For those in or around the Dallas area tomorrow (Thursday) evening, I'll be speaking at the North Texas SQL Server User Group meeting at the Microsoft campus in Irving at 7pm.  I'll be giving my talk on Scripting in SSIS, one of my favorite topics.  Sean McCown will also be continuing his series on PowerShell in SQL Server at 6pm.  If you're a reader of this blog, please catch me after the presentation and say hello.

I received my notification from the PASS Program Committee on Friday evening, and found out that I will not be speaking at the PASS summit this year.  It’s a little disappointing but not entirely surprising; it’s only been in the past year or so that I’ve committed to speaking professionally, and there are many others who submitted sessions who are far more experienced at speaking than I.  To that end, I’d rather have the bar set very high, even if it excludes me for this year, to maintain the quality of the material and presenters at the PASS summit.

I do appreciate that the Program Committee now offers feedback for the sessions that are not selected.  Mine was marked as “Insufficient speaker experience”, which sounds like a bummer but it’s good information and something I can work on between now and next year’s selection.

In the meantime, I’m adding more speaking engagements to my agenda.  I’m speaking this week at the North Texas SQL Server User Group meeting, and I’m going to submit sessions to one (or perhaps both) of the SQL Saturday events coming up in August.

So for this November, I’ll simply be an attendee/volunteer at the PASS Summit, and will continue to accumulate outside engagements to build my street cred for next year’s selection.

I was tagged by Scary DBA and recent MVP awardee Grant Fritchey with the latest viral question:

“So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work.  Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island.  Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?”

Yes, it’s a bit silly, but think about it – a full month to do the stuff you’ve wanted to do all along.  No ringing phone.  No midnight SPID-killing.  No “I accidentally deleted all of our customers, can you drop what you’re doing and fix it?” support tickets.  Thirty days to show off how smart you are, or to get even smarter.  A month to work on real projects with real value.

With that in mind, the first thing I’d do is to remove any visible signs that I’m on the island, which should keep the rescue craft from easily finding me.  This might buy me 2, maybe 3 more months on the island.

Seriously, with that kind of unallocated time, I’d round out my Analysis Services knowledge and learn everything I could – including MDX, data mining, and DMX.  I believe business intelligence is the future of SQL Server and of the data profession as a whole.  Those who are well-versed in these technologies will bring enormous value to any organization.

With any remaining time I had left, I’d finally get around to writing some tools to make my job easier.  I’ve had many moments of pause throughout my SQL Server career when I’d tell myself, “Someday, I’m going to create an application/script/add-in to make this task easier".  With my time in isolation, I’d spend the time to streamline those tedious task that take up too many mindless clicks or keystrokes.

Now to keep this rolling, I’m going to tag my friend Jack Corbett, who I’ve “known” online for a couple of years but only met in person last weekend in Pensacola.  I’ll also reach out to Ken Simmons, whom I also met at the same SQL Saturday event.

I received my evaluation summary from Karla Remail for this weekend's SQL Saturday event.  The results are as follows:

Expectations:  0 Did not Meet, 2 met, 7 Exceeded. 
 
Overall quality:  Zero 1's, Zero 2's, Zero 3's, 2 4's, 7 5's.
 
Comments:
"Great session!"  "Very knowledgable presenter. Kept on his schedule and presented well." "I really haven't used SSIS, so it was hard not to pick up on some new tips and tricks."

All of the evals were on the right (positive) side of the scale, a good sign to be sure.  I solicited some feedback from a few fellow speakers who attended my session, and received some good comments and a few suggestions as well.

The SQL Saturday Pensacola pics are up!  Visit the SQL Saturday Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=58052797867&ref=ts
and tag or leave your comments.

I’ve just arrived home from a quick trip to Pensacola to speak at SQL Saturday 14 in Pensacola, FL.  I’m quite happy with the event; the planning and organization was handled very well, and I believe the event was a big success in the eyes of the attendees.

