It Depends

Time Management Quotes

Andy Warren — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:01:00 GMT

A short post today, ran across http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2007/03/08/66-best-quotes-on-time-management/ when I was looking for ideas for my Moo cards. Quotes are fun and sometimes useful, but also all too easy to just find a quote that fits what you want to do. Yet, it’s interesting to think that time management has been an issue for a long time, well before the advent of the PC and email.

Closing Out PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:48:00 GMT

I was up early again on Friday morning to have breakfast with Patrick Leblanc (SQLLunch man), and then off to a four hour Board meeting, then a few more shorter meetings, finally finishing up the day at 4 pm with a trip to the bookstore and the mall for a few gifts to bring back. Back to World Grill about 5:00 pm for dinner with Wayne, Rafael, Kendal, Mike Wells, Rick Heiges, John Welch, and a few more that came and went, then back to Sheraton to pick up our bags for the ride to the airport. Rick and I were flying together, him up front in the nice seats, me way in the back, but he did treat me to joining him in the Delta club pre-flight and if I traveled more I’d have to get a membership, nicer chairs and real desks to work at. Arrived home at 9 am on Sat, and now still trying to get back on normal schedule. Good to have weather in the 80’s again!

Hard to recap the week in a few sentences, but I’ll try!

Really glad I flew in Sunday, that extra half day was great networking time and time to just let go of work for a while
Terrific week for me. No problems, lots of people, felt like an incredibly good use of my time
I almost wish for a closing session on Thursday, almost a shame to have it quietly fade to an end!

It’s hard to describe how immersive an experience it can be. I took my wife to dinner Sunday night and walking through the restaurant I was mildly startled to realize I was looking around for people I knew, and expecting to see some. For 6 days I was hard pressed to go 5 minutes without seeing someone I knew, now back to the lonelier life of the DBA!

Now the question for me is; how many other attendees had that same great experience, and what can do to try to make sure they get it next year?

More Thoughts on Stress

Andy Warren — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:16:00 GMT

I’m trying to pay more attention to things that cause me stress and how I deal with the stress. It’s helping some to work on the self awareness, but some of the reactions seem to be baked in, very hard to change some things that I perceive as stressful. As I’ve looked at my reactions, it seems like I see two different things:

My reaction to something that “I” perceive as stressful
Stress is cumulative

One way to identify stress is to substitute the word frustrated. Not a perfect match, but a good way to get away from the negative connotation of ‘stress’. One example of stress for me is being on a tight but doable timeline and then having something unexpected and unrelated intrude. It’s not always as easy as pushing something back, and the instinctive stress reaction doesn’t help productivity.

Now it seems like that once the situation is over, goals met, that the stress would be gone. Instead – at least for me – it takes time for the stress to drain away. Given a few weeks of tranquility my stress index goes back to near zero, but I don’t usually get weeks, maybe days. Then when the next stressor comes along, instead of starting at zero I’m starting at 10, which makes it harder to get through the situation, and then when done without a longer recovery, maybe the next time I start a stress situation at 10 instead of 20. Over time that can really add a level of background noise/pain that hurts the ability to respond well to minor levels of stress.

I don’t know that life can be stress free. Or that it would even be healthy. But if I can see fewer things as stressful and develop methods of relieving cumulative stress, I see that as a pretty big advantage. Now to figure out how to do it!

Notes from the PASS Summit 2009 Trip

Andy Warren — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:37:02 GMT

A few random thoughts:

