I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

Just as the list issue of the Connector was ready to send we announced the full schedule for the 2009 PASS Summit. In this issue I want to focus on a topic that I think is of critical importance to PASS (and a personal cause) – bringing in new talent each year. If you look at the schedule you’ll see a Who’s Who of people in the SQL Server world, and that is good. Good because they have a lot to share, and good because they find the Summit to be an event worth their time. It’s definitely good for attendees.

• So why do we need new talent? I can think of a few interesting reasons:
• We need a ‘next generation’ of speakers for when the current ones retire
• We need new ideas and new approaches – and new passion
• It makes speaking slots competitive – only so many seats on the island
• It’s the right thing to do. Good organizations constantly look for those with potential and offer them the opportunity to grow – but they have to do the work

I asked PASS HQ to send me a list of first time Summit speakers and it turns out 12 of the 85 distinct speakers are on the list. I’ve linked to their blog where I could find one:

Remember, these aren’t first time speakers or newbie DBA’s – they’ve all been using and talking about SQL Server for a while. Read some of their blogs, or search for them and see what you find. I think you’ll see that those listed above are another 12 good reasons to attend the Summit this year.

In the next issue we’ll look at the upcoming PASS elections. Until then, if you have questions about PASS, please email me at andy.warren@sqlpass.org.

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

Before we launch into the big news of the week I’d like to remind everyone that our schedule for the 2009 Summit has changed from previous years – Monday will be pre-conference sessions, the main conference will be Tuesday through Thursday, and then we will have a day of post conference sessions on Friday.

This week we announced 23 spotlight sessions, awarded to speakers that have previously presented one more sessions at the Summit and received excellent evaluations. You can click here for the full list, but I thought I’d demonstrate the kind of speakers the Summit attracts by listing their names here – I suspect you’ll recognize many of them!

Itzik Ben-Gan, Grant Fritchey, Klaus Aschenbrenner, Peter DeBetta, Paul Nielsen, Greg Low, Erin Welker, Brian Knight, Erik Veerman, Andy Leonard, Warren Thornthwaite, Joe Yong, Kimberly Tripp, Maciej Pilecki, Paul Randal, Peter Ward, Adam Machanic, Thomas Grohser, Gail Shaw, Kalen Delaney, Andrew Kelly, Joe Webb, and our own President, Wayne Snyder

We’ve also announced the pre-conference and post-conference sessions as well as a special 2 hour networking (as in people) class on Monday by author Don Gabor.

So click on the links and start thinking about attending! As always, if you have any questions about PASS, please email me at andy.warren@sqlpass.org.

Note: The full schedule of speakers ended up also being announced between the time I wrote the editorial and it being published – visit the Summit site to see all of the sessions for this year.

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

I was browsing through the list of SQL 2008 books today to find one to feature in this issue of the Connector and Pro SQL Server 2008 Analytics: Delivering Sales and Marketing Dashboards caught my eye. There’s no doubt that ‘dashboards’ are a hot commodity these days and while some of that might just be the buzzword of the quarter, there’s also a real need to provide information to business users in a way that people understand.

Often we call that reporting, and the presumption is that reporting is easy, if anything figuring out the query for the report is the hard part. There are definitely reports that work just fine in the plain tabular format, but it’s interesting how displaying the data the right way can lead to a better or faster understanding of what the data means. For example, during the months prior to our European Summit we received a weekly report that was a graph showing the year over year trend along with lines indicating major milestones on each timeline making it very easy to understand.  For the 2009 Summit we get a similar report but in tabular format. It’s the same data, just not as easy to understand.

Business intelligence isn’t just reporting, there is definitely a lot to it and as I assess my own skills I see that without more knowledge of both SSIS and SSAS I’m limiting the solutions I propose – the old saying about when all you have is a hammer all the problems look like nails applies all too well.

