The 1992 Dream Team

When you hear the phrase “All-Star Lineup”, what comes to mind? The New York Yankees? The 1970′s Pittsburgh Steelers? What about the 1992 USA Olympic Basketball “Dream Team” in Barcelona? Oooooh.

Or maybe it’s simply a bacon, egg, & cheese biscuit?

Well, each year the SQL Server community has one event that attracts the best of the best, the upper echelon of industry experts, Microsoft product team developers, authors, MVPs, Regional Directors, and all manner of other scary smart people. The PASS Community Summit is our community’s version of the “All-Star Lineup”.

This year’s Summit is 8 – 11 November in Seattle, Washington. This is bound to be an event you won’t want to miss.

Once again, I’ve submitted some abstracts and hope to speak at the event. In years past, I’ve primarily spoken in the Database Development track on topics such as Reporting Services, T-SQL tricks, and the since deprecated Notification Services. I occasionally made forays into the Database Administration track with topics on performance monitoring and the like.

Although I did submit a couple of technical abstracts, this year I’ve also reached into the Professional Development track. Here are a list of the abstract I submitted.

Locking & Blocking Made Simple

A good working knowledge of how SQL Server makes use of locking and transaction isolation levels can go a long way toward improving an application’s performance. In this session, we will explore SQL Server’s locking methodology and discover techniques for enhancing query response times.

Conducting Effective Meetings

Ever been in a meeting that drones on and on? It starts late, runs long, and doesn’t really accomplish anything. It’s a complete waste of everyone’s time. Worse yet, since nothing was resolved you’ll have to have a follow up meeting. Argh!

In this session you’ll learn some of the keys to conducting an effective meeting. You’ll gain practical tips for making your meetings more productive and dramatically improving one of the most inefficient parts of your day.

Getting Started in IT Consulting

Do you have the expressed goal or the suppressed desire to become an independent consultant? Think it’s too risky? Don’t know where to start? In this session, I’ll help you create a clear transition strategy to go from full-time employee to full-time independent IT consultant with a minimum of risk along the way.

I’ll discuss:

• The many hats of a consultant
• Strategies for minimizing risk
• Setting up your business
• How to handle sales
• Low cost promotions
• Some best practices

The PowerShell Cookbook for the DBA

The best DBAs work hard so that they don’t have to, well, work hard. In this session, we’ll discuss how you can use the PowerShell cmdlets and snap-ins to create scripts that automate the more mundane tasks in your role as a DBA or developer. We’ll create scripts that check the status of SQLAgent jobs, verify the configuration of your servers, and retrieves information from your SQL Server database. You can even store your results in a database table if you’d like. This session is mostly demos with only a few PowerPoint slides to get us started.

The Art and Science of Great Technical Presentation

Have you considered speaking at your local user group, a SQLSaturday, or even a major technical conference? What’s stopping you? Don’t know where to begin? The thought of getting in front of scores of people a bit unnerving? What topic? How many slides? How many demos?

Having great technical skills isn’t enough anymore. The most sought after people in the industry also have great presentation skills. In this session we’ll discuss how to put together an effect and engaging technical presentation. We’ll learn techniques and strategies that will help to give you confidence as you tell your story to peers, colleagues, and even industry experts.

“I got promoted! Now what?”

You were a rockstar DBA. You could leap tall buildings and tune databases in a single bound. Life was grand. And then you got promoted. The skills that helped make a rockstar DBA won’t help you in management. In fact, some of those skills could actually be a hindrance. In this session we’ll discuss the new skills you’ll to hone to excel as a manager like, skills like: managing former peers, delegating to get more done, working more productively, giving effective feedback, and conducting effective meetings.

I certainly don’t expect all of these to be accepted, but I do hope that at least one will be.