I think many people did ok at the airport connecting for ride share via Twitter. By next year may not matter when the train is complete, but if held in other cities it might be interesting to do more to facilitate ride sharing. Not only does it save the attendee some money, it starts the networking and social part of the event
Try to book your hotel room on a lower floor. This time I was on the 33rd floor and sometimes it took forever to ‘just drop something in my room’
Think we could also do more to facilitate after hours meetups. I know many already do their own thing, good! But especially for first timers something loosely organized would be useful
Keynotes need to be informative and pertinent. Reminder to all keynoters – make sure you understand who the audience is! Thursday was a great example of how a bad keynote can lower the mood and how a great keynote (or the expectation of one) can raise the mood. We need three good keynotes next year!
I heard almost no complaints this week. PASS HQ did a great job.
One thing I’d like to see added is something that we just tried in Orlando – printing schedules on 3’x4’ paper and posting every where, good way to handle schedule changes
I think we should do Birds of a Feather lunch every year, and maybe all three days – just vary the topic. Tues was great at BOF, Wed lunch seemed…not as fun?
We should have the Q&A with the PASS Board each year. This year was a late addition, next year we can schedule better and get more attendance, more questions!
I think we need to offer the networking seminar next year and maybe more on top of that, especially for first time attendees.
I also like the idea of a button or something that identifies first time attendees. I was at Disney World recently for my wifes birthday and they gave her a birthday button, I think almost every employee she saw said Happy Birthday. Can’t we do the same for first time attendees?
We’ve got to do more to build the culture of exchanging business cards. I’d like to see us host a kiosk to just print a sheet or two of business cards, maybe a $1 a sheet for those that forget/run out
I thought I did better about breaking out of my comfort zone of people and spending time with new people (or a mix). Still got work to do.
I don’t know if we already have it, but we should have a way to sell tickets to the opening reception only so that spouses can attend
Saw lot of netbooks present, and obviously for the size/weight savings
Heard a comment that we put too many Summit ads in the chapter decks that go out monthly
Chapters would like to know who registers with their chapter code, and also have a message sent to all Summit attendees that are in their region
Now I understand why server racks have brakes on the wheels, in case all the fans spin up at once – otherwise the rack would start rolling until it unplugged itself
I did ok on eating at non-chain restaurants; Top Pot Doughnuts, Vons, Cutters, Pike Bar and Grill
The weather was the best I can remember, actually saw the sun a few days, Thursday night was cold with 30 mph gusts, Fri morning was cold!

Thanks to PASS Board Members Finishing Up Their Terms

Andy Warren — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:45:00 GMT

We’re losing three good people as of the end of the year, but I thought now would be a good time to mention their names and add a comment or two from me:

Pat Wright – Pat is quiet, thoughtful, and worked hard to make PASS good for volunteers, especially at the Summit. He’s dropping back to a less demanding level of volunteering, but expect to see him in and around PASS events going forward
Greg Low – Greg did a great job on building chapters, and did a lot to help me see the challenges/values that come from taking an international view of PASS. Like Pat he plans to stay engaged at a reduced effort level and may run for the board again in a year or two.
Kevin Kline – Kevin has spent 10 years building PASS, doing about every job there is. He’s been a good mentor to me as well (though I don’t always listen!). Kevin will be taking a break I think, available for conversation but enjoying some time to just focus on job and family for a while.

I appreciate all that each of you did and the things you did for PASS. I know it was hard work and not everyone saw all that work, but you’ve moved things forward and I hope the rest of us can continue that work. Thanks!

PASS Day 3 – PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:37:55 GMT

Started the day at 6:30 at Top Pot with a meeting about SQLSaturday over coffee and it really ended up being a discussion about chapters as much as anything. Jack Corbett, Kendal Van Dyke, Rob Hatton, Pam Shaw, Patrick Leblanc, Tim Mitchell, Greg Larsen, and Stuart Ainsworth joined me. I love their passion for community! I see them as the next generation of leaders – get to know them!

8:40 am

Bill Graziano doing the keynote, started by thanking Greg Low and Pat Wright for their contributions to PASS for serving on the Board for the past two years. Then they did a great slide presentation with music showing pictures of Kevin Kline, then brought him up on stage to say thanks, brought Wayne Synder out to give him a thank you award. Very emotional Wayne starts talking about a picture of Kevin of sleeping – hard to describe, Wayne crying with emotion – kudos to Wayne for showing what he feels about how much Kevin has done over the years (Kevin served on the original board back in 1999 and continuously since then). Then reviewed existing board members and the new ones, then the new Executive Committee (Rushabh, Bill, Rick H).

European Conference April 21-23, 2020 in Neuss Germany, PASS Summit in Seattle next year, Nov 8-11, early bird rate is $995 through Dec 2009. Talked about the location of 2011 conference not set yet. Showed a picture of PASS HQ staff.

8:50 am

Patrick Ortiz from Dell. Rough start, presentation about SQL in the Enterprise, DR, etc. Honestly not very good so stopped taking notes. Sorry Dell.