Changing topics, I saw that Board member Greg Low just sent out his monthly email to our chapter leaders and included this time is something we’re calling the ‘chapter deck’, a short Powerpoint slide deck that has news and other information from PASS.  Our hope is that this becomes both a tool that is useful and time saving for the chapter leader, but also another way to communicate our messages to prospective members. If you attend a chapter meeting and see it used, let us know what you think!

As background, I've never been a fan of multiple instances. It's a useful thing to have available and I use it on a server today, but it's never provided a solid way of isolating resources for each instance.

Next, one of the things I evangelize is that DBA's should make every effort to make a database portable. Portability is important because sometimes we run short of space and/or performance, and the ability to quickly and easily move a db to another server is a nice thing to have. We used to use views to abstract three part and four part lookups, but since SQL 2005 synonyms are a cleaner way to solve that problem. Actually, it only solves part of the problem, since we still have jobs that access the database, external reports, and often linked servers.

We can fix some of that by setting up a DNS alias for each database (thanks for my friend John J for that idea) so that we don't require any app code change if we move a db, and that should handle reports too. Linked servers aren't terribly hard, but what about jobs? Is there an elegant way to handle them besides a good naming convention such as DBName - Job Name, or creating a category that maps to each db, or just using the dbid assigned as the job context?

Instead, I propose a simpler model - every database runs in a separate VM. That forces portability because everything moves as a package. It's a challenge as far as licensing because unless you have the Enterprise Edition you have to buy licenses for each VM, but it might be worth spending more (or getting MS to change the licensing model). Nothing that says you couldn't put more than one database on a VM when it made sense - an example might be a lookup db or an archive db that you really do want in the same place all the time).

Licensing is a negative, I think all the rest is positive if you can live with SQL on a VM. It's a brute force solution, but it also feels mildly elegant. If the licensing question could be fixed would you consider this as a solution?

PASS has a contest going to capture some of the great stories we know are out there - the ones that you took back to the boss and said "this one thing alone paid for the trip". I think it's a good contest and good marketing. Bill Graziano wrote up his story (and rules on the contest), but strangely I couldn't think of a story that quite met the criteria. I've learned a lot and met a lot of people over the years, just never had the one big "aha" that makes a great story. Maybe I need to listen harder! I think that also points out the challenge of justifying any type of conference - you don't know if you'll say Eureka, or if you'll learn a couple dozen smaller things that don't seem all that impressive considered separately, but together add up to an interesting bump in your own knowledge.

If you've got a story I hope you'll enter the contest. If you don't - like me - then we should work harder at keeping track of the things we do learn this year, because even something that seems small to us might be hugely important to someone else, and maybe that helps them get to go next time.

I flew up to Birmingham Friday for SQLSaturday #7 organized by John Baldwin from Steel City SQL and a lot of volunteers. Flight from Atlanta to Birmingham was interesting, the luggage bay door handle wouldn't stay closed flush (the external door that is) so finally the application of some aircraft grade duct tape was applied for the flight over - cool or what? Stayed a new hotel for me, the Hyatt Place, nice concept - rooms have couch, desk, fridge, 42" tv wall mounted so you can view from bedroom or couch, and it has a side panel of accessory jacks so you can easily connect to it as needed. The lobby had an integrated coffee shop/bar/check inn area, and for breakfast they provide free toast/cereal/coffee, or you can place a reasonably priced breakfast order at a touch screen monitor and swipe your room/credit card.

Anyway, headed over to Richards BBQ about 4:30 for the speaker party and due to traffic - wow - finally made it there about 5:30. Richards is a low key BBQ, we initially had a meeting room for the first hour, then moved out to the main dining area but it was never loud enough to be a distraction. Good crowd, John, Robert Cain, Stuart Ainsworth, and more, talked shop until 8 pm or so. Wasn't in the mood for ribs, and the bbq chicken was chopped (just seems wrong), so on Robert's recommendation had a burger and he was right, good stuff, and we all had banana pudding for desert, very sweet banana pudding.

