Core Team

Last year:

Last year the event was organized by Ted (blog | twitter), Wendy (blog | twitter) and myself. This was our first event and we were learning as we went.

This year:

This year in addition to Ted, Wendy and myself, Norm (blog | twitter), Bill (twitter), Bob (blog | twitter) and Rich (twitter) also were part of the planning with Jes (blog | twitter) stepping up at the last minute to help with the T-shirts. Having the additional people with additional contacts was an absolute boon. Responsibilities were able to be delegated and just removed from the list of concerns as well as conversations and creativity was improved (hey 8 heads are better than 3 ).

Venue

Last year:

The event was at a hotel with 5 rooms that could accommodate between 75 and 200 per room. Two of the rooms were able to be combined to allow for 350 or so. The 2 main challenges we had were:

1. Moving between rooms was almost an impossibility due to 350+ people trying to navigate through the same 20’x20’ area at the same time

2. Screens in the largest 2 rooms weren’t large enough for entire room to see them easily.

This year

The event was at DeVry with 8 rooms that could accommodate between 30-75, and the common room. This solved the 2 problems from last year by allowing more space to move between rooms as well as each room was already equipped with a projector and whiteboard. Awesome. There were a couple more challenges that we had to overcome such as we didn’t have a space that could accommodate all the attendees at the same time. Plus due to some of the class sizes being smaller, some of the rooms had people sitting on the floor or standing along the walls. We tried to limit these challenges with better scheduling.

Schedule

Last year:

Last year we scheduled 4 rooms with eight 1 hour sessions each. Personally I loved because when I go to an event like this I go to seep all the learning I can out of it. However feedback we received was it was a little too hard core and people were just brain dead with a session and a half to go. Secondly last year we made the mistake of “assuming” time in between sessions. We scheduled sessions at an hour figuring presentations would last around 50 minutes which would allow 10 minutes to move between sessions. However due to Q&A, longer sessions and the problems moving between sessions mentioned above, this ended up being a huge oversight on our part. Lastly we had many speakers giving multiple sessions and tended to give MVP’s or other community leaders more speaking time.

This year:

This year we scheduled 8 rooms with five 1:15 session each. We also provided a 15 minute windows to move between rooms explicitly. This allowed for a much more relaxed feel throughout the day, people didn’t feel rushed and were able to have more conversations and connect with each other. I saw a lot more community interaction this year. Also in regarding to scheduling we had something around 50+ speakers submit over 140 sessions. However this year we decided to go back to the basic tenet of SQLSaturday:

We focus on local speakers, providing a good variety of topics, and making it all happen through the efforts of volunteers.

So we decided to only allow a speaker 1 timeslot and pick some people that aren’t as well-known as speakers. In fact we had at least 1 first time speaker Christina (blog | twitter).

Food

Last year:

Last year we wanted to do a breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack. However we were limited in finances as well as the venue not allowing us to bring in food. So we ended up going predictable and easy – we had the hotel do coffee in the morning, water through the day and a pizza buffet for lunch. Everyone loves pizza right? There were some time challenges in the buffet line as it just takes time to build up your plate.

This year:

With the venue allowing us to bring in outside food plus having a little more freedom in our finances this year we were able to do more. For breakfast Keith (blog | twitter) was gracious enough to order and pick up bagels, donuts and coffee. For lunch we consciously made the decision to not do pizza. We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we wanted to do something else. Then Norm the idea of using Meatyballs (blog | twitter) a lunch truck in Chicago by Chef Foss. In addition to that Bob and Wendy were also able to bring in food from Aldi’s and Costco to supplement throughout the day.

Registration

Last year:

We had a single area with separate lines dependent on last name. Due to limit in financed we were unable to print out name badges and had attendees write in their own name tags.

This year:

Speed PASS = awesome. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty you can see that here. We had around half the attendees or so sign up for SpeedPass which significantly reduced time at the registration tables. The process is highly recommended. Rich, who was unable to actually attend the event, did all the programing and emailing of the Speed Pass process, please be sure to thank him if you liked it.

Room for Improvement

I felt we still missed on a couple things. Most notably in my opinion was the session and event evaluation process. This process needs to be easier, period. Also while the event allowed more time and space to travel between rooms, due floor plan on the building, some people were confused. Better directional signs as well as room signs identifying what sessions are in which room would also be an improvement.

Final Thoughts

Overall I felt the event was much better this year. In the end it was more volunteers, more sessions, more speakers, more time for discussions, in essence; more community. Thanks to the SQL Community for having another successful event.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure and honor to help organize the first SQLSaturday in Chicagoland with Wendy (blog | twittter)  and Ted (blog | twitter).  Let me first say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Obviously there are things we could of done better and some things we just simply weren’t aware of, but it was without a doubt the best SQLSaturday I have ever been to (full disclosure: it is the only SQLSaturday I have ever been to ).

However one of things I thought was interesting about it was that it never would have happened if not for foursquare and twitter.

I cannot get to the posts now, but sometime last October I had posted via foursquare last I was at Magenic in Lombard, IL when Wendy saw that it was only a mile away from her work in Lombard.  Within a week, we met for lunch.  That is the luncheon where Wendy and I first shook hands and said let’s do a SQLSaturday.  Thank you twitter and foursquare.

How many methods can we use?

Just the other day I was chatting on IM with Ted.  He asked me for something, however we were off IM by the time I got it, so I called and left him a voicemail.  Evidently, he was at dinner so he texted me back and then I Twitter DM’d him to which he called and left a voice mail for me.  What is cool about that is each of us communicated with whatever was easiest at the time and the conversation context was not lost.