9:18 am

David DeWitt, Technical Fellow, Data and Storage.32 years as Computer Sci professor, joined MS in March 2008, runs Jim Gray Systems Lab. Very engaging, joked about the server fans spinning up yesterday. Talking about growth/speed trends, seek times not getting much faster compared to other factors, need a lot more drives to keep CPU’s busy, SSD’s the big hope for changing that. This is really a presentation that’s worthy of a keynote – interesting, technical, no sales pitch, recognizes we get the base concepts already. Right now we try to avoid random IO, expensive. Memory is in Peoria, 200 cycles to access compared to 20 for L2 cache. Green stuff is bad (gotta be here, it’s the stall on the chart he is showing). Talking about column store vs row store, advantages to column store are only retrieving data needed to put into cache. Stopped writing to pay attention!

Missed a planned meeting due to bad scheduling, keynote went later than I thought it did. My fault, annoying!

Went back to the hotel to drop off my bag, back to the convention center for more networking, then off to a lunch meeting, then back for some more chat before a 2 pm meeting and another at 2:30, then spent some time wandering, looked in on Buck Woody’s session which seemed to go very well, then started working on preliminary dinner plans, meeting people at 6 pm and go from there. Finally headed back to the hotel, it’s funny that the conference just quietly ends, seems like there should be a closing ceremony!

So it’s dinner tonight, then a board meeting in the morning, one more meeting after that, then some time to relax before heading to the airport about 7p for a 10:30 flight that puts me back in Orlando at 9am Saturday – doesn’t seem like it should take long.

It’s been a good week, think I hit my goal of meeting 50 new people but it started to blur, definitely did better than in previous years. Looking forward to getting the event DVD’s so I can enjoy the technical side of the content back home. Things went very smoothly, PASS HQ did a great job this year!

Day 2 – PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:19:00 GMT

Up at 5am today, worked for a while, then down to breakfast at 6am with Brent, Colin, Denny (and wife!), Tom, and Tim. Good conversation, good food, expensive breakfast (at the Sheraton). Then over to the convention center to see what was going on, had coffee with Kendal, Patrick Leblanc, Greg Larsen, and then up for an informal meeting with the sql bloggers we could gather, just trying to start a dialog about how we can communicate better with them. Very early on that, but interesting. Then wandering around the main room chatting with a few people, enjoying the time

8:40 am

Rushabh Mehta, VP of PASS, started off talking about finances. Financials are available on the site, login, go to governance page. Mentioned again that attendance this year was only down 9%, pretty good given the economy. Encouraged participation in PASS at chapters, volunteering, speaking. Talked about how many volunteers make PASS happen, had all the volunteers present stand – guessing it was 75-100 people.

8:50 am

Wayne Snyder, President. Started by saying the board serves the members. Recognized outstanding volunteers:

Tim Ford – volunteer since 2002, Program Committee, Virtual Chapters, Quiz Bowl, more.
Grant Fritchey – editorial committee, SQL Server Standard editor, chapter leader, won the best thing I learned at PASS contest
Amy Lewis – Volunteer Coordinator for BI Virtual Chapter
Jacob Sebastian – Chapter regional mentor, PASS Member outreach in India (by himself…with others)
Passion Award:
- Giving two awards this year
- Charley Hanania, PASS Europe, Swiss Chapter, four years volunteers
- Allen Kinsel,served on Program Committee (PASS Summit speaker schedule), has been on volunteer and nomination committee, fives years as a volunteer

I love Wayne keynotes, Wayne does Wayne very well!

9:00 am

Back to Rushabh, 7th year we have the Women in Technology luncheon (how to get more women engaged in tech). MVP’s wrote SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, royalties to charity. Q&A today with the PASS Board today at 4:30 pm. Party tonight at Gameworks tonight, sponsored by Microsoft. Tom Casey will answer questions on Twitter, @ms_sql_server.

9:06 am

Tom Casey, GM, Business Intelligence. Comments on PASS; 2 dedicated BI tracks, 41 sessions on BI last year, 50 this year, 20% selected BI as focus last year, more than 30% this year. Long intro.

