Mission Statement

I was asked by someone to write a mission statement for chapters. I don’t know if this qualifies in the truest definition of a mission statement or not but, I partially stole this from a friend and I hope he doesn’t mind: 2012 is going to be the year of the chapter.

Its been a busy quarter since I took over responsibility for chapters and there have many changes, hopefully this post can summarize the highpoints.

New Faces

During the past quarter we’ve seen exceptional growth of chapters, including seeing 12 new chapters formed across the globe!

A BI Chapter in Wisconsin, USA led by Farouq Abukhamireh

Algeria led by Badrou Zeggar

Bangkok, Thailand led by Fukiat Julnual

Ekatrinburg, Russia led by Evgeny Fedyakov

Kharkiv Ukraine led by Denis Reznik

Kyiv Ukraine led by by Konstantin Kosinsky

Las Cruces, New Mexico USA led by Colleen Barnitz and Russ Burns

Leicester, UK led by Gavin Campbell

Los Angeles, California USA led by Kim Schmidt

Maidenhead, UK led by Richard Douglas

Stavropol, Russia led by Maksim Lemeshko

Santa Catarina, Brazil led by Rodrigo Dornel

Budget Exceptions

Last month I put forward some recommendations to the board of directors for increased spending for the Fiscal year 2012 (ends 6/30/2012) two of those proposals were accepted and funded.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead 2 separate meetings with our Regional Mentors in order to bring them up to speed on what those proposals are funding.

The first thing this is going to allow us to do is send a “Chapter Kit” or mailing to every PASS Chapter around the globe!  I’m not going to spoil the surprise about what’s going to be inside but, we hope that Chapter leaders will find the contents valuable and can put them to good use.

The second program we’re going to implement is to fund some regional mentor travel to PASS chapter meetings and SQLSaturdays.  The basics are that we’ve given each regional mentor a funding allocation and asked them to attempt to visit as many chapter meetings in their region as they can, with the primary focus being on chapters especially those that need help with speakers, or are otherwise struggling.  We are attempting to fill a gap in speakers at local UG’s and allow the Regional Mentors to get out in the community and evangelize for PASS.

Both of these programs are new, and both are things that we’ve talked about trying for a good while.  I’m expecting to see both of these have a positive impact on the community and I’m expecting to get lots of feedback during the process and learn some lessons while we see exactly how this is going to work and what impact its going to have.

Tools improvements

Since I started with chapters I’ve been pushing forward with a plan to revamp the existing tools our Chapter leaders use to manage chapters and I’m happy to say I’m starting to see some real movement towards helping with our needs in this area!  I expect the first round of changes to start being rolled out within the next 45 days.  As this project continues ill continue to write about the new and exciting changes we’re making.

These people are the lifeblood of the SQL Server community, they freely give of their time to make PASS the premiere SQL Server association and its about time we start recognizing them!

Since Ive been volunteering with PASS one thing that has always struck me is how rare it is that PASS actually recognizes outstanding volunteers.  When I first joined, we only had the PASSion award which is awarded yearly at the Summit to the single volunteer who had the “most” outstanding contributions.  In more recent years we’ve done a better job of recognizing additional people who are outstanding volunteers through the outstanding volunteers presentation at the Summit however, these volunteers all come from the passion award nominations and those nominations are only open just prior to the summit.

I’ve always thought that we should recognize volunteers across the organization in a more consistent way, and not revolve that recognition around the Summit.  Luckily, the opportunity to do something about this lack of recognition knocked earlier this year and we’ve made progress.  In last weeks connector there was an announcement about nominating volunteers to be recognized as outstanding volunteers of the month.  The initial intent is that we’ll accept email nominations during every month for any volunteer who has made outstanding contributions to the community.  Those submissions will be reviewed on the last day of the month and recognition will follow the next month.   Initially, we are planning to recognize these outstanding volunteers with a nice certificate and highlight them in the connector newsletter.  Its not much compared to what these people do day in and day out but with success over time, hopefully we can expand this a bit more.  For a start though, I think this is a good first step down the right road.

We intend to have the first recognition cycle start in March so that means that submissions are due by 2/29 (tomorrow!)  Please, take a moment and send us an email with as many details as possible about the contributions of an outstanding volunteer who has made an impact in the SQL community.  As always with these types of things, the more details the better!

With all endings there is a beginning.  I’ve written previously about deciding to take on a different role within the PASS organization in 2012.  I’m excited to say that I convinced the leaders within the BOD to let me have a chance at leading the Global Chapters portfolio.  What does this mean to the two of you reading this?  Likely not much but, to myself and a few hundred chapter leaders and regional mentors I’m hoping it means the beginning of a great run of imrovements to the Chapters program within PASS.  For the past weeks I’ve been working very closely with our wonderful Community Evangelist Karla Landrum (Blog|Twitter) and her counterparts within PASHQ to learn everything that I possibly can about what our chapters are doing, and what they need to grow and thrive.  What I’ve learned is somewhat what I already knew and can be summed up in 4 words!

