SQL PASS Summit Day…Uhhh, All the Rest

By Airborne Geek on October 31, 2011

Since I couldn’t keep up with writing every day (or nearly so) weeks ago at the Summit, recap post(s) weren’t going to go up until after the fact. Since my life has been pretty crazy since getting home (combined with some semi-minor problems with the web host), this isn’t getting finished until way late. I honestly don’t know where everyone found the time to write in the middle of all of this, because I flat-out need more sleep than that. I’m only grabbing the highest of the highlights here, and I’m doing this the weeks after! Normally I would say that I’ll try to do better next year, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.

Wednesday

Washington State Convention Center

Yep, those are overhead electrical lines for pantograph-equipped busses

Wednesday started out with a Keynote address, as most conferences do. This one had a few announcements, such as SQL Server v.Next getting a real name replacing its Codename. Instead of “Denali”, we now have “SQL Server 2012.” Nobody should be overly surprised by this, unless you were really hoping for 2011. The technical content of the keynote was very heavily focused on end-user flavors of BI technologies. Some of the stuff we’d seen before, but there were some new bits here and there. Generally, the “managed self-serve BI” space looks pretty similar to what it did before, being based around PowerPivot and other similar tools in Excel, like tabular data stores (VertiPaq). I thought it was an awful froofy* presentation, but most Keynote-type presos are. What was shown on screen was fine and all, and was neat to look at, but as I’ve said before, the hard part about “managed self-serve BI” is the “managed” part. There’s a lot of work that still needs to happen on the back end by people who know what they’re doing with respect to both the Business and the Data in order to get to the point where a C-level manager is poking around in Excel and making good, data-backed decisions. On that note, though, how many business users have the technical know-how to do the work that needs to be done in Excel to get there? And how many of those are C-level managers? OK, that’s a different post for a different day.

The main sessions on Wednesday for me were pretty heavy SSAS & related topics (like Data Mining). I had a big lightbulb kick on in Craig Utley’s SSAS Aggregations session confirming something that I had been suspecting, so the whole thing got off to a really good start for me. I can’t work on our aggregations situation right this second, but it’s something that will be making it onto my list for the mid-term after some current project work gets finished up.

Some of the days at PASS Summit have special wardrobe…themes. For the last couple years, there has been #sqlkilt day. This particular theme occurs on the same day as the Women in Technology lunch/panel discussion. Its purpose is to “support women in technology” by the guys wearing skirt-like apparatus. It’s cool, but a kilt guy I am not. Anyway, Wednesday this year was SQL Saturday day, where one was to wear their favorite SQL Saturday shirt. Since I’m not a speaker (yet?), all I have is my t-shirt from Nashvegas’s SQL Saturday last year. (It bothered me to wear a t-shirt on a conference day at first, but I got over it by lunch or so.) Coming out of the keynote I looked for what shirts everyone had on. Honestly, a non-zero part of this was me looking for who else just had t-shirts on, but I also wanted to see what everyone else was wearing. Turns out: There weren’t many! I wish I knew why this was. I suppose it could be due to not hearing about it…But I’m a little afraid that it’s because not that many have SQL Saturday shirts! People!! Free training by high-quality speakers (ie, not me). I’m sure there’s one near you. Website right here. Check it out.

The Couch

For my Purdue peeps, think Mathews Hall's ground-floor Men's room

Wednesday night was the vendor reception & some extra-curricular activities afterwards. We had planned to go to two things, but at one point, we were standing on the expo floor when we realized the first thing had started about a half hour ago. We started back to the hotel (which, due to when we started to schedule this trip, wasn’t close), when we realized we weren’t going to be able to get everywhere we wanted to when we wanted to. So, scrapped the first event, and got some food before heading to SQLKaraoke. I don’t know how much of that really needs to be discussed, as it’s fairly self-explanatory. Suffice to say that I fulfilled what had become a lifetime goal in recent years, tried to make friends/be nice to the cranky local guy sitting at the end of the bar, and we got home at 0300 again.

Thursday

Thursday… yeah, that keynote didn’t happen. Haven’t had a chance to go back and watch it yet, either.