Saturday morning was up early for breakfast and arrived about 7:45, nice day and beautiful location at The Shelby-Hoover Campus of Jefferson State Community College. Plenty of parking, brand new building, lots of room in the main entrance for registration and sponsors. First thing I noticed was that the signs for the turns to the event were too small, it's been a recurring problem and an area that all of our events have suffered from. For all that, the signs were there and I think the location itself was fairly accessible.

Things were calm when I arrived, they were just finishing the setup. Speakers were in blue polos, volunteers in red and John had plenty of volunteers on hand, no sense of chaos at all. Krispy Kremes for breakfast, coffee (fake creamer though!). They had a couple big signs out front which was nice, and they spent smart by omitting the "#7" from them so they can reuse them next year. Attendees got the standard bag of stuff and a pre-printed name tag, nice event guide and schedule as well.

I think there were five sponsors on site, and hats off to Confio for being solid supporters of all the recent SQLSaturday events. PASS had a table at the event, but we didn't have a table throw or prominent sign for it, so it didn't prove to be very effective. Switching hats for a minute, this is an area where PASS needs to figure out a cost effective solution for being prominent - maybe shipping a table throw, and we also need some need marketing materials. The challenge is that the person that would usually be super focused on this is the person that is tied up managing the larger event.

Back to being an attendee. Also included in the bag was a stampede card to drive traffic to the sponsors, and it also counted as a chance to win the set of PASS 2008 Conference DVD's if they had the semi-secret Steel City stamp on the back.

They elected to do a short intro talk to the attendees in the main room, one of those rooms that can be used as one big room, two medium size, or four small rooms. Configured as one large room for the intro and that was a combination of John Baldwin and Morgan Smith explaining the flow of the day, schedule updates, and how the raffles would work.

After the intro they reconfigured the room into two medium rooms (for the two DBA tracks) and a room down the hall and around the corner for the developer track. I was first up at 9 am, so I started setting up right away and ran into a minor snag - they had a volunteer in the room to introduce me. Typically I start to engage with those in the room prior to the session, but what do you do when you're waiting to be introduced? Rather than try to figure it out at 9 am on a Saturday, I grabbed a couple boxes of the Krispy Kremes and made the rounds of the room making sure everyone had another chance to indulge. Just as we started we hit another snag, the speaker in the other room was using the microphone and it was playing in both rooms - who would think to check that? Finally resolved by just not using the microphone in either room, and from there all went well. I got to meet Robert Griffin in person after the session and he was curious if I had a new laptop bag yet - nope, still looking!

After that I sat in on a session by new friend Tim Roper, and then spent some time with John Baldwin discussing how things were going. It's hard to describe the pressure that comes with these events, lots and lots of little details and decisions, and of course you want it to go perfectly. The only thing I had seen early that was missing was a trash can near the coffee for the sugar packets and stirrers, and the need for the larger signs. Then off to the speaker lounge for an early lunch, talking a little more shop and waiting for the lunch break where we were all scheduled to participate in various panel discussions.

The lunch panel was ok - five of us including Kevin Boles on mine - but we had to self moderate and we only did fair, felt like we let a few people monopolize our time a bit much, and in some cases we probably talked more about some things that needed rather than going to the next question. Hard to know, because you hate to give a 30 second answer and move on to find out no more questions! Still, I think some people found value in it and it was fun to do (if you've seen a formula for these that you really like, please drop me a note).

Lunch was boxed lunches, plenty on hand and no line at all, just grab lunch and go, and the quality was fine. Saw a couple of the between session raffles and while they aren't my favorite feature - I'd rather let them just mix as they want - they were handled nicely.

Made the rounds again after lunch and all running smoothly, still plenty of food and drink available as needed, no problems at all. Attendance was 125, a little under the projected 140 but still a great turn out. No major issues and really no minor ones, John and team did a fantastic job, and they are already thinking about what they can do better/different for one in March or April 2010. I left before 3 to head to the airport, having the choice of flying out at 5:30 pm or 6:30 am the next day, rather just get home late Saturday and try to have a day off with family on Sunday.

Long post, and I'm still leaving out a lot of good stuff!

