PASS Summit 2012 To-Do

Diners Drive-ins and Dives was on the TV just now (it was the first episode I’ve seen of the day, so I hadn’t gotten to the point of stabbing myself in the eyes yet), and Guy was at a place in Seattle that we want to put on a list of things to do this year. Tammy said we should start a list in a folder somewhere, and I thought why not mumble to the world about it.

So, here’s a random list of things that we’re going to try to do when we’re out in Seattle this year, along with a stab at when we might be doing it. Obviously these can all be #SQLFamily events, unless otherwise noted.

Oh, and of course, if anyone knows anything about these places and it would actually be a bad idea to do/visit any of them, please feel free to let us know!

  • Slim’s Last Chance Chili Shack & Watering Hole (1st Ave South, ~Georgetown); Probably hit this place on the way into town due to its location
  • “The spice place”; That’s all I’ve got about it. I seem to recall hearing about this once before, but this is all I’ve got right now

Will add to this as time goes on…

SQL PASS Summit Recap Part 2 & Lessons Learned

I really don’t know where November and December went. Or January. Oh crap, it’s the end of February already. Sigh. I’m doing good to not go to the office on a Saturday or start cleaning the house on a Tuesday morning. So, now, I’m finally going to finish what was a little series (err.. OK, two posts don’t a series make) about PASS Summit with this post, which will cover some boring personal stuff, along with some lessons learned back in October.

The Weekend

We were in Seattle until the Monday after the conference, so we had the weekend to do some sightseeing. We planned that since we had never been to Seattle before and we also have a habit of tacking on some vacation around conferences like this for higher quantities of bang-for-buck. We would have rather done this scheduling a little differently, but more on that in a bit.

Alaska King Salmon

Mmmmm

We reserved a rental car on Friday morning, so we could get around outside of downtown. We of course went to the Pike Place Market, which was great. Saw some fish flying through the air, as expected. Went by the original Starbucks, bought some cheese, even some flowers. We actually came back here on Monday morning on our way to the airport to pick up a couple of fish to take home with us. There’s now an Alaskan King Salmon in the freezer in the basement, which I think is pretty awesome. I suppose it’s one’s duty to go to the Space Needle their first time in Seattle, so we did that, too.

 

With the touristy stuff out of the way, Tammy and I met up with Denny (blog | @MrDenny) & wife Kris and set out to see our favorite off-the-beaten-trail thing: dams! Although more lock system than dam, we went to the Hiram M. Chittenden (aka “Ballard”) Locks. Denny & Kris made fun of us a little bit for being “oooo, boats!”, but hey, we’re from Indiana and live in Tennessee now—we don’t exactly get to see water all that often. The complex has a fish ladder where adult salmon can make it upstream past the dam complex to spawn in the freshwater Lake Washington. There’s a viewing area down along the ladder where you can see into the water through windows. October isn’t exactly heavy salmon migratory season, but there was one lone fish in there bumming around. This would be pretty sweet to see when it’s busy.

Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full

Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full

Somewhat ironically, immediately after this, we went and ate sushi. I can’t drive chopsticks, but that’s a different story.

The rest of the weekend involved closing down the Tap House another time or two, shopping, me piecing out and almost hitting my face on some asphalt in a park, annnnnd sleep. We got back on a 737 for the return trip to KBNA on Monday, and that was that.

Our pics from the trip are on Flickr here. Well, Tammy’s are. Mine haven’t been sorted through & uploaded.

Summit Recap

This conference is crazy. If it had eyes, you wouldn’t talk to it in a bar; you would walk swiftly the other way.

Now, of course, if you’re that guy, it probably isn’t as bad. You come to Seattle, you get your learnin’ on, maybe spend some time with the crew at an Expert Pod to talk through a nasty intermittent deadlocking problem you’ve got, grab some supper, and then head back to your room to catch up on some work or otherwise. I used to be that guy at conferences, so I understand. However, this is the SQL community, which means if you want to take your chances with the crazy, there’s plenty of opportunity.

Obviously, there’s the conference itself. With the schedule full of world-class speakers, small-group interactions with leading experts, and the Birds of a Feather lunch, it is truly amazing the amount of knowledge and experience available for attendees. If you have a question about SQL Server, there is someone here who can answer it (and if there isn’t, then the question is probably unanswerable 🙂 ). I really do enjoy this “learning” part of events. I also love being able to take advantage of the expertise available when I have big nagging problems that I haven’t been able to work out. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t have any such things going on last fall that I was able to pick brains about. For a number of reasons, I hope that is different this year.