Ron Van Zanten, Directing Officer, Premier Bankcard, 9th largest issuer of mastercard in US, process 600k credit apps this month. Doing this interview fashion must like with Priti yesterday, not my favorite format, Ron doing pretty well. Said Madison reduced query time greatly. Said the ability to visualize the data was pretty important.

Talked about empowering users, the spread of info throughout the business. Powerpivot for Excel and Sharepoint (used to be Gemini) (2010).

Amir Netz – Demo of Powerpivot, 100 million rows in Excel on a laptop.Seems fast. Has Analysis Services running in process, compresses data. 20g of data, compressed to 133 mb. Underlying data in reports can be exposed as data feed, consumed by PPivot (not screen scrape). Has RelatedTable function to do lookup, returns table, SUMX aggregates table. Automatically finds some relationships. Showing new feature called Slicers in Excel, click fields and chart object shows up, but they seem to align and size well. Data can be uploaded to Sharepoint, live preview of Excel view of that data in Sharepoint. Now going to 2nd machine, Win7 touch screen. Accessed doc via Sharepoint, then running server side. Can use gestures to navigate (assuming you have the touch screen!). Harder to read demo, just a camera on it instead of direct from PC. Another demo, mildly confusing, reports in Sharepoint. Nice visual way to go back/scroll through report for various time periods (good demo there).

10:00 am

Back to some report demos. November CTP coming soon and Office 2010 beta as well. New resource center, www.microsoft.com/technet/bicenter. End of keynote.

From there I met Brent Ozar for coffee and a long chat, great fun, the first time we’ve had a chance to talk at length. Worth the time if you can corner him!

Had lunch in the main hall, wasn’t as much fun today with no birds of a feather, but did get a chance to get some feedback on business cards. In general people like the half size moo cards initially, but then worry that they’ll lose them. What can you do?!

I had another meeting scheduled for after lunch that was rescheduled, so went back to the hotel for a break and to work a little, back over to the convention center about 3 pm to network, then head to the Q&A session at 4 pm. It was the first time that I know of that the Board took open questions and I think it went well, Joe Webb moderating. Attendance lower than I hoped, but lots of good discussion. As you might imagine we were a little nervous going in – imagine an open forum where anything can be asked in any way and knowing that if you goof on the response, there’s the twitter sound bite of the day! In general you win at these type of forums by being direct, honest, thoughtful, and non-defensive. Can’t answer all the questions, or please everyone, but you can engage them to understand their concern. I thought the attendees treated us very fairly and tried just as hard to engage us. I’m really hoping this will become a yearly tradition.

After that, around 6:30, we left to get ready for the MS sponsored party at Gameworks. First class, tons of food, three hour pass to the games, free drinks too. Eventually we headed out for a sit down dinner and wound up at Changs, too tired to go further. So far not doing well on my quest for ‘Seattle’ food, but having fun anyway.

Called it a day about 10 pm as I write these closing notes, have a meeting early tomorrow!

PASS Log Reader Winners Announced

Andy Warren — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:17:40 GMT

Brent posted it first and I’m going to borrow his list to post here:

Best Business Intelligence Blog Post:

Winner: Chris Webb for Implementing SSRS Drilldowns (Blog – RSS)

Runner-Up: Michelle Ufford for Using Variables in SSIS (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Best New Blog:

Winner (Tie):
Aaron Alton for The Hobt (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
Michelle Ufford for SQLFool (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Runner-Up: Jorge Segarra for SQLChicken (Blog – RSS – @SQLChicken)

Best Professional Development Blog Post:

Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Off-Hours Work Guide for Managers (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)

Runner-Up: Sean McCown for Landing That Job (Blog – RSS – @MidnightDBA)

Best T-SQL Blog Post:

Winner: Aaron Bertrand for Stored Procedures Best Practices Checklist (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)

Runner-Up: Grant Fritchey for Unpacking the View (Blog – RSS – @GFritchey)

Best Unusual Blog Post:

Winner: Alex Kuznetsov for Reproducing Deadlocks with One Table (Blog – RSS)

Runner-Up: John Magnabosco for Encrypting Large Values (Blog – RSS)

See the full post from Brent at http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2009/11/pass-log-reader-award-winners/.