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

As of our most recent update PASS has more than 45,000 members, a number that reflects real growth over the last year and an indication that PASS is moving in the right direction.  We’re doing a lot of things better than ever; more Chapters, more Chapter communication, more local events, more Summit attendees, more translucency, more volunteers. That’s not to say we’re done, just that we’ve made positive progress and the challenge is to maintain and accelerate our growth and change.

Setting goals, often ambitious goals, is a good thing because goals focus your energy. One of our major goals for PASS is to reach 100,000 members by June 30, 2010 (or sooner!). That’s an aggressive goal, trying to more than double our membership in just a year. Trying to reach that goal will make us all focus on doing things better and faster, and making sure that we provide lots of good reasons for people like us to join and participate in PASS.

We’re working hard at finding ways to do that, but you also get to play a part in reaching that goal. You’re reading this today because you find value in PASS and in growing your skills as a SQL Server professional. I’m willing to bet that you work with or know others that work with SQL Server, so I’m going to ask that you share your interest in PASS with them. Whether you chat about it over lunch, forward your issue of the Connector, or take them with you to a local Chapter meeting, just make sure they know about PASS. No arm twisting, no sales pitch – just tell them about PASS and share your interest and passion.

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

As you read this I’ll be attending my second in person board meeting for PASS, and with luck I’ll be enjoying it! As I write this on May 1^st I’m looking forward to the meeting because while I certainly haven’t learned it all, I’m at that 90 day mark where you start to have a pretty good idea of who does what, what needs to be done, and can begin making deeper contributions. As always we have a lot of stuff to discuss, ranging from plans for the next quarter to setting the budget for FY 2010 which begins July 1^st. I’ve already submitted a preliminary budget for next year, but it will be interesting to see how that gets folded into the final budget. I’ll try to share more details about the entire meeting in a blog post and/or here in the Connector.

Changing topics, a question surfaced on Twitter about transferring registrations for the Summit. Great question, because many companies have things come up as well as staffing changes that might prevent the original registrant from attending. The good news is that you can change registration at no cost! We also have a pretty fair cancellation policy and I encourage you to visit the Summit web site for the details.

And finally, I’d like some feedback about what your thoughts and expectations are with regards to networking at the event. Would you attend a one or two hour class on networking if we could find a way to do that? Would you find some simple coaching guides in your event bag useful? Or are there some specific people you would really like to meet at the event? Post a comment on our blog, or just email me at andy.warren@sqlpass.org.

SQLServerCentral had a press release today about attending the Summit and the networking opportunities, something that I've been blogging about and so has Tom Larock. I mentioned it in my PASS Update today, but I wanted to say again here that I think the biggest reason to attend the Summit (or other conference if you must!) is the people. Not just the speakers, but everyone there that makes it such a great venue because no matter where you sit, next to you is going to be someone as interested and as passionate as you are about SQL Server.

Of course, not all of us are good at starting conversations and meeting new people, so that's why I think PASS needs to do more to teach and facilitate those conversations. Something to think about.

It's been a slower pace since the last update. Grant and I are working on the publication process for content on sqlpass.org, and Tim Mitchell is still queued waiting to deploy some code that will let us provide a filtered feed of all the bloggers in the blog directory. Probably the biggest thing that I've done is attend the board meeting last week in Seattle and I want to share some of that with you, and we'll get the minutes published as soon as we can.

I flew out on Tues about 8 am via Alaska Airlines, they have a direct flight to Seattle from Orlando, though it's a long 6.5 hours. Waited at the airport for Pat Wright to arrive so we could ride together up to our hotel in Bellevue. We arrived about 1:30, checked in, then split up to walk and explore a bit. We were downtown Bellevue this time (for proximity to MS) and it was a nice location, plenty of stuff nearby that didn't require a car/taxi. About 3:30 I met up with Blythe, Kate, and Craig from PASS HQ and sat with them at Red Robin while they had a very late lunch, then back to the hotel to work a little in the lobby and just sit and talk some. Everyone that had arrived met up for dinner at 7 pm for fajitas and etc, talked work a little but it was mostly relaxing.