Along these lines, something did happen at the conference last year which I haven’t really had happen before: during a few different sessions, I had the realization that I actually knew what was going on. It wasn’t exactly that I felt I was learning for the fist time, it was more the feeling about “getting” such a big chunk of this “working with data” thing that I do. Obviously I don’t really get everything there is to get, as there’s way more to “working with data” than I have my brain wrapped around at this point, but the speakers and the content are just that good—they make you feel smarter than you actually are! I never got this feeling back when I was a sysadmin, doing sysadmin-y things, and I don’t know if it’s because my heart is so much more in what I’m doing now or something else. 

Oh hai!

There are plenty of networking opportunities during the conference day, up to and including ones that I didn’t even know were coming. Case in point: When I would think about it, I would Tweet what session I was sitting down in; or, RT someone else who beat me to it. In one session, I saw a tweet of someone sitting in the same session I was. Into the session, I happened to notice the guy next to me would flip over to TweetDeck on his laptop every so often. I checked out the avatar of the guy who said he was in the same session and I then realized that I was sitting right next to him. It was @DataOnWheels. We talked for a bit & exchanged cards at the end of the session. It was a pretty cool happening.

Some people will say to not feel obligated to go to a session in every slot—that’s what ordering the DVDs of all of the sessions are for. Instead, use the time at the conference to do things that you can’t get for later. Things like hanging out and talking to other people who do the same things that you do that you met at lunch (of which there are plenty of…even I found some!). I can at least partially agree with this advice. However, I’ve been to a fair handful of conferences over the years where, due to one reason or another, the sessions (the learning) were the main reason I was there. As a result, it is going to take me a little while to get over the “sessions are Priority 1” thing. Also, watching the DVDs afterwards just isn’t quite the same as being in the session in all cases. I know as I start to get to know more people (or maybe as more people get to know me), I will be more inclined/have more opportunity to spend part of an afternoon talking about where Microsoft is going with Vertipaq or whatever. This time, I went to a session in every slot except one or two at most, and I’m glad I did that.

One place where we did jump into the social/networking aspect is after-hours. Other than a couple nights where we went back to our hotel and pretty much passed out, we were out quite late. In fact, on the day we flew out to Seattle, I realized later that we had been awake and moving for 23 hours or so. There was SQLKaraoke for one, but for the most part, it was just hanging around at the Tap House talking shop until they kicked us out. Those were some good times. There was the second dinner lots of nights part, which was a little over-the-top. I didn’t really gain much weight that week, and I don’t know how I pulled that off.

Random Bits & Things We Learned for Next Time

Stuff We Should Have Brought More Of. Clothes. The 16 or so hour days that we were running really put an unexpected hurt on our clothes. Tammy noticed about halfway through our trip that one of my pairs of jeans was getting a little… rough (relatively speaking). We got to thinking about it and realized that we were wearing clothes for about twice as long as we usually do in a day, because of how long our days were on this trip. By the time we were heading home, nothing was standing in the corner on its own, but we do know for next time to plan on wearing some things (mostly pants) fewer times than we would normally expect to.

Stuff We Could Have Gone Without. Power Strip. I packed one. It didn’t get used once. I don’t know how it didn’t, and as a result, even though it didn’t get used this time, one will probably come along again next time. This is one of those things that doesn’t take up all that much room, but if it turns out that we actually need it, it’s gold. If we’re tight on room or weight though, this will be one of the first things to go.

Down Time. We found that down time is an important part of the week’s schedule. We cashed out pretty early two nights and it was probably the only way we made it through the week. Basically… we’re not in college anymore. And, likely…you aren’t either. I mean, if you are, that’s cool—we’ll see you a night or two this year at 0300. If you’re like us, though, there will be a few late nights and a couple/few not-so-late nights; and that’s perfectly OK.

Food. Something funny happened in the first part of our week in Seattle last year—we were sick! Long story short, it turns out that we apparently eat better than we thought we did. I mean, yeah, we hardly ever eat fast food, only eat at restaurants a few times a week, and grow a fair amount of the plant-derived food we eat, but I wasn’t expecting to be thrown for a loop by eating nothing but institutional food. This isn’t about any food in particular we had towards the beginning of our trip, it’s just that it turned out to be so different than what we usually eat, it was a shock to our systems. Everything was OK after a few days, but this might be something to keep in mind if you’re a heavy eat-in-type person. At the risk of sounding snooty, we will probably be hitting the Whole Foods that’s in downtown Seattle for some meals at least early in the week to help ease the transition.

Jet Lag. A number of years ago, someone told us of a good way to deal with Westbound jet-lag. See, the problem with going back in time is that you tend to go to bed and get up way early until you get acclimated. The fix is the day you get to your destination, stay up as late as you absolutely possibly can, and only then go to bed. This will make you “sleep in” the next morning as far as your body is concerned, which will hopefully more-or-less land you at the correct time to get up in the new timezone. We’ve done this for a while, and it works really well for us.