We have unmet needs!!

After staffing the Community Evangelist role last year it appears as though some of the pain points with running a chapter have been alleviated however, it seems as though there are still plenty of places that could use some improvement.  One of the first things I have attempted to do is to get approval to spend PASS IT time on improving the suite of tools we provide to make managing a chapter easier.  While I have a list of things I’d like to see these tools become based on feedback I’ve personally received from my friends in the community, I would like to encourage all PASS RM’s & CL’s to get in contact with me though any means available.  I’d like for every PASS Chapter Leader/Regional Mentor to list the top 2-3 things they’d like the chapter tools to do that would make running their chapter easier and send those to me.  I obviously cant say we’ll address everything but, this year I intend to see to it that we address as many as possible.

Connect Share Learn

While this is the simplified version of the overall PASS mission statement, it is applicable here as well. I want to encourage you to reach out to me and connect, in order to share your successes and pain points in leading a PASS chapter so that hopefully we can each learn from it.  My contact info is at the top right of this page, connect with me on linked in and drop me an email to bend my ear if you’d like to talk about anything remotely related to SQL Server, PASS Chapters or the SQL Server Community at large.  Ill be “the guy” trying to keep the ship on course for at least the next calendar year and I plan to make the best of it.

This will be a quick update to my post from earlier this week.  As I mentioned previously, PASS has plans to do away with all paper evaluation forms in the future.  This change can come none to soon for me!  After I published Fridays blog, I was contacted by a speaker who had some evaluations in their report that obviously werent theirs.  So, after some digging, the staff at PASS HQ figured out that during data entry several evals were incorrectly included under this speakers session id.  We corrected the scores and doing so caused the overall “top 10” to change slightly.  The updated top sessions with ties is now actually a top 12 list where before it was actually a top 11.  Additionally doing this updated the track rankings in the BIA track as well.  I apologize for the mix up on these evals but, I guess this is not totally unexpected when hiring temporary workers to enter 8,000+ individual evals.  The updated rankings can be found here

Online Evaluations produce unexpected results

One interesting thing I noticed in this years online evals was that we received evals for all sorts of “events” that happened at the Summit.  Normally, we only get them for sessions but because of the way the session scheduler was automated and integrated into the session eval forms, we actually received evals on many other events that took place at the summit other than regular sessions.  Receiving candid feedback on these events was quite refreshing and will be worked back into next years similar events. 

Moving into the 21st century

This year since we offered online evaluations as well as paper evaluations I was interested to see what the turnout would be and while the amount of paper vs online evaluations entered was more lopsided towards paper than I’d have liked.  I believe that overall they were well used and next year we plan on only having online session evals.  I expect that if the room monitors push the online evals in the same manner they pushed the paper this year that we’ll get enough evals next year for this to be an effective option.  The real benefit other than costs of entering paper evals and killing trees is that if all of the evals come in a digital form I would see no reason that they shouldn’t be ready either real time or within a week or 2 from the end of the event but, Ill leave those details to next years Board member whose in charge of the Summit.   

Without Further ado, Here’s the link to the 2011 Summit top 10 list 

The top ten was calculated by averaging all of the evaluation answers then we excluded results if there were less than 20 evaluations or 20 attendees.

Also, if you were a speaker, You can log into the PASS Speaker portal site and get your full evaluation results (and the overall event scores) from the following link

http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/Speakers/SpeakerPortal.aspx

Please join me again in congratulating all of the speakers from this years Summit, without them and their excellent contributions our community wouldnt be the same. 

Edited-> I had the wrong filter criteria on our exclusion of sessions from the top list specification.  I stated we excluded if there were less than 10 evals and 10 attendees when the number was 15 each, I apologize for my fading memory.

Like most in the SQL community who are fortunate enough to attend the annual summit I am looking forward to next Sunday.  But, unlike most I am probably looking forward to this years summit for slightly different reasons. I’m definitely ready for the plethora of sessions, the great networking and all of the regular things everyone looks forward to (SQLKARAOKE!) but, when you are as heavily involved as I am in leading the Summit Program Committee, just getting it “started” is a huge relief.

For the last four years Ive looked forward to the Sunday before the Summit like ive looked forward to no other Sunday of the year.  However this year is going to be different!  This year will be my last year of leading the Summit “Program Committee”.  Its truly bittersweet for me as Ive really loved doing this but Its time for me to focus on doing other things for our great community.