Wed our biggest item of discussion was the budget for FY 2010 which begins Jul 1. This quickly became complicated for a couple reasons. One is that given an uncertain economic climate, what projection should we make for the Summit? We had a really great year last year and overall things seem to be progressing nicely, but would it be responsible to project an increase in an economic downturn? Same as last year? Down slightly? While that might seem like a guess (and it is go an extent), it's a critical guess as the Summit represents the bulk of our FY 2010 funding. That puts us in the position of having to build a budget around what we expect to generate, then we have to adjust our budget once we know the final number. As a fiscal conservative I'd much rather be in the happy position of having more money to use for good things than having to cut appropriations because we didn't hit our revenue projection. Lot's of discussion and we didn't quite finish, but we did end up with a road map of how we'll arrive at the final budget and that works.

It's also fair to say from my perspective that the Wed meeting seemed like it would never end. I try hard to remember that meetings are not pretty things, they can only be organized so much and with a dozen people in the room, any topic will generate 10 minutes of discussion. Yes we had an agenda and a sort of moderator, but in the case of the budget I think we can learn a lesson - just having an agenda is not enough. What we really needed was more work in advance to make it more of a decision making process, something like this:

• At least 7 days prior to the meeting email board members good, better, best case budgets based on various revenue projections. Potentially the discussion around revenue expectations would have to be done via email prior to that, but I think having three variations would work just as well. In each case the revenue would be adjusted on a pure percentage basis across line items.
• At the meeting provide a summary of the 3 budget options and how the forecast for each was derived, and try to reduce the conversation to a vote on the forecast first, and then a quick review of proposed spend by department. In practice I think we need goals outlined at the same time as the budget to see if spend aligns and supports the goals for the board member, but I can also see that it might be more effective to have the VP of Finance and team do that review and take the board through the uncertain areas.

It's not that the budget isn't important or worth my time, but it's only worth so much of my time, and only so long as I'm getting/providing value. It's also important to decide if any part of the meeting is one that needs the long discussion in order to figure out a course or make it easier to accept a hard decision, or if should be more of a decision. Both are fair approaches, but would be very important not to appear to be removing the attendees from the discussion without their approval, so that does require a quick discussion in advance.

Discussed a few other things (a blur!) and ended the day sometime after 7 pm, meeting up for dinner at 8. It was labeled a working dinner, but the restaurant was just a little noisy and everyone was tired, so it more dinner and small talk than work.

On Thursday we went back to the budget for the first few minutes as some details had been finalized, and then we talked about changes to our by-laws. Many of these are to clean up our existing by-laws where they don't handle exceptions very well, but we're also in the middle of revamping our definitions of members. As you may recall PASS used to have two categories of members; paid and free, and the paid members could vote. Now that we've changed our membership to all being free, we need to adjust how we determine who can vote. I'm going to way on the by-laws to be published to discuss that (next 30-60 days), but I will say that the Board is trying very hard to encourage and allow members to vote.

The by-laws discussion was another place where it's important to think through how to present it at the meeting. We would end up reviewing a document that contained only the revised paragraphs, but no markup showing the original text or reasons about why each change was being made. Made it hard to review and because by-laws are a legal document, language matters and so does context! We got through it, but it took longer than it feel like was needed.

Thursday night we scattered for various discussions, I had a long dinner/meeting with Wayne, Lynda, Rick H, and Tom. Tom left about 6:45 to watch Star Trek (and I was tempted), but the discussion was good and continued past 9 pm. Lynda heads up the program committee which among other things builds the speaker schedule for the Summit, and it was interesting to hear about the work and challenges involved in that - and it reminded me that we still need to do more to help the board members share details of those efforts with the members.

Friday morning I met Tom Larock for breakfast, and then Bill Graziano, Sonia, and Blythe joined us for a discussion about chapters and marketing, and that moved into a discussion about networking and people, making sure that our marketing message is more than just the technical value, it's also the people value. We've got a few ideas we're working on and we'll see.