The problem is when flying Eastbound. This leads to one staying up and sleeping in way late compared to the prevailing time, which is more of a problem to deal with. This is really bad, because there’s not a good, easy way to deal with it like there is the other way. You just have to go to bed, set your alarm, and hope for the best (and probably be dead for a day or two). On this trip, our first day back in TN, we went to bed at about or normal time, 10:00p Central (8:00p as far as our bodies were concerned). This was only possible because of the craziness from the week before. Turns out this snapped us right back to Central Time in one day! It was by far the easiest jet lag recovery we’ve ever had.

 

That’s it for PASS Summit 2011. I feel bad that it has taken me so long to finish getting this post together. I mean, it’s almost SQL Rally time. I guess one could say the silver lining here is since so much time has gone by, this is a good way to keep the excitement for Summit 2012 alive! We’ve already registered for this year, and we pretty much can’t wait to see our #SQLFamily again.

SQL PASS Summit Day…Uhhh, All the Rest

Since I couldn’t keep up with writing every day (or nearly so) weeks ago at the Summit, recap post(s) weren’t going to go up until after the fact. Since my life has been pretty crazy since getting home (combined with some semi-minor problems with the web host), this isn’t getting finished until way late. I honestly don’t know where everyone found the time to write in the middle of all of this, because I flat-out need more sleep than that. I’m only grabbing the highest of the highlights here, and I’m doing this the weeks after! Normally I would say that I’ll try to do better next year, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.

Wednesday

Washington State Convention Center

Yep, those are overhead electrical lines for pantograph-equipped busses

Wednesday started out with a Keynote address, as most conferences do. This one had a few announcements, such as SQL Server v.Next getting a real name replacing its Codename. Instead of “Denali”, we now have “SQL Server 2012.” Nobody should be overly surprised by this, unless you were really hoping for 2011. The technical content of the keynote was very heavily focused on end-user flavors of BI technologies. Some of the stuff we’d seen before, but there were some new bits here and there. Generally, the “managed self-serve BI” space looks pretty similar to what it did before, being based around PowerPivot and other similar tools in Excel, like tabular data stores (VertiPaq). I thought it was an awful froofy* presentation, but most Keynote-type presos are. What was shown on screen was fine and all, and was neat to look at, but as I’ve said before, the hard part about “managed self-serve BI” is the “managed” part. There’s a lot of work that still needs to happen on the back end by people who know what they’re doing with respect to both the Business and the Data in order to get to the point where a C-level manager is poking around in Excel and making good, data-backed decisions. On that note, though, how many business users have the technical know-how to do the work that needs to be done in Excel to get there? And how many of those are C-level managers? OK, that’s a different post for a different day.

The main sessions on Wednesday for me were pretty heavy SSAS & related topics (like Data Mining). I had a big lightbulb kick on in Craig Utley’s SSAS Aggregations session confirming something that I had been suspecting, so the whole thing got off to a really good start for me. I can’t work on our aggregations situation right this second, but it’s something that will be making it onto my list for the mid-term after some current project work gets finished up.

Some of the days at PASS Summit have special wardrobe…themes. For the last couple years, there has been #sqlkilt day. This particular theme occurs on the same day as the Women in Technology lunch/panel discussion. Its purpose is to “support women in technology” by the guys wearing skirt-like apparatus. It’s cool, but a kilt guy I am not. Anyway, Wednesday this year was SQL Saturday day, where one was to wear their favorite SQL Saturday shirt. Since I’m not a speaker (yet?), all I have is my t-shirt from Nashvegas’s SQL Saturday last year. (It bothered me to wear a t-shirt on a conference day at first, but I got over it by lunch or so.) Coming out of the keynote I looked for what shirts everyone had on. Honestly, a non-zero part of this was me looking for who else just had t-shirts on, but I also wanted to see what everyone else was wearing. Turns out: There weren’t many! I wish I knew why this was. I suppose it could be due to not hearing about it…But I’m a little afraid that it’s because not that many have SQL Saturday shirts! People!! Free training by high-quality speakers (ie, not me). I’m sure there’s one near you. Website right here. Check it out.

The Couch

For my Purdue peeps, think Mathews Hall's ground-floor Men's room

Wednesday night was the vendor reception & some extra-curricular activities afterwards. We had planned to go to two things, but at one point, we were standing on the expo floor when we realized the first thing had started about a half hour ago. We started back to the hotel (which, due to when we started to schedule this trip, wasn’t close), when we realized we weren’t going to be able to get everywhere we wanted to when we wanted to. So, scrapped the first event, and got some food before heading to SQLKaraoke. I don’t know how much of that really needs to be discussed, as it’s fairly self-explanatory. Suffice to say that I fulfilled what had become a lifetime goal in recent years, tried to make friends/be nice to the cranky local guy sitting at the end of the bar, and we got home at 0300 again.