I plan on handing the reigns of the summit over to _____ after the end of this years Summit.  I wish I knew who was taking over so I could tell you, but as it is no one has volunteered and PASS doesn’t exactly have a structure in place to allow for transnational hand off(more on this later).  I wish I could say it will be all Rainbows and Unicorns for the next person leading the program committee but, the reality is it is a lot of work.  The payoff is quite large though in knowing that you lead a group of 30ish volunteers to do a large portion of the work in making the summit a success but, even with a dedicated support staff (PASSHQ) its still a challenge.  After doing every job from the bottom to the top of this small piece of PASS I  feel like ive literally “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt”

I’d guess Ive spent at least 10 hours a week on average working on the Summit for the last several years and this year I added on regular PASS Board member tasks and am regularly exceeding those 10 hours a week, unfortunately, its just not sustainable for me any longer.  Im happy to spend the time for the community but, Its time for a new challenge and fortunately being on the PASS Board affords me all of the community challenges I could ever need (including figuring out to handle transition within PASS mentioned earlier). 

If you spot me at the Summit, feel free to stop over and introduce yourself, I promise not to try and convince you to volunteer to take my PASS job!

My favorite PASS memory isnt actually a single memory at all, its actually the conglomeration of all the SHARED experiences I have with all the hundreds(?) of people that I have gotten to know rather well over the years.  One of the most important things about our community of SQL professionals that I can never seem to put into words are those “Shared experiences”, they are what makes us unique.  Some first timers will listen to the conversations and think “what in the world is so funny” or “really, did that actually happen” or more likely, “what in the heck are they talking about” and I can see that there would be some intimidation factor with that but, the reality is you just have to jump in and start making those shared experiences of your own.  While some of my favorite shared experiences are from 2004-2006 that doesnt mean that I dont have some great ones from 2010 with people I had just met.  My point really is those experiences (which un/fortunately become memories) whether made at the Summit, a SQL Rally, SQL Saturday, or a local UG meeting are the things that actually tie us together as a group of professionals.  Sure, we all talk SQL and geek about it but, without the shared experience factor we’d all just be names behind posts on a Newsgroup/Forum which wouldnt be nearly as much fun!  

just choose one

If I had to list a single memory though it would be from 2004, where it all started for me.  You see I had just met Pat Wright, and Tom Larock and somehow they convinced me to attend the early morning (7AM If I recall) PASS volunteer session.  Im not an early morning person AT ALL so I definelty felt some peer pressure to go but, I can honestly say sitting in that session hosted by Wayne Snyder has probably changed my professional career as much or more than anything else.  Wayne is a very dynamic speaker and he had us all believing we could change the world, or at least the SQL portion of it.  I really miss those sessions, and wish we could find a way to ressurect them because this introvert would have never become involved with PASS had it not been for that 1 single session (and the encouragement of Tom and Pat) Thanks to the 3 of you for that!

This week is a busy week for 2011 Summit planning.  Some things need direct community participation and Id like to draw your attention to them

• Lightning Talks (5 minute “mini sessions”) Call for speakers closes today at 6:59 UTC (11:59 Pacific)

If you have an idea that you’d like to talk about for 5 minutes, Id encourage you to submit.  These sessions were well received last year and I expect the same this year

• Session Preferencing is open until  6:59 UTC on Aug 20 (Aug 19 11:59 Pacific time)

The Summit schedule creator(s) will make extensive use of this to properly size the rooms for each session.  There is more art than science to building the schedule but, the more data we have the better.

• Applications for the Nominations Committee
  

Lots of hard volunteer work went into the forming of this years process.  Please support it by offering your time if you have it to give.

Last year PASS decided to invest in the development of our own tools to manage the educational portion of the summit.  This investment has proven to be an excellent idea as it has made running the program a lot simpler.  In the past we had 2 or 3 different tools to manage the summit and thats not including the massive amount of excel spreadsheets that were passed around.  This would create obvious problems when changes weren’t propagated through all the tools in the same way.  In prior years it was a herculean effort to get the Summit program handled on time, this year however it has been markedly easier.  Maybe its not herculean anymore but, its definitely still takes a great deal of effort from a large number of volunteers.  Additionally, the same system we are using for the Summit in 2011 was used for both SQL Rally’s so in that way, the data and use of the system should start to form one experience for the entire community (speakers, volunteers & attendees)  Sometimes its the small behind the scenes things that really make a difference on the admin side that the public may not see and in this case I cant say it enough how thankful I am the past PASS BOD made that decision to invest.

