your employees, you want to make sure that there is some real world expertise behind that trainer and his training manual.

Building off of the certification guide idea, I would like to see PASS creating training material that is immediately valuable to community members. Training based on real world situations that has been written in direct response to community needs. If I want to know about the SQL CLR, I know who I would ask via email, IM, or twitter. But those people only have so much free time to answer questions before they’re overwhelmed. Now, if their combined wisdom were put into a training course based on real world usage of the SQL CLR that would do a much better job of training and educating community members than multiple email threads.

Growth

I’d love to see PASS grow. More importantly, though, I want to see the members of PASS grow. Personal and professional growth are key to being happy. How does PASS fit into this?

Speaking & Writing Mentors

PASS is full of the brightest database professionals in the industry. Every time I speak to a PASS member about SQL Server, I learn something new. They’ll smile and laugh while talking shop, but as soon as I ask them to share their ideas as an article or presentation a look of absolute horror crosses their face. Speaking and writing aren’t scary things, but many people are terrified to even try.

I want to create a group of speaking and writing mentors within PASS to work with people who want to get started sharing their expertise with the public. Of course, this isn’t just for people who have never written or presented before. Anyone who wants to improve their speaking and writing should feel free to take part and also to give back. We all have a great deal to offer each other why not take advantage of our collective skills?

Connecting

I’ve said it before and I will say it again – PASS is far more than just the Summit. PASS is a vibrant, global, organization with a wealth of knowledge and it is a shame that many of us only get a chance to share with our local community while we’re socializing at a meeting. Even then, we rarely get a chance to share with other people in our region unless we make a concerted effort to seek them out.

Local Conferences

I believe that it’s important to remember that PASS is more than a yearly international conference. It’s two yearly international conferences. No, that’s not right. PASS is a huge community. Even when you look at my home state of Ohio, there are three PASS chapters in state. That’s more than enough people to put on a regional conference and invite participants and speakers from the neighboring states.

PASS in a wonderful, vibrant community, but we need to build stronger connections locally and regionally if we want to increase the health of PASS as a global organization. Local and regional conferences will also help us grow personally and professionally. PASS members will have more opportunities to hone their speaking skills, network, and increase their knowledge and understanding of SQL Server. We will be able to attract members from the other technology communities and increase collaboration across industries.

Summary

As I said earlier, my views boil down to three things: Knowledge. Growth. Connecting. I believe we have a very strong community right now and that we can take PASS from simply being a great community to being the de facto source of SQL Server knowledge, training, and community.

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