PASS Summit 2012

By Airborne Geek on November 5, 2012

I feel really bad about not getting a post up about this before now. Since it’s to the point where people are already on their way to SEA or already here for this year’s Summit, it’s not like I’m going to be able to talk anyone into spontaneously deciding to go. I mean, unless you’re totally made of money and this last-minute of a flight and full Summit price wouldn’t be that big of a deal to you. In fact, I’m writing this (posted later) from the starboard-side exit row of a Southwest 737-700 rocketing along at FL400, typing on my Surface’s Touch Cover, which I’m only about 2/3 happy with (some of it is due to the seating arrangement, some of it due to not 100% being used to the keyboard yet).

SWA 2410 Flight Tracker
Not really willing to trade flying ourselves for this kind of speed and altitude, but I do it anyway.

This is only our second time to go to Summit. Last year was the first, and was also the first time that we met a lot of the #SQLFamily that we felt like we already knew, mostly due to Twitter over the couple-three years before. ‘Course, now we actually do know a lot of people, and they’re some of our favorite people around.

Summit gets talked up a lot about being a near-sleepless, heavy learning, heavy partying networking event that’s second-to-none. For a bit, before we came last year, I didn’t think it could be AS GOOD as everyone says it is. And, well, I was wrong. Every good conference should have your brain melted by the time it’s all over. It’s two, three, four days of hours of learning, lots of time about stuff that’s at least partially over your head; that does wear on you.

I’ve been to conferences before, so that part of it wasn’t new to me. What was new is all the other stuff–all of the stuff that happens after the sessions are over for the day. Everyone always says it, but it bears repeating: If you eat dinner by yourself (or maybe with some coworkers that came in a group) and then go up to your hotel room by yourself for the rest of the night, yer doin’ it wrong. Summit is not the place to be That Guy. I know, because I used to be That Guy.

I will be the first to tell you that being That Guy does have some advantages. It allows you to review what you learned that day. If you have enough/the right equipment with you, you might even be able to tinker around with some demo code you picked up that day, or experiment with some new way of doing your nightly index maintenance.

Those are all good things. Possibly even good things to do while you’re at the event. But, when SQL Family is involved, there’s something even better to do–hang out. Talk to people. Go to SQL Karaoke. Go to dinner with the guy who presented on your favorite topic that day (OK, that one might be hard to pull off, but I can tell you from experience, it IS possible). I think it’s better to take good notes during the day (I can type faster than I can write and still be able to read it later, so I plan accordingly) so when you review them a few days later on the airplane ride home, you are still able to apply what you learned. Even better, recordings of all the main conference sessions are available for purchase before and during Summit, which makes it even easier to refresh your memory about what you learned long after you’re back home.

In Conclusion…

If you’re going to be there next week, come hang out with us. I’m not quite one of the cool kids, but they humor me, so it’s all good. See, that’s another good thing about networking at Summit–as I’ve said beforeabout this group of people, they’re all awesome, and they all understand–What you do, why you do it, what keeps you up at night… All of it. This is why SQL Family are some of my favorite people around.

See you guys at the Tap House.

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SQL Saturday 145 (BNA): I Haz a Sad

By Airborne Geek on October 13, 2012

(Yes, I speak in airport IDENTs, leave me alone!)

This is not the post about our local SQL Saturday that I wanted you to read, nor is it the one that I wanted to write. I’m barely even getting to write and post this within the week that I intended to. Alas, sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Yay, being a grown-up!

The Plan

Pretty much: See what Tammy wrote. We were going to have some #sqlfamily out on Thursday for dinner, do the usual Friday pre-SQL Saturday things (Speaker Dinner, etc), then on Saturday, Tammy and I were going to co-present a session targeted at accidental or otherwise new-to-SQL Server folks. This was going to be the third time she’s presented at a SQL Saturday, and was going to be my first time speaking.

Although as of last weekend, I was horribly nervous about this already and still feverishly working to get all of the details of my part of the session together, I was really looking forward to this. It was going to be a nice way for me to present for the first time, as I could rely on Tammy’s experience doing this at SQL Saturdays and the internal training she has been doing at her company. Hopefully after this, I’d have some confidence and would be able to start doing something on my own. You know; theoretically…

That WAS the Plan

As I have mentioned before, Tammy’s Grandma had been in the hospital for a couple of months now, recovering from heart surgery. Although there had been some stretches of good days (some really good), she passed last weekend. It wasn’t necessarily unexpected, but it was somewhat sudden. Dealing and coping with that wouldn’t have affected the plan very much, except Tammy’s brother & new wife were still on their honeymoon, and wouldn’t be back until middle of this week. With services delayed until late in the week, we realized that having that on Friday just wasn’t going to fit with speaking on Saturday very well.