Thursday

Thursday… yeah, that keynote didn’t happen. Haven’t had a chance to go back and watch it yet, either.

More BI-related sessions for me, as that’s what I do now. I did go to one Engine session the whole time, and it was Aaron Bertrand’s (blog | @AaronBertrand) “T-SQL: Bad Habits to Kick” on Thursday. I was looking to see what kinds of things I do that are bad, because, honestly, T-SQL is not my strongest suit. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything major that I didn’t already know, but I did get some background as to the “why”s on a few things. Plus, the only reason “what happens when you don’t declare a length on a varchar() variable” wasn’t news is because we ran into that in an old store

d proc at the end of September. I did learn about TRY_CONVERT() in SQL 2012, though. Although at first blush, it sounds pretty good, it also looks like it could be a big crutch. OH, and also I’m glad that I’m not the only one who finds non-ANSI 92-style joins hard to read at this point. Alright, so obviously I got more out of that session than I initially thought.

Thursday night had an interesting occurrence or two. I mean, there was this thing (someday maybe we’ll tell my parents, haha). I’m pretty happy about that. Yeah, it was an over-the-top nerdy thing to do, and more than a little weird, but that fits us pretty well, so I’m OK with it. Some people did make the chilly trek out to Puget Sound with us, and I/we are very, very grateful to everyone that did. We <3 our SQL Family.

We went to the official second-to-last night Gameworks party for a little bit, but were pretty worn out. We tried to hang on, but once again turned in early. Tammy was passed out on the couch within about three minutes of walking in the door, and I didn’t last a whole lot longer. I think I did try to write something that night, but realized quickly that if I wanted to keep drool off my work laptop, sleep was in order. Plus, I knew we had to get up early on Friday, because it’s Friday, and…

Friday…Dewitt Keynote!

See, for at least the last couple years (that’s as far back as I know, because I didn’t pay close attention to the conference in 2009, as I was bitter about not going), the last day of the conference’s Keynote has been a presentation by Dr. David DeWitt. This has yet to disappoint. This year, the topic was Big Data, including discussions about Relational DBs vs NoSQL DBs. I learned a lot from this, and think I understand why Microsoft is going in the direction that they are when it comes to NoSQL & related technologies. It will be fun to see where this goes. Dr. DeWitt’s keynote is available on-demand here (along with the others), but they do require minor registration. His slide deck is available here.

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring your attention to this little thing that happened at the beginning of the Friday Keynote. The song was hilarious, but I’m still pretty sure that Buck Woody with a 12-string is > *

More BI sessions on Friday, of course, along with a Professional Development one. The PD session was a panel discussion entitled, “Are you a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensible.” The discussion was led by Andy Leonard (blog | @AndyLeonard). Panel members were: Andy Warren (blog | @SQLAndy), Stacia Misner (blog | @StaciaMisner), Louis Davidson (blog | @drsql), Brent Ozar (blog | @BrentO), Thomas LaRock (blog | @SQLRockstar), Kevin Kline (blog | @kekline), and Jeremiah Peschka (blog | @peschkaj). While writing this post, I listed everyone out, then almost deleted this whole paragraph to start over, because I felt like this was the biggest name drop bomb in the history of blogging. I then decided to leave it, because I can use that blob of names to make a point: Every single one of them has a blog and Twitter account. One could argue about an incorrect causation/correlation conclusion, but I think it’s telling that some of the most successful people in SQL Server Land use these communication methods heavily. I sometimes goof around on Twitter more than I use it constructively, and only like four people read my blog regularly, but if you’re a SQL Server DBA/Dev/etc and enjoy helping people and rubbing elbows with others that do, there’s no time like the present to start using these mediums if you don’t already. There are plenty of people here already who will support you and help you grow and learn.

Conference centers always start the tear-down ASAP at the end of the last day. I understand this—there’s a hard number of hours between when one event ends and the next one begins. It always makes me sad, though. Nothing says an event is over like the registration desk getting torn down in front of you. The good news for us on Friday afternoon while this was happening is that we had spent a lot of time with the awesome community that we’re a part of, and there were still good times ahead, both Friday night and at future events. More on that later, though.

To be continued…

I will cover some of the weekend happenings in another post soon, but more importantly, I have a few lessons learned and/or overall comments to make about the PASS Summit. I’m not going to get that written right now and this post is already too long and has taken me too many days to finally get together, so I’m going to split that up and get to it very soon. Thanks for reading