I have to say it was fun to have the contest, but grueling to grade. Very easy for them all to run together. We used a simple system where we each (me, Jeremiah, Brent) scored each entry, then we added those up and took the high scores in each category. The challenge was the scoring. Many were very good, so separating great from good is hard, and of course subjective. I think we learned some lessons and we’ll definitely do the contest again, but we definitely haven’t learned ALL the lessons yet either.

A few general comments from my own scoring run:

I put a high value on a good descriptive title. Don’t try too hard to be cute on the title, have it tell me what you want to write about, and then make sure your post matches the title (do I always do this? probably not).
I’m not fond of white text on black background. That’s style and you shouldn’t change because I don’t like it, but think hard about doing anything/everything you can to help the reader read
Along those lines too, I’ve come to value good consistent formatting with a ‘normal’ font. Posts with uneven breaks between paragraphs, badly formatted tables – after reviewing post #50 or so those things just made my head hurt!
One post = one topic. I saw a few where they ultimately told the story, but after a very long lead in. It’s good to set the stage, but do it in a few sentences…OR….write the intro post first, then the one you meant to write
It’s good to have technical content in your blog, but…I (my preference of course) is to keep it to about a page, maybe 700 words max. Got more to say? Make it a series!

We’ll get more news about the contest for next year out by the end of the year after some time to reflect, but it’s a good guess that it will be similar, we may tweak the categories, and we’ll try to add a reader vote to it. In terms of strategy, that means:

Blog consistently
Make sure you have a good post for at least two of our current categories
Write at least one series

I’d also say that it’s pretty incredible the information that gets shared in blogs, and it clearly has a positive impact on both the SQL community and on the writer. Thank you to all who entered for trying the content, and just for sharing as often as you do!

Day 1 – PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:53:00 GMT

Up early again, started my day at the Convention Center for breakfast. Light breakfast, drinking water, never seem to drink enough during the day. Ran into old friend David Koth on the way, did a lot of hand shaking on the way through the seating area to finding a table. Interesting experience, I know a few people from my many times here, yet I still know so few. Then off to the keynote, talking with Brian Moran, Douglas, Kevin Kline on the way up, running into Chuck Heintzelman up front, then checking in at the blogger table (Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey, Tony Davis, Brent Ozar, more), wishing I was back there instead of sitting up front – blogger envy I guess!

About 8am

Wayne Snyder was first up at the keynote, and had a great slide showing the registration numbers, overall attendance down about 9% from last year (our highest year so far), really good given how some conferences have fared this year. He said that 43% of attendees are here for the first time (which interestingly matches the percentage of first time attendees at the networking seminar yesterday). 75 chapters in 2007, now at 200 chapters. Interesting map showing where attendees are from world wide, just guessing at the numbers I’d say 500 or or attendees from outside the US. Great explanation that virtual chapters are focused based instead of regular chapters which are location based. Notes on the 24 hours of PASS; 3500 attendees, 50,000 registrations. Announced the relaunch of the SQL Server Standard as online only, first issue now available, paying $500 per article. Open session with the Board of Directors on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:15, come ask questions! Wayne also showed a liver Twitter feed showing #sqlpass, Steve Jones managed to get a tweet up mentioning that Wayne had mentioned SSC (I can just see everyone next year with a tweet ready to send if that comes up again!).

Next was Bob Muglia, President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. He was the program manager when MS announced the deal with Ashton Tate that launched SQL Server in 1988. Mentioned doing first demos for press showing SQL on OS2. MS was desktop focused at that point. Says that SQL Server can solve 99% of problems, but that there are some that SQL still doesn’t handle well (super huge db for example). Server rack on stage running IBM hardware, running 192 processors. Shows a workload on 64 processors, enabled 128 processors watch the CPU usage drop by about 50%, then they add more load back to 90%, changes to 192 processors, processor usage down to about 75%. Nice demo of the idea. Says adding a processor adds about 1.6 capacity. Talked about the growing capacity of machines, trend of virtualization, sees it growing in the database arena.

Demo: Edwin Yuen, Senior Product Manager, demonstrates live migration on HyperV on Win 2008 R2. Using Virtual Machine Manager shows machine running SQL, then starts a demo app that runs a workload. In VMM, right click, click on Migrate. It picks best available host. then moves the process while the workload was running – no change in the demo output, appears seamless and easy.