Unfortunately, we had to cancel our speaking slot in Nashville. And, just about everything else, for that matter. I still feel really bad about having to do this to the local chapter leaders. I feel bad that it was our local chapter that this happened to! I also hated that we had to cancel what was going to be my first time speaking; now I’m probably going to be cursed 😉 . I know that this is one of those things that comes up nothing can really be done about it, but it doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it. Last weekend I commented that I was about every emotion but “happy” about the entire thing.

But it’s OK. Things are better for Grandma now. We’re hoping to be able to make it back into town to see our Nerd Family at/after the after party tonight. I feel like a bit of a heel for showing up to the party after not speaking at the event, but we won’t eat any of your food 😀 .

Now…

So, today, Saturday, SQL Saturday 145 is in-progress, and when this posts, we’re likely in the car somewhere along US 31 or I-65 (hopefully actually moving and not stopped by a cop 😉 ). Not sure how many people will see this before tonight, but we hope to see some of you then.

We’re sorry, we’ll see y’all soon, and hope you don’t hate us now.

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Recap: SQL Saturday 160 (AZO) and Some Other Driving

By Airborne Geek on October 4, 2012

This trip to Kalamazoo was, at first, supposed to be the front end of an epic road trip involving SQL Saturday 160 and SQL Saturday 149 in MSP. Those plans wound up scrapped when Tammy’s brother announced his wedding date on the same day as 149. Instead of spending the week between visiting friends & family in NW Indiana and doing stuff in Chicago, we only did some of those things; for the most part spending time in/around Indianapolis. It wasn’t all bad, as we were able to spend more time with some people than we otherwise would have; those people just weren’t #SQLFamily 😉 .

SQL Saturday 160 was the second SQL Saturday that Tammy submitted a session to. The first was Kansas City back at the beginning of August (159). The one that started it all was kind of a non-standard submission: Long story short, Andy Galbraith (blog | @DBA_ANDY) said on Twitter that they had five (or so) speaker slots still available and anyone interested should submit a session. I more-or-less threw Tammy under the bus publically on this, she did submit her “SSRS for Nubs” (not really its name) session, and it was accepted. Yay, speaker!

Driving

Packed car

I could say that we had a bunch of extra stuff for Tammy’s mom, which is true, but we still pack like a family of four going on a month-long trip to Europe

We steamed away from the house on Thursday morning. Left so early because we were going to stop for a bit in Indianapolis to visit Tammy’s Grandma, who is still in the hospital recovering from open-heart bypass surgery. We wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get to Kalamazoo in time for the Speaker’s dinner if we had waited to leave & do all of that on Friday.

After eight hours-and-change in the car, including my first-ever speeding ticket while driving through Louisville (because I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing), we made it to Kalamazoo and checked into the water-logged hotel. Turns out something happened to a sprinkler head on the third floor, and drenched half the hotel (and by “something”, I mean, “some guest allegedly broke it”). This means that half of the people staying in the hotel that weekend were going to have to be moved somewhere else. Probably the only thing that got us a room for the weekend was the fact that we got there on Thursday instead of Friday. Everyone who had a reservation had a room in one of two other hotels (one of which wasn’t part of their chain), so that was good.

The Good Stuff

Friday was a nice, relaxing day, where we didn’t actually do much. We kind of needed that.

Had the Speaker’s Dinner Friday night at Tim Ford’s (blog | @SQLAgentMan) place. I love Tim, and after this weekend, pretty much his whole family, too. He had a head-start on that, being a fellow Pentax shooter and all. We had been to a SQL Saturday Speaker Dinner once before, ahead of Nashville’s first SQL Saturday two years ago (they had invited volunteers to it), but this is the first one where we were actually there as a speaker (well, Tammy’s the speaker; I’m just Demo Tech Support). I’m still not quite used to being one of the “cool kids” yet, so I spent some time simply weirded out by being where I was with who I was Friday night.

Saturday itself went really well from my perspective. We didn’t get to the venue as early as I would have liked (my fault), but it was a great venue and there was even some breakfast available! I went to a session in every time slot, as there was interesting stuff for me, and it’s not like I had to sit around and be nervous about speaking later.

My favorite session (criteria: general “interestingness” of the topic/session and how many detailed bits of info I learn and can take away) is probably a toss-up between David Giard’s (blog | @DavidGiard) Data Visualization and Allen White’s (blog | @SQLRunr) “Manage SQL Server 2012 on Server Core w/ PowerShell”.