Left for the airport about 10:45 with Tom and Bill, they dropped me off and then I ran into Kevin Kline going through security, so we took advantage of the wait time to have lunch and talk some. Then back on the plane for the not quite as long 5.5 hour ride home, getting to Orlando about 10 pm.

People often ask if the meetings are worth the time and expense. I still say yes, because even though they aren't always as productive as I'd like, they are the only time we really collaborate. In my experience collaboration takes time and patience, not something that goes well on a 15 minute phone call. I wish it took less time, the trips to Seattle use up the better part of 2 days for me, and combined with the time zone change it definitely throws me off my game a little.

So that's it for the past couple weeks, in the next update I'll discuss my goals for the next three months.

I serve on the PASS Board of Directors, but this post reflects my personal views and not an official PASS position.

One of the things that has always interested/amazed me is how many people wait until the last minute to register for PASS, and that wait typically results in spending an additional $500-$1000 more than you needed to. Early bird registration is $1195, and that's an entirely reasonable cost for any conference, and what you save by getting the early bird rate would cover most of your travel expenses.

So why do people wait?

One big reason I've heard is that they are unsure of their schedule and what will be going on at work. I know work can present challenges, but if you asked to schedule vacation right now for November would it be approved? If so, how's that different from scheduling training? Both require checking for existing conflicts and figuring out who will cover for you while you're gone. One thing to note is that PASS allows transfer of the registration without penalty, so you can register the most likely person to attend and if things change, send someone else from your team, or maybe your manager!

Another reason is money. Businesses like to procrastinate on spend, but that's not always good stewardship of money. Why spend $500+ more than was needed to delay the decision a couple months? If the money just isn't there yet that makes sense, but more often it's just a tradition of let's wait and see. Not only does that increase your cost to attend, it decreases your ability to save money on hotel and airfare by starting to look well in advance.

From an attendee perspective the first and most important battle to win is that you need training and that you think the Summit best fits your needs. Part of a strategy of winning that discussion is to show your employer that traveling to training is possible and that you are looking at ways to get the training you need at the lowest cost to the company. If the company just insists on waiting there's not much you can do, but seriously, doesn't it make sense to register early in most cases? Not all, but most?

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog

We’ve made some minor updates to the PASS web site recently. None that are amazing, but represent attempts to fill gaps that we think will be useful to members, and more often, to prospective members. Here’s a list of recent additions:

• Top 10 Lists. We’ve already got a few posted, why not become mildly famous by building your own list and adding it to the collection?
• Online Communities. PASS isn’t the only SQL Server community, and we want to make sure our members can find all the resources that are out there – and its part of us being good citizens in the online community too.

Waiting for deployment are pages about SQL MVP’s, the history of PASS (terrific read!), the history of SQL Server, and some great information on certifications. All of them contributed by volunteers, and we hope you find them useful. But if you find a typo, or an omission, or a page we should have but don’t – drop me a note at andy.warren@sqlpass.org. Eventually PASS should become a great career resource for you, and when someone asks you ‘should I get certified’ or ‘what is an MVP’, you’ll have a place to point them to!

Changing subjects, we recently extended our call for speakers for the 2009 Summit, but at the time we didn’t explain why, which in turn lead to speculation. Microsoft had let us know that the BI conference that runs in the same time frame was being canceled, and we decided to extend the call for speakers so that the speakers from that event would have an opportunity to submit sessions for the Summit. Our plan is to add capacity so that as we add BI sessions we don’t detract at all from the DBA market, but for many of us it’s no longer DBA or BI, most of us do a little bit of both. I’m looking forward to taking in a great BI session or two to expand my own horizons.

A week or so ago I posted a note about reading How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends (worth reading), and I had a comment posted to the blog by author Don Gabor. I like that kind of follow up, so I sent Don a note and a Linked In connection request, and that in turn led to an hour call talking about what he does, some ideas I have for the PASS Summit, and about my efforts to learn and improve my own networking skills.