Note: photographer down front taking pictures, so if you seem one of me with my laptop on my lap, I’m writing this and not doing email!

Bob talked about cloud definition, and the idea that there are public and private clouds. Sees it as a natural progression for some things to move to the cloud (Azure is the MS public cloud). Becomes a decision about where best to host for a given problem. Challenge is to evolve our existing skill sets to solve problems using new options. Said thank you for the all the feedback they get about the product.

About 8:50 am

Introduced Ted Kummert. Talked about how exciting it was to speak at the PASS Summit each year, some of the things that were on the horizon last year, all due within 6-9 months. SQL 2008 R2 due in first half of 2010. Sees it as a significant release. MS rented out Gameworks on Wed night for conference attendees. Five years go they had platform vision; all tiers, all data, data lifecycle, progress made, time to involve – information instead of data, users more at the center of vision. Mentioned service pack uninstall supported, few vulnerabilities discovered within SQL. Announcing Fasttrack v2 with three new reference configurations. SQL will now scale to 256 logical processors on Win 2008 R2.

Priti Desai, VP of IT, First American Title. One of largest escrow/title in the US, 1200 offices. 10 terabytes data spanning 200 servers. 7000 concurrent users, 50k batches per second. Upgraded to SQL 2008, big features were partitioning and compression [fans spinning up on demo hardware – don’t know if that was in the plan!]. Had been using a third party backup, switching to use in the box backup. Results of upgrade; had one weekend to do upgrade, mentioned using SQLCAT as sounding board.

[On Twitter everyone trying to guess how much heat the server is throwing off to spins the fans into turbo mode]

Dan Jones, Principal Group Manager SQL Server Manageability. Demo hanging up on Step 1. Back on track! [Twitter abuzz with comments on the demo glitch!]Connecting to R2 instance, runs validation upfront, all green. Connected to control point, step 1 complete. Now to collect utilization data. Demo not exciting so far. Switched to one that has history accrued, nice dashboard – shows storage usage, under utilized instance, drills down, finds dbs not using much of spaced allocated (and could then reallocate). Can now generate a dacpac – unit of deployment from developer to DBA. System will generate alter scripts from package. Interesting, they did make it see easy compared to doing a compare and creating the scripts.

Back to Ted. Able to publish data feeds using reports as a source. More work on PHP and JDBC drivers.

Pablo Castro. Using Entity Framework with VS 2010, imported dacpac. Created a diagram (projection) of a couple key tables. Separating domain model from storage concerns is key point. [Down to 28 mins of power, wireless off now, trying to make it through – wish I was at the blogger table]. Definitely a dev person demo now, wondering how it plays to audience. Persistence Ignorance! Setting access to data in code with SetEntitySetAccessRule – that’s on top of SQL security I guess? Thinking DBA’s are looking for coffee right now. Shows URL access to data. Shift to Sharepoint 2010, every list exposed for data access via URL.

About 9:45

Stream Insight is for high volume event streams, will be in R2, integrated with VS. Master data services, scale out data warehousing in R2.

Amir Netz(sp?). Master data, shows data issues – wait, problem not there! Connecting to scale out data warehouse, 20 notes with 16 processors, 336 processors. Using Powershell to load data, 60 million rows, splits out work automatically, showing about 2.1 TB/hour speed. 60 billion rows in 10 tb warehouse. Change to Report Builder v3 connecting as SA..wow. Doing a group by against 60 bil rows, splits across all processors, to return 7 rows – very fast. Of course, that’s serious hardware behind it! Building a report using existing report as source. RB definitely nicer than earlier releases, supports maps in reports.

Talking about Azure briefly. [Watching camera guy wander around – we should have a camera on the camera guy, and really low on power. Hoping I don’t have to switch to pen and paper!]

About 10:06

Wait, one more demo, missed the name. Azure demo. Running a standard group by on Azure, works ok. Shows option to sync to Azure from SQL db. Create an agent, definitely looks like replication, handles merge conflicts. Not showing up on Azure. Web demo works based on data. Now trying to apply a dacpac to Azure. Changes connection string from earlier demo, seems to work.