As part of this tools upgrade, we are able to do some interesting things that we may not otherwise be able to do like…

Produce an OData “feed” of event sessions

If your familiar with OData you can try it out here

http://feeds.sqlpass.org/public/events/OratorDataService.svc

If you want to see the Summit 2011 Sessions for instance, try this link. Feel free to give it a try and let me know if you see any issues, but note the sessions arent scheduled yet so those data elements wont be correct

Hopefully having a service like this will open up the data enough that it will be useful to someone out there.  We have several internal uses planned for this feed including updating the mobile application we trialed at the SQL Rally “guidebook“  Yes, we will have a fully functioning mobile application for this years summit (and most other PASS events shortly)

Hopefully Ill be able to keep this place updated with something relevant way more often

(edit: somehow I forgot the Nomcom!! oops)

I apologize for the tardiness of this post, its been a busy week with PASS finalizing the Summit Sessions.

As always, there were some awesome posts this month!  If youve ever wondered why you need to prepare to recover your databases, or your life for that matter I suggest reading through the huge amount of content below.

The good stuff

Rob Farley (B | T) Writes us a two part post with half being technical about migrations, downtime and high availability and the other half being personal with regards to dealing with and controlling life’s disasters.  Hats off to Rob for pouring it all out there.  (sometimes it just feels better to write it all down and put it in perspective)

Noel McKinney (B | T) recounts a bad situation where he played the part of message queue during a human disaster where a developers spouse unplugged the telephone in the middle of the night (surprising this didnt cost someone a job)

John Pertell (B | T) tells us about times where he learned lessons the hard way about backups and restores.  His stories hit home for me and im sure they will for most other seasoned DBAs.  Ive lost more SAN arrays over the years to firmware flashes than I care to think about, so much so that I cringe when the SAN admin calls and even utters the word firmware.

Robert Davis (B | T) writes about backing up system configurations in the case of a complete server failure.  Good info in one place here about what you would loose if you lost one of the system databases.

Ricardo Leka (B | T) turns in his post letting us know that its important to have a backup plan but even more important to have a recovery plan! (his post was in portugese so if I’m way off I blame google translate!  Thanks for the post Ricardo)

Merrill Aldrich (B | T) reminds us to be aware of blind spots in the recovery scenario of our companies.  He shares some great info about cultures that can cause disasters to be unrecoverable.

Jack Vamvas (B) Shows us how he uses powershell to gather an inventory of SQL Server info that may be needed in the case of a disaster.

Mark Broadbent (B | T) Writes a post about how others mistakes can often become your problem when corruption lands in your lap.

Muthukkumaran Kaliyamoorthy (B) Goes over the various ways that you can build HA/DR system including Clusters, Mirroring, Replication, etc

Jason E Bacani (B | T) shows once again that backing up a database is important but making sure you are backing up what you think you are backing up is even more important

Bob Pusateri (B | T) recounts a story of a former employer and the resulting problems from having a “if it isn’t broken dont fix it attitude”

Chad Miller (B | T) writes about using powershell and CMS to inventory your SQL Servers

Ryan Adams (B | T) Writes some tips about using and configuring mirroring to prevent disasters

Gail Shaw (B | T) does her best to remind us that disasters arent just huge events in the world but rather most of them involve smaller more isolated events.  Id agree with her analysis and I live in the bullseye of hurricane country!

Nic Cain (B | T) writes about a full scale disaster at a former place of employment.  I see a running joke in these posts about san firmware upgrades being the cause of most DBA disasters.

Robert Pearl (B | T) shares his story of 9/11 and recovering from that disaster.  Things have certainly changed in the years since then.

Amit Banerjee (B | T) gives us 10 key points to keep in mind when thinking about disasters and how to best deal with them

Pinal Dave (B | T) recounts his early days as a DBA and 4 pieces of wisdom that he learned early on

Steve Jones (B | T) Writes about small disasters that arent natural disasters.  He’s right, these types disasters are considerably more likely than a massive natural disaster.

Thomas Rushton (B | T) Shared not one but two posts for this months edition of TSQLTuesda.  He reminds us to test our DR plans and recounts a story of what was likely someone updating every record in a database with the same value.  Which is a common disaster indeed.

Jason Brimhall (B | T) Shared a story of three personal disasters. included is a good tip about recovering the registered servers in ssms after a reinstall

Nick Haslam (B | T) wrote about an experience at a retail organization where a loss of power took out all of the systems.  Seems its often the small things that get overlooked (not that power is small but, often taken for granted)

John Samson (B | T) shared links to his prior posts about DBA responsibilities in planning for recoveries

Nancy Hidy Wilson (B | T) who lives just up the road from me in Houston recounts her own personal story from Hurricane Ike.  I learned I need a chainsaw and a tractor to recover from a hurricane.  Also I was reminded just how far our modern jobs have come in that we can personally experience disaster and move a few hundred miles away and continue to work our day jobs since their systems *should* be designed for uptime!

Thanks again to everyone who participated this month! 

Be on the watch for next months host and consider participating if you havent before!