More <> Better

Of course more communication methods do not in any way, mean more efficient or even better communication.  In fact, it is probably the opposite.  Conversations held 140 characters at a time do not have much depth.  Plus we all have been in the situation of being 10 characters over and trying to figure out what characters we can remove yet still get the meaning across.

This has the similar effect of the newspaper headline.  It is catchy and sells but the depth is not the best.  In addition, studies shows that the majority of communication is non-verbal, or in the context of this blog post: non-text.  Not everything can be boiled down to the 140-character sound bite.

Lonely and complicated

It is unbelievable that we live with 6 billion other people on the planet but one of the largest problems is loneliness.  I mean it is documented about our society regarding loneliness and interaction:

When Americans say “Hi, how are you?”, they are only expecting a “Fine,” or a “Fine, thank you” or a “Good” in response.  It is not usually an invitation to a lengthy conversation.

And truth be known, I’m as guilty as the next person of doing that,

There are some things that are inherently complex and therefore need a deeper level of discussion.  Having a real relationship is one of them.  And you know what?  That is ok.

I continue to be very grateful to the SQL community for its hard work and support (I loved 24 Hours of PASS and the impromptu associated ustream – 24 hours of LaRock) and hopefully I can give back to the community a portion of what you all have given me.

#1

When I was working at the University I was the primary DBA on the system for the student and Employee ID card.  This card was swiped for access to dorms, parking, buildings etc as well as it was hooked up to a student accounts for cafeteria, laundry, etc and the numbers were used for websites access.  There was a server at each of the three main campus throughout the state and the data was replicated via transactional replication.  Being it was a university it was a Database Application that had to have all the business logic in the database as we had to open it up to any platform or data access technology that the individual campuses, departments wanted to use.  However if the server was down or unavailable for any reason there were certain applications that didn’t cache data like the cafeteria services.  Our service window which allowed downtime was Sunday mornings from 2 am to 4 am.  This was run on Windows NT 4.0/SQL 7.0.  We eventually migrating to new machines running Windows 2003/SQL 2000 and then upgraded to SQL 2005.  Shortly after the upgrade to 2005 we went live with a new version which included utilization of service broker and clr and encryption.  So in a little over a year we did a platform migration a platform upgrade and an application upgrade without missing any of target dates or times or affecting out users.  Our core technical team was 4 people that was managing the entire process including communication to clients.  Documenting and scripting each step along with running multiple tests and involving our clients in the tests as well to set everyone’s expectations made the whole thing a success.

#2

I don’t think I’ll be shocking anyone by saying that in the consulting world sometimes you go onto projects in areas or technologies that you aren’t necessarily an expert in and therefore are sometimes learning on the job.  For example I knew DTS fairly well, however when I went on my first gig that was teaching and doing SSIS I wasn’t extremely knowledgeable about it.  However I crammed and learned about SSIS and the client was extremely happy with what I brought to the table.  So sometimes when I’m billed out as an expert, knowing how to get up to speed and being able to is just as important a skill to have.  And twitter has made that just more easier and fun!

Anyway that’s the two that really come to mind.

Tagging Dan English

My first full time job I was employed as a System Administrator.  I soon realized the purpose of this generic term was because I was the only technical guy on site supporting a company’s sales office of around 20 users and as a result I had to maintain NT 4, SQL 6.5, Exchange 4.0, Win ‘95, Office ‘97, Goldmine, Veritas Backup, etc. This office also housed the primary dns information and our website and exchange.  The primary office which was around 60 people at the time was in another country with a time difference of 6 hours.

Anyway I had weekly calls with the senior sys admin who was telecommuting from his house (1 timezone away) and one of the items that had been on the to do list for awhile was upgrade the Exchange server from 4.0 to 5.5.  Not liking things on my to do list for very long I kept asking about it and was told it was no big deal and when we get some time we will do it.  Well being about a month out of college and wanting to make a good impression I realized I had some time one late afternoon and figured as it was no big deal, I’ll just pop in the CD and go for it.  I mean it’s an upgrade right, not like a new install where I’ll have to configure a bunch of stuff.

Well suffice to say the upgrade actually crashed partway through and NT 4.0’s Dr. Watson faithfully kicked off.  Not really understanding anything about anything I rebooted and tried it again at which point I received the same result.  So I remembered being told we has backup tapes and I should be able to restore if there’s a problem, so I popped in the backup tape and starting restoring.  Once the restore was done I tried to access my email and still no luck.  Time to call someone, but as it was no big deal I wasn’t even worried at this time.

Well calling the senior sys admin they gave me a little better perspective of how big the deal was.  And they were even gracious enough to inform me that I really shouldn’t have done the upgrade by myself and that the backups I had just restored weren’t of the Exchange server, they were of the file server so not only did was not have Email working for the entire company, we had also just lost the sale’s work for the entire day. 

It was at this point I immediately starting doing multiple things at once.  I started sweating.  I started feeling sick to my stomach.  I started worrying about my job, and subsequently my bills (I had just gotten my first mortgage earlier that month).  I started trying to figure out what I could do to solve the problem.

The next 26 hours went by like a blur, but I can say that I ended up doing those four things a lot.  I got on the phone with MS Support (paid-for incident).  Finally we got Exchange Server running after using a low-level utility which investigated every record in the Exchange data store and if that record wasn’t perfect it was deleted.  We went from about 3GB data store to about 650 MB data store.  I quickly wrote up a post-mortem (although I didn’t know it was called a post-mortem at the time) and sent it out.  I actually shared an office with the COO and co-owner of the company at the time due to space restrictions and I remember hitting the send button on my email and booking it out of the room on an ”errand”.  However after a discussion of the post-mortem with management they ended up using this as a learning opportunity for me and I ended up continuing to work there for another 2 years or so.

While I have made mistakes since then, none have every been to this level and therefore I usually keep a nice cool head on my shoulders in the face of problems.