New editions, Datacenter for up to 256 processors unlimited virtualization, and Parallel Data Warehouse. Expecting to continue deliver releases 24-36 months. Azure available as public CTP. Nothing on future releases yet. End of keynote.

I was headed for coffee when I ran into my friend Simon, so we had coffee (well, he had tea) and sat to chat for a while. Don Gabor came by and I introduced him, and just watched in a bit of awe as the master of small talk did his thing. Good way to start the day though.

From there I headed to the Birds of a Feather lunch, where about 50 MVP’s hosted talks over lunch about a variety of subjects. Mine was about how and why to participate in the SQL community and was thrilled to have 8 people join me (at a table that seats 10 mind you, we used one seat for bags) and had a really good discussion. Some points I'll share here:

Giving back can be as simple and lightweight as just asking a question, answering a question, or commenting on a blog post
Block out x minutes per week and dedicate them to this – maybe it’s writing 3 comments, doing one blog post
Another way is to help your local chapter find speakers, or by bringing someone new to a meeting
Think of community as a set of circles, with the innermost ring being those most visible, the outer ring those that don’t participate at all, and then start trying to take one step in at a time.

Next was a 2 hour session at the PASS area answering questions. Only had a few, more it was people I knew stopping by, chatting about Twitter, bingo, SQLSaturday, the open discussion with the Board tomorrow, and more. I’ll probably do another shift there later in the week.

Out of order: heard a lot of great comments about the networking seminar today, glad it was well received, and seems to be actually working. Had someone come over to meet me as a result of that, and he admitted it was still hard, but he was moving out of his comfort zone. Cool! Another said it was the first year at PASS without someone from work attending, but felt it was the most fun – the combination of being solo plus the head start from the seminar had her meeting a lot people and having a lot of fun.

I had a meeting after that, then finally caught up with Steve Jones for coffee, catching up a little, and then back to the hotel for an hour to finish writing this and catch up on email, then going back out for dinner.

Its almost 9pm eastern now, and I haven’t had dinner yet. Easy to forget/downplay how the time zone change causes pain. I’m always glad I attended, but I wish for east coast once in a while!

PASS Day –1 (Monday) at PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:12:07 GMT

Started the day with a long walk, then off to Top Pot doughnuts for coffee with Don Gabor, Jack Corbett, and Tim Mitchell. Greg Larsen stopped in for a while too. Fun to sit and talk with Don, he of course doesn’t know anything about our world, so it’s interesting to hear the questions as he tries to understand the someone complex world of technology, community, relationships that we live in, and to hear how that matches or not other groups he works with.

Then back to the hotel to check email and grab some stuff, then to the chapter leader meeting. Greg Low lead the meeting and it was nicely informal, just a circle of chairs with about 40 people present. Some good discussion, here are a few points:

Lots of people struggle with LiveMeeting, we need to train more and encourage it’s use with integrated audio
Current DNN solution works, but a few missing pieces – might need another option to supplement it too
Really a lot of interest in the speaker bureau

From there I had a Board meeting, welcoming our two new members Brian and Jeremiah, and just reviewing our calendar for the week. Big things are the open board discussion with the attendees on Wed, and then a full board meeting on Fri to set assignments for the next year.

As soon as that was done I went to make sure Don Gabor was all set on the one hour session for volunteers. All was ready, so a 30 minute break to catch up on things. Had about 40 attend and it was fun, the way training should be. Don really engages people, has some nice tricks for doing it and some short but useful exercises around remembering names. Don just amazed me on names, he could name 80% of the 40 people in the room after just doing handshake introductions. I have a LOT of work to do, and it reminded me how valuable it can be to see someone show you what good really is. Everyone participated, no problems at all, good reviews at the end. I think most were very pleasantly surprised, not sure going in what to expect.

An hour break then before the 2 hour networking seminar. Bigger crowd, about 70 in the room, and of them half – yes, half – were first time PASS Summit attendees. Confirms for me that this is the right direction, if we can get first timers off to a strong start, they’ll come back! I did a short intro, and then again Don just took charge and immediately got everyone going, lots of participation. I had to leave early to prep for the reception and didn’t want to leave!