As we talked about my ideas for the Summit (which are definitely not fully formed yet) Don mentioned that while he had not worked with database people (my words) before, he said that he'd expect them to be very similar to doctors, engineers, and attorneys (is that good you wonder?) in that he would expect them to be smart, methodical, and typically a bit reserved about their networking efforts. At this point I'm interested, because I believe in the value of training, and I'm thinking that here's a chance to learn from someone who focuses on it, the proverbial subject matter expert.

What immediately seemed very very interesting was - could I bring Don (or someone like him) to the Summit? I struggle with networking, and from the comments here and discussions elsewhere I know many of you do as well, so instead of just talking about networking, maybe we should have someone teach all of us! Maybe that's an hour session, maybe it's a 4 hour workshop, maybe it's a keynote. Don't know yet, and in fairness while I have read his book and talked to him for an hour, it's probably a little early to make that larger commitment. But...I'm curious, how many of you that plan to attend would find an opportunity like this interesting?

I asked Don about just doing some initial consulting with me because I'm hoping at least to have a few networking events that go well, and he seemed to have the knowledge to help. One of the ways that Don converts brand into money is by doing phone coaching, so rather than drag PASS funds into the mix so early on, I signed up do to the coaching, we'll four sessions each of 1.5 hours. My first assignment is to write down three goals and then we'll build some details around how to achieve those goals (which I'll share with you next week). It's not cheap, $400 for 6 hours, but I do believe in training and this is an area where I'm weak, and I want to take Don for a test drive before I start talking to the PASS Board about inviting him to the Summit.

Interestingly, our call never felt like a sales pitch at all. Like many of you I can typically detect when a conversation is leading to a financial objective, and the warning buzzer never sounded. I'd say that it felt like...networking. I was interested in his experience as related to my interests, he was interested in my comments and reasons behind reading the book, and that just lead to a good conversation.

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

What does a professional organization do? What should members expect from their professional association? Those are good questions, though not easy to answer. Twenty years ago one of the big reasons to join associations was for the benefits large organizations could negotiate – now there are very few that are large enough to beat the discounts available via various web sites and searches. For those of that use SQL Server we don’t have the same licensing requirements that doctors and attorneys do, so that model doesn’t quite fit us either.

I’ve thought about it a lot and while I don’t have all the answers, here is what I have come up with so far:

· PASS should focus on career development, networking, and some aspects of professional development

· PASS should speak out about matters of interest to our members – best practices, features for the next version, bugs that need to be fixed, and more

· PASS should be the place where we send those considering a career as a SQL Server professional to understand the options and the career path

· PASS should be more than just DBA’s, we have to include those that work on the BI side of things, and we should encourage developers to participate in some way too

· PASS should help employers and managers understand the particular needs, demands, and stresses of our profession, how it affects them and how it affects us

· PASS should continue to host the annual Summit as the premier learning and training opportunity for those of in the SQL Server business

· PASS should be a equal player in the larger world of SQL communities and events – we’ll seek to be the best we can be at our mission and we’ll let them be the best they can be at theirs, and we’ll embrace any site/event that provides learning opportunities to our members

· PASS should be keeping our members informed about news and events of interest – you may find it in other places, but we’ll make sure it’s visible here

· PASS should encourage those that want to take the next step and provide opportunities for volunteers to participate, and to speak at our local chapters, regional events, and the Summit – and provide training and guidance to help them succeed

We would like to hear from you! Do you like that list, have an idea for something that can be added or removed? At the end of the day we want being a member of PASS to be more than just good karma; we want you to be a member because we’re providing value to you. I’ll hope you post to our blog your ideas, but as always you can reach me directly at andy.warren@sqlpass.org.