David’s was nice, because it’s full of little ways to improve data visualization that might not seem so obvious until they’re pointed out…at least not for me. I maybe got more “don’t”s than “do”s out of it, but that’s still OK. Some of the “don’t”s are really good. I especially like David’s use of Charles Joseph Minard’s chart of Napoleon’s army during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Full res of the chart is on Wikimedia here, and is inlined in the Wikipedia page on the invasion itself. The chart is sweet, because it shows so many different pieces of info all at the same time in a fairly easy-to-understand and interpret package. Lots can be learned about data visualization from that one single chart.

I got a lot out of Allen’s session, although possibly not what he exactly has in mind. I’ve recently begun building a new test environment at the house, self-contained on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 that I picked up a few weeks ago. My intent with this is to do everything all ultra-modern. The metal has Server 2012 Core installed on it, running Hyper-V. Everything will be virtualized in that environment. I’m doing this for a couple of main reasons, but I realize that talking about it too much here is fairly off-topic, so I’m going to skip it for now. Anyway, I was a fan of just watching Allen work within Server Core, because although I’ve got our server set up from that standpoint, there was a lot of Googling semi-randomly, running either legacy commands or PS snippets that I barely understood. I have everything written down that I ran, but now I understand a little more of it. Additionally, I know what I need to set up SQL 2012 on Core, which is a task that is coming up after everything going on in the next month or so calms down (that’s another blog post, too).

Tammy participated in the Women in Technology lunch panel discussion, which I think is the first one of those I’ve gone to (not sure how/why). This particular one didn’t have a specific topic to discuss, which led to a lot of varied conversations. There were a couple of audience members who got specific answers to questions that they had, which was really cool to see.

Tammy’s presentation was in the last slot of the day, which led to a slightly tough crowd. It went well though, with one minor hiccup. I like her presentation in general, and so far she’s been getting good feedback on it. Although this is only the second SQL Saturday it’s been done at, she’s given basically the same training to a couple hundred people internally at her company, so the content is fairly refined. It’s done in SSRS 2008 R2 at the moment, and we’ve talked about upgrading the demo to 2012. For right now, it’s going to stay where it’s at, because we don’t get the feeling that 2012 has reached enough of a critical mass, especially considering the intended audience of this session. In fact, one of the attendees in the session asked a question related to running reports against 2005 instances, because they’re currently stuck there and can’t upgrade.

Beer

The after-event was held at the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange. I know very little about this place, other than they have a lot of beers on tap, whose prices are all driven by demand within 15-minute chunks. I hoped this would be good for us, because of our propensity to drink Porters & Stouts. Due to the number of taps they had (and that we’re in Michigan), I also hoped for a good selection of said beers! I wasn’t really disappointed on either point.

Tammy and I both had Dark Horse (Marshall, MI) Thirsty Trout Porters to start out with. I was a big fan based on its name alone, just because it’s a big giant mouthful. I thought it was good. Didn’t write any notes or anything, but I classify it as “definitely a porter”, which all but guarantees I’ll like it. One of the things the KBE has is one cask beer available. When we were there, it was Arcadia Brewing’s (Battle Creek, MI) Baltic Porter. This stuff out of the cask was ri-dic-ulous. Have no idea what it tastes like out of a bottle, and I don’t know if I’d ever even want to after having it like this. It was really that good.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see how their food is, because there was a slight fiasco with getting seating. Apparently the place doesn’t take reservations (which I can understand), and have limited space for even medium-sized (not to mention large) groups (which I can also understand). Long story short on that is we didn’t get to eat there, as some of us basically decided to bail and head back to Tim’s house. Good times were had by all, on all accounts. #SQLCAH

This is one of the best SQL Saturdays we’ve been to but we honestly haven’t been to all that many, so I feel like I’m not saying much.

Back to the Driving

Mostly at the last minute on Sunday, we decided to go to Chicago for the afternoon. I love Chicago. I also love driving to/in Chicago.

It was refreshing to blast up the Dan Ryan at 80 behind a BMW 6 and not have to work too hard to do it, even though traffic wasn’t exactly light. See, Tennessee drivers don’t exactly “get” the whole “keep right except to pass” thing (or, in the form of Kerry’s Driving Rule Number Two, as applied to Multi-Lane Interstates: Only be as far left as your speed and traffic dictate). In fact, when traffic is light-to-light/moderate, the lane where it’s easiest to go fast is usually the far right (#1) lane. Once to a certain point, no clear winner emerges—either you have to just take the speed you can get, or expend a lot of effort—and greatly increase your risk—to weave around in traffic. Bonus points for the guy going 10 under the limit in Lane 1 during rush hour. So, driving on a five lane wide slab of concrete where things work like they’re supposed to is pretty high on my list of favorite things to do.