My part in the opening night reception was to announce the log reader winners (I’ll get you a link to that soon) and there was no prep time, my fault on that. Had a wireless mike which I’m used to, but had to deliver the message on stage – which is ok – but no experience with the stage lights blinding me, not used to being unable to see people. Muddled through, and made a note that I need to practice that before I do anything more complicated than read a list! Then we had the quiz bowl which went well, and then off to the SSC party. Saw a few more old friends, had planned to go to dinner afterward but just too tired, headed back to the hotel about 9:30 to call it a night.

Long day, but a good day, and thrilled that the seminars Don did went so well. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Day –2 (Sun) at the PASS Summit 2009

Andy Warren — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:49:04 GMT

Flew out of Orlando direct to Seattle, leaving at 8:30 and arriving about 1130 am Seattle time. Nice flight, no problems! Waited at the airport for Mike Wells and Bonnie, fellow Florida user group leaders, and then took a limo in to the Sheraton. First time on the limo, found it costs the same as a town car - $45 per trip. Limo seats more, but still same size trunk, so space constrained – could probably put 4 in a limo vs 3 in a town car. Ran into a few PASS people along the way, including Andy Leonard and Karla from Pensacola.

Spent the next next couple hours working in my room, then headed over to the Convention Center to see what was going on. PASS HQ was in busy mode, getting the final stuff done for the 4 pm open of check-in and registration. We tend to take that for granted, but for them it’s a period of high stress, making sure all is ready so that everything goes smoothly. Happy crew though, stress and all!

Went up to check in, we’ve got a big monitor up with the #sqlpass Twitter feed. Probably fixed by now it was showing time since last post as something like “-42000 seconds”, mildly amusing! Got my bag and tshirt, ended up staying there for about an hour of networking as all the early arrivals came in. At 5:30 met up with some people for a networking dinner, walked down to the market and eventually to Pike Place Bar and Grill, decent food, and a long dinner. About 15 people total at the dinner, nice low key discussion, lots of fun.

Then it was back to the hotel for coffee and more discussion, more networking as there were a lot of attendees in the lounge. Finally called it a day about 10 pm. I’ll try to post more details the rest of the week, funny how it gets busy and the event hasn’t really started yet!

PASS Officers for 2010-2011 Announced

Andy Warren — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:50:43 GMT

Posted yesterday at http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/118.aspx, Rushabh Mehta is the incoming President, Bill Graziano is the VP Finance, and Rick Heiges is the VP of Marketing.

Congratulations to all!

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives – In Seattle

Andy Warren — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:04:00 GMT

If you’re going to spend 3-5 days in Seattle at the PASS Summit it’s worth sampling the local food rather than sticking with the ‘safe’ chain choices. I enjoy Diners, Drive-In’s, and Dives on the Food Network, so I grabbed the list of restaurants they had featured from Seattle. Haven’t tried any of them, but hoping to try at least one on my next trip. Been to one of these, or have another you think I should try? Post a comment!

Voula's Offshore Cafe
658 NE. Northlake Way
Seattle, WA 98105
Tel: (206) 634-0183
Website: www.voulasoffshore.com

Mike's Chili Parlor
1447 N.W. Ballard Way
Seattle, WA 98107
Tel: (206) 782-2808

Bizzarro Italian Cafe
1307 N 46th Street
Seattle, WA 98103
Tel: (206) 632-7277
Website: www.bizzarroitaliancafe.com

Slim's Last Chance
5606 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA, 98108
(206) 762-7900
Website: www.slimslastchance.com

Georgia's Greek Restaurant & Deli
323 NW 85th Street
Seattle, WA 98117
Tel: (206)783-1228
Website: www.georgiasgreekrestaurant.com

Pam's Kitchen
5000 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
(206) 696-7010
Website: www.pams-kitchen.com

More Seattle Food

Andy Warren — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:15:06 GMT

Was browsing on a break and found this, http://www.seattle.com/dining/. Of them I’ve been to Palomino (good) and Ruths Chris (good), neither is cheap. Food for thought!

Need an Aircard for a Few Days?

Andy Warren — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:59:54 GMT

Ran across this, http://daypasswireless.com/, lets you rent an aircard plus service. Don’t know if it’s too late for those of you travelling to the PASS Summit, but an interesting idea. Rates are not bad.