Andy

Time has flown by since my last update, busy time at work and struggling to get that done and find a few hours for PASS too. Here's a short version of what I've been working on lately:

• Added the Top 10 List page and have some starter lists from Jessica Moss, Grant Fritchey, and Jack Corbett. Can I talk any of you into adding your own list? Interesting way to help people get started on a topic.
• Added the online communities page as a starting point for trying to show that PASS is only a portion of the online community, and that we celebrate the other communities that contribute so much.
• We've got the SQL history page almost done, our MS contact Roni K went and took some pictures of the trophy case with all the various SQL boxes so we'd have some artwork for it, and we've got links to some other nice resources too.
• PASS Blog directory has been updated a few times. Note, one glaring weak spot is we're not checking blogs listed in PASSPort yet.
• Tim Mitchell has completed the code to let us review and filter all the posts made to all the feeds in the Blog Directory, now we're trying to get it tested and deployed - not a small thing, since our move to DNN last year we don't quite have a testing environment ready. Worst case we'll host externally for a while until that gets resolved.
• Final drafts of our SQL MVP and certification pages are under review. My fault for them taking longer than they should have, Chuck and John had them in on time and I didn't have a copy editor lined up. Hoping we finish these up sometime this week.
• We've changed our process a little so that the Connector editorial is also posted to the PASS blog, allowing anyone with comments to easily participate, and I'm also cross posting to my blog. Going forward we'll continue that, and also ask for permission to repost (or at least link) to blog posts by board members/active volunteers that fit into the PASS blog. The intent there is that the PASS blog is about PASS and it's a less formal way to provide news to members.
• I've checked in several times with big kahuna Wayne Snyder about my progess, and it's always useful to remember - especially in distributed environments - that spending 10-15 minutes just chatting with the boss is pretty valuable on both sides. Wayne expects people to do things and ask for help if needed, but it's always going to be a struggle to keep up with everyone, so pushing information to him is pretty useful
• We just had our April board meeting via conference call, and the major topic of discussion was budgeting. Budgets (the act of figuring one out and living with it) are always hard, and in our case we'll be meeting in May to set a budget based on income we'll earn in Nov. That's always a guess of sorts, so right now we're adjusting our FY 2009 budget to try to down to a balanced budget. In practice we're within about 2% or so of balanced, and that's not a huge variance. It's quite a discussion to have, debating whether to cut core expenses (which you'll need next FY) or just trim anything close to a nice to have. I was pleased to see all participated in the discussion and while we didn't all exactly agree, no one was against trying to get as close as possible to balanced. Nothing to worry about here, this is typical stuff for any business, and we're actively managing it.
• You've probably seen the news that MS canceled their 2009 BI conference, and PASS Summit 2009 is one of their recommendations for those that had planned to attend. It happened at a weird time for us, near the end of the call for speakers, so we ended up extending the call for speakers without a good message about why (to give those speakers time to cross over). We'll try to get a more thorough message out sometime this week or next, just had to do the best we could!
• For my work I'm trying to better utilize our full time staff, especially Sanj (who does the Connector and more for me!) and Blythe (helps with Chapters and SIGs) and the trick is figuring out what to give them and what to ask for help for from volunteers. I've been trying to call in once a week to check on them and get them to give me feedback on my ideas, and I think that helps all around
• Tom Larock has done some nice posts lately about his PASS involvement, and I hope that continues. More info, more translucency - all good stuff for us in the long run.
• I'll post more on this separately soon, but I'm working on a Connector editorial about the upcoming elections. Before I write that, I'd appreciate any and all input from those that participated (or chose not) in last years election.
• We'll be meeting in Seattle in May for an in person board meeting, and I'm looking forward to the meeting (if not the trip). Our main focus will the FY 2010 budget, but we've also gotten to know each other better and how things work, I'm hoping we can really start to work together as a group. Next post I'll have a draft of my Q2 goals up for discussion.

There's probably more than that. I had a couple slow weeks with only a few hours, one week where I worked Sun on "real" work so I could Mon on PASS stuff, and that ended up taking most of Tuesday too. I'm trying to move back out of tactical work now that I have a little better idea of how things work, but there's still plenty of work to do.

As always, if you have a question or comment, post it or email it to andy.warren@sqlpass.org and I'll try to get you an answer.