More BI-related sessions for me, as that’s what I do now. I did go to one Engine session the whole time, and it was Aaron Bertrand’s (blog | @AaronBertrand) “T-SQL: Bad Habits to Kick” on Thursday. I was looking to see what kinds of things I do that are bad, because, honestly, T-SQL is not my strongest suit. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything major that I didn’t already know, but I did get some background as to the “why”s on a few things. Plus, the only reason “what happens when you don’t declare a length on a varchar() variable” wasn’t news is because we ran into that in an old store

d proc at the end of September. I did learn about TRY_CONVERT() in SQL 2012, though. Although at first blush, it sounds pretty good, it also looks like it could be a big crutch. OH, and also I’m glad that I’m not the only one who finds non-ANSI 92-style joins hard to read at this point. Alright, so obviously I got more out of that session than I initially thought.

Thursday night had an interesting occurrence or two. I mean, there was this thing (someday maybe we’ll tell my parents, haha). I’m pretty happy about that. Yeah, it was an over-the-top nerdy thing to do, and more than a little weird, but that fits us pretty well, so I’m OK with it. Some people did make the chilly trek out to Puget Sound with us, and I/we are very, very grateful to everyone that did. We <3 our SQL Family.

We went to the official second-to-last night Gameworks party for a little bit, but were pretty worn out. We tried to hang on, but once again turned in early. Tammy was passed out on the couch within about three minutes of walking in the door, and I didn’t last a whole lot longer. I think I did try to write something that night, but realized quickly that if I wanted to keep drool off my work laptop, sleep was in order. Plus, I knew we had to get up early on Friday, because it’s Friday, and…

Friday…Dewitt Keynote!

See, for at least the last couple years (that’s as far back as I know, because I didn’t pay close attention to the conference in 2009, as I was bitter about not going), the last day of the conference’s Keynote has been a presentation by Dr. David DeWitt. This has yet to disappoint. This year, the topic was Big Data, including discussions about Relational DBs vs NoSQL DBs. I learned a lot from this, and think I understand why Microsoft is going in the direction that they are when it comes to NoSQL & related technologies. It will be fun to see where this goes. Dr. DeWitt’s keynote is available on-demand here (along with the others), but they do require minor registration. His slide deck is available here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring your attention to this little thing that happened at the beginning of the Friday Keynote. The song was hilarious, but I’m still pretty sure that Buck Woody with a 12-string is > *

More BI sessions on Friday, of course, along with a Professional Development one. The PD session was a panel discussion entitled, “Are you a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensible.” The discussion was led by Andy Leonard (blog | @AndyLeonard). Panel members were: Andy Warren (blog | @SQLAndy), Stacia Misner (blog | @StaciaMisner), Louis Davidson (blog | @drsql), Brent Ozar (blog | @BrentO), Thomas LaRock (blog | @SQLRockstar), Kevin Kline (blog | @kekline), and Jeremiah Peschka (blog | @peschkaj). While writing this post, I listed everyone out, then almost deleted this whole paragraph to start over, because I felt like this was the biggest name drop bomb in the history of blogging. I then decided to leave it, because I can use that blob of names to make a point: Every single one of them has a blog and Twitter account. One could argue about an incorrect causation/correlation conclusion, but I think it’s telling that some of the most successful people in SQL Server Land use these communication methods heavily. I sometimes goof around on Twitter more than I use it constructively, and only like four people read my blog regularly, but if you’re a SQL Server DBA/Dev/etc and enjoy helping people and rubbing elbows with others that do, there’s no time like the present to start using these mediums if you don’t already. There are plenty of people here already who will support you and help you grow and learn.

Conference centers always start the tear-down ASAP at the end of the last day. I understand this—there’s a hard number of hours between when one event ends and the next one begins. It always makes me sad, though. Nothing says an event is over like the registration desk getting torn down in front of you. The good news for us on Friday afternoon while this was happening is that we had spent a lot of time with the awesome community that we’re a part of, and there were still good times ahead, both Friday night and at future events. More on that later, though.

To be continued…

I will cover some of the weekend happenings in another post soon, but more importantly, I have a few lessons learned and/or overall comments to make about the PASS Summit. I’m not going to get that written right now and this post is already too long and has taken me too many days to finally get together, so I’m going to split that up and get to it very soon. Thanks for reading so far…

* As usual, I reserve the right to make up my own words, as this is my blog.

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SQL PASS Summit Logical Days 1 & 2

By Airborne Geek on October 12, 2011

Logical Days? Well, the Conference doesn’t /technically/ start until Wednesday (tomorrow, as I’m writing this), but, 1) we’re here, and 2) I really do think of Pre-Cons and other organized functions as part of the conference itself, so these days counted for me.

Monday

Our conference trip started at 1:30 PM Central Daylight on Monday. With pushback scheduled for 4:45, this was wayyy out of whack for my usual scheduling. Because of how long it had been since we had flown, I didn’t know what security would look like at BNA or how long the process itself would take these days. Turns out, there have been little changes in the duration of things, so we wound up downstream of Checkpoint Charlie almost 2 hours before preboarding would start. Damn.

Anyway, ~5 hours later, we were in the back of a black Tahoe being driven by a Russian dude. I didn’t arrange the ground transportation; I was merely a pawn in a greater game passenger.

One of THE places to hang out & see people at, other than the Sheraton Lobby, of course, is the Tap House (it plays music, I’m sorry). We went there for supper, along with a couple of Tammy’s coworkers that are here. They have 160 beers on tap, and I had a few different Porters throughout the night. I was able to meet a good chunk of SQL Celebrities for the first time, and it’s always kind of fun to meet people like this. Twitter’s really good at making this happen—you feel like you’ve known these people for half your life, yet you’ve never actually met face to face. This happens a lot. In fact, because of my whole picture situation (I’ve got the Ray Bans on in all of the close-ups), Jorge Segarra (blog | @SQLChicken) was beginning to think that I was just a well-written bot. I thought that was pretty funny. For all you may know, he’s right.

Then there was the Mladen (blog | @MladenPrajdic) stuff, but I think that’s under NDA.

Long story short, we finally got back to the hotel at 0300 Tuesday morning. We’re off to a good start.

Tuesday

DowntownTransitTunnel
Seattle Transit Tunnel

Tuesday was mostly uneventful. We had an errand to run in the morning, which involved the usual public transportation crash course that happens in a new city. Turns out Seattle has this cool underground tunnel system for busses in the central downtown area. It’s just like the subway, except the bus routes run through there when they’re in the area. It’s a bit weird & pretty cool.

Tonight there were a few official events. The first was a First-Timers orientation & mixer session. We decided late to not go to that, instead going straight to the Welcome Reception/Quiz Bowl. The Quiz Bowl is where pairs (or three) SQL Server “Experts” compete in a Jeopardy!™-style competition where they basically are subject to the whims of Tim Ford (blog | @SQLAgentMan). Many LOLs ensue. After that was the SQL Server Central/Red Gate Exceptional DBA Presentation/Party. Got to meet Steve Jones (blog | @Way0utWest) finally, along with lots of other community members.

Of course, there is more SQL Karaoke going on tonight, but we decided that after the night we had last night, and the nights that we will have for the rest of the week, we should take it easy once.  Just about to pass out for the night, to be rested for tomorrow and all of the crazy learning (and just crazy) that will be going on for the next few days.

I’m here now, and I still can’t wait for whatever is going to happen next #sqlpass

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PASS Summit From Home

By Airborne Geek on October 10, 2011

I know that I have at least a couple people who read this (incidentally, I just realized they have the same first name) who might be interested in watching some of the Keynotes from PASS Summit next week, but aren’t plugged in to the SQL Server Community to notice this on their own 😉

The best place to find out what is being streamed online to watch off-site is going to be Jen’s post here on “attending PASS Summit Virtually.” It’s pretty much where I was going to go, because I know she’s got everything listed in one place that I can get right to, so you guys had just as well go there directly. Plus, it’s a fun post to read, so it’s still worth a couple minutes.

Even if Keynotes aren’t your thing (I understand), at least check out Dr Dewitt’s session on Friday morning. I was able to catch bits & pieces of his last year, and if you think that you know a little bit about databases, this is sure to destroy any self-confidence you may have in knowing what you are doing. It’s awesome.

So, that’s pretty much all I’ve got here. Check out Jen’s page & catch what you can and/or are interested in.

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Seattle in October

By Airborne Geek on September 29, 2011

Next month, something awesome is going down.

PASS 2011

I haz a happy

For the first time since the Two Weeks in Junetrip in 2008, we’ll be going to conferences. For the first time in…well…ever, the conferences we’re going to are the same one at the same time.

Finally, FINALLY, we’re heading to Seattle for the Professional Association for SQL Server’sannual Summit. This conference was first put on my map when it basically replaced the MS BI conference in 2009 (which wound up getting scheduled for every two years). At the time, I was getting deep into my first “real” DBA job, taking the somewhat long and temporarily divergent road towards a career in BI. I came very close to footing the bill myself for the conference that year, and it would have been pretty interesting to see what would have happened since then had I made that move…

Anyway, we’re both going for real this year, and I’m looking forward to just about everything about it. I can’t wait to meet everyone from the SQL Server community that I haven’t yet (which is most everyone), to possibly sing badly (#SQLKaraoke), to try to split myself up into three pieces to go to all of the sessions that I want to go to (although I haven’t run through the schedule yet), and to try to find time to mumble onto the keyboard to get some posts up here about whatever is going on.

There are a couple things different about this one, though. I won’t be attending a precon session for the first time. That’s a little weird for me, as I think of it as part of the conference experience, and I always get a lot of good info out of them. When I’ve gone to conferences before, I haven’t had great reasons to go to BI-related sessions; I’d just check them out because I’d have the time and/or because I was interested in that sort of stuff. This time, pretty much the primary reason I’m attending is to go to every SSAS session I can. This is really awesome for me.

The other big thing that will be different is my attendance in after-hours events. For the TechEds & Connections conferences I went to, I went to very few after-hours events, either official or unofficial. We’re going to be hitting as much as we can this time, spending time with as many of our fellow Data Nerds™ as possible. Hopefully we won’t annoy too many people—we wouldn’t want to get blacklisted or anything 😉

So, in about a week and a half (!), we will get to spend some quality time in the back of a Southwest Boeing, KBNA—>KSEA. This trip will put me both the furthest West & North I’ve ever been (I don’t get out much), and that will be neat, too. We’ll be missing the photowalk on Monday, which is a bummer, but will be in town through the following Monday, so we’ll have plenty of time to spend with the Emerald City.

I know it’s getting close, but there’s technically still time! If you’re a SQL Server Pro, any of DBA, BI Monkey, or Dev, if at all possible, you should be here for this. I don’t explicitly know what we’re all getting into, but from what I’ve heard and read, there is no better place to be.

Did I mention that I’m excited about this? Yeah, I’m excited about this. The lack of sleep that’s going to happen that week, though? Yeah, I like my sleep. A lot. I’m not sure how that’s going to go.

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Atlantis, Go at Throttle-Up

By Airborne Geek on July 6, 2011

Atlantis

Atlantis on the pad, the night before STS-132 in May 2010

This week, we all have the opportunity to hear this, one of my favorite phrases in the English Language, one last time.

“<Shuttle>, Houston, go at throttle-up” is the command from NASA Mission Control in Houston to the ascending Space Shuttle to open the throttles of the three Main Engines back up to 104.5% of rated thrust. This event occurs as the shuttle is coming off of Max Q, about a minute-10 into the flight. I grew up listening to Lisa Malone’s voice narrating this radio exchange. Because I’m a huge nerd, I use this phrase in day-to-day life whenever I can.

STS-135, a mission that wasn’t supposed to happen at all, is currently scheduled for Friday at 11:26a Eastern Daylight.

This is the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis, and the last one of the entire Space Shuttle program. NASA is taking a back seat to commercial endeavors in the human spaceflight department, instead focusing on heavy-lift capabilities. These heavy-lift rocket(s) will propel robotic missions to far-off places such as asteroids and will hopefully be the technological basis for long-term manned missions, as well.

I have my thoughts about this situation, but that’s not what this is about. This post is about Atlantis. This post is about a workhorse that is fading into history. This post is maybe a little bit about NASA Tweetup, as well, as Tammy and I were part of the STS-132 launch Tweetup. At the time, it was officially the last flight of Atlantis; the first of the last. That is an experience that we will never forget and will always be thankful for. It was an item off my bucket list and a lifelong dream. The launch, however, was almost just the icing on that Tweetup cake—the other activities, the people we met (both other Space Tweeps and NASA personnel), and just the experience of it all were truly what those two days were all about.

The best place to watch peoples’ lives changing (and average Joes being on NASA grounds and rubbing shoulders with others who feel the same way along with the employees that make this happen truly does change lives) in real-time this week is the #NASATweetup hashtag on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitter user (why the hell not?), you can get the feed here. It’s also a good idea to check NASA Buzzroom. It’s down at the moment, and I don’t know if it’s going to be back up for the Launch or not.

Not being all that good at writing is making it hard for me to say what I’m really wanting to say about this. Suffice to say that Friday’s launch is a big deal, both to me, and really, to all of us. I think the space program, the people who forge this trail every day, and even us ardent supporters who watch from the sidelines will have a greater impact on humanity as a whole than any of us can comprehend today.

Godspeed, Atlantis (and Roger Roll!)

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