Did I mention I got a speeding ticket in Louisville on our way up on Thursday? The first one I’ve ever gotten? Because I was spending more time looking at airplanes than paying attention to how fast I was going and the Edge goes fast kinda easy? Yeah. That. Everything makes sense now, doesn’t it? 😉

Steaks at Michael Jordan's

This happened…

Anyway, walked around some there, got our Sunday night steak at Michael Jordan’s restaurant (convenient more than anything), took some pictures, and took the Skyway back to Indiana.

Then more driving, we stopped at my parents’ place, spent some time in Lafayette to see some friends and some other family (and get a DenPop), then time in Kokomo and Indianapolis, Tammy’s brother’s wedding, etc, etc, back to the Osburn Hideaway just in time for Sunday steaks again.

All in all, a really good trip. I’m pretty happy for the time off, even if we were really busy most of the time. It’s always so nice to sleep in our own bed after a trip like this. I don’t know how some of our #SQLFamily do as much traveling as they do. You guys are crazy. And awesome. But possibly mostly crazy.

Pictures

SQL Saturday 160

Chicago/Indiana/Assorted Flatness; Also, giant turbines

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PASS Summit 2012 To-Do

By Airborne Geek on March 5, 2012

Diners Drive-ins and Dives was on the TV just now (it was the first episode I’ve seen of the day, so I hadn’t gotten to the point of stabbing myself in the eyes yet), and Guy was at a place in Seattle that we want to put on a list of things to do this year. Tammy said we should start a list in a folder somewhere, and I thought why not mumble to the world about it.

So, here’s a random list of things that we’re going to try to do when we’re out in Seattle this year, along with a stab at when we might be doing it. Obviously these can all be #SQLFamily events, unless otherwise noted.

Oh, and of course, if anyone knows anything about these places and it would actually be a bad idea to do/visit any of them, please feel free to let us know!

  • Slim’s Last Chance Chili Shack & Watering Hole (1st Ave South, ~Georgetown); Probably hit this place on the way into town due to its location
  • “The spice place”; That’s all I’ve got about it. I seem to recall hearing about this once before, but this is all I’ve got right now

Will add to this as time goes on…

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Meme Monday: #SQLFamily

By Airborne Geek on November 7, 2011

It’s Meme Monday. This is LaRock’s (blog | @SQLRockstar) brainchild. Its idea is to spur all of us to write something, and my sister agrees that this is a good idea. So, here I am, writing about this month’s topic, which is: what #sqlfamily means to me.

So, what does #sqlfamily mean to me? I love these guys. All of them. Even the ones that don’t follow me back on Twitter and/or think I’m a total muppet (for the record, I don’t care at all if you don’t follow me on Twitter. Alternatively, if you’re not on Twitter at all, I think you’re broken, but that’s a different story). I would say that I love these guys like family, but that would be pretty obvious.

See, the deal is, I’m not a big family type of guy. I don’t know why that is. My family is just as crazy as everyone else’s; nothing special there. Maybe it’s the part about how everyone just expects you to show up for things just because it’s a family function. If that is the case, one of the reasons that #sqlfamily is better is because nobody expects that. We all have lives outside of any one particular thing that we do, so for each thing, there’s always other stuff that we could be doing. We’re all the same in just the right ways, so everyone understands.

That’s another thing—we’re all the same in just the right ways. Tammy and I basically can’t talk about what we do with our family and a lot of our friends, because they just don’t get it. We can’t be like, “yeah, so the business today wanted this report deployed with no filtering in place—all 20,000 rows of it,” because nobody will really get it. Sure, the SQL Community is pretty heavily-weighted towards the Engine side of things, and we’re mostly BI people these days, but pretty much everyone understands at least a little bit. So, what does #sqlfamily get us? People who understand.

Most everyone knows by now (well…umm…) about the wedding at PASS. Like we’ve said before, that was pretty nerdy, pretty over-the-top, and more than a little weird. That description fits us pretty well, so I thought it worked out alright. You know who else fits that description pretty well? Yeah, a lot of #sqlfamily. And guess what? These people understand.

Hopefully you’re getting the theme. That’s what SQL Family means to me: People, friends, family who understand.

There are lots of days where that’s all I am looking for. Thanks, guys <3

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