I flew into Pensacola on American Eagle, arriving at 3:30pm on Friday.  I usually dread flying American, but this time wasn’t so bad; the flight was on time and the flight attendant (just one – it was a small plane) was polite and attentive.  My rental car company, which shall remain nameless, was less impressive, since I had to deal with the cigarette residue from the previous renter, and I had to return all the way to the ticket counter to report some undocumented damage to the car before leaving.  Nevertheless, I did get one good surprise upon arrival: Thinking that I had crossed into Eastern Time, I subconsciously added an hour to the time, only to realize upon arrival that western Florida is actually on Central Time.  A free hour!

I got settled into my hotel room, which was about 5 miles from the event location.  Note to self: Don’t be cheap, spend the extra $50/night next time and stay nearby.  In a nice hotel.  Andy Warren and I had tentatively planned to meet before the speaker reception, so I called him and we met up at McGuire’s Irish Pub.  It’s a neat little place, and I recommend it if you find yourself near downtown Pensacola.  One word of caution: read the signs on the outside of the restrooms carefully.  By the way, the ladies room at McGuire’s is quite nice.

The speaker’s reception at the Fish House was a big hit.  I don’t know if anyone kept count, but I’m guessing that we had 35-40 people that showed up over the course of several hours.  It got a little loud when the peripheral crowds arrived, but a good time nonetheless.

The event itself went well, in my opinion.  It got off to a slow start since the building was still locked at 7:45, but there were a lot of volunteers to help out with the heavy lifting.  Traffic flow was very good and there were few bottlenecks during registration.  According to the last figures I heard, there were 180 or so registered, and 170+ showed up (this included a number of walk-ups).  I heard of one speaker that didn’t make it, but it was due to a family issue and Karla was able to adjust the schedule beforehand to allow for this.  The book giveaway was done throughout the day rather than at the end, which helped to thin out the end-of-the-day swag bottleneck.  Among the items given away was a pass to go on a deep sea fishing trip the day after (Sunday), which I personally would have loved to do but just couldn’t fit it into my Sunday schedule.

I spoke again on SSIS Scripting, and the session was full and seemed to be well-received.  I neglected to plug in my laptop during setup – and believe me, a warning message stating “Your battery is at 7% – plug into a power source immediately” will throw a kink into the best presentation.  I had an issue with the resolution on the projector which kept me from going full-screen on my VM, and this slowed me down during the demos.  Despite these minor glitches, everything else went well, and we had some excellent questions and good discussion during and after the presentation.  If you’re interested, I’ll be publishing the slide deck and code on my website in just a while.

I talked to several attendees during and after the event, and all of them that I spoke with spoke very highly of this SQL Saturday event.  Those who attended were gracious, attentive, and polite, and I got the sense that they felt their time was well spent.

I did get to meet a number of people whom I’ve “known” for months or years but had never had a face-to-face chat, including Jack Corbett, Steve Jones, Brad McGehee, and Ken Simmons.  I also got to visit with several folks that I had met at previous events, including Rodney Landrum, Karla Remail, Nathan Heaivilin, Pam Shaw, Jessica Moss, Joe Healy, and a number of others.  I also shared a flight home on Sunday with Brad McGehee, so he and I got to visit for a while as we waited to fly back to Dallas.  It’s great to share the company of these smart folks, because it 1) makes for interesting conversation and 2) gives me hope that I’ll collect a few IQ points by osmosis.  For me, this event was also an experiment in personal networking, but that will be covered in another post.

My hat is off to Karla and the volunteers from the Pensacola SQL Server User Group.  This event was well planned, organized, publicized, and executed.  I’m hopeful that we can replicate this event, and its success, in the Dallas area sometime next calendar year.

For those who are interested, I've got a couple of speaking engagements coming up in the next two weeks. I'll be speaking about one of my favorite topics, scripting in SSIS.

The first event is this coming Saturday, June 6, at the SQL Saturday in Pensacola. This free all-day event has dozens of different sessions on various SQL Server-related topics.

Also, I'll be speaking at the North Texas SQL Server User Group in Dallas (Irving) on Thursday, June 18th at 7pm.

If you're able to make it to either event, please catch me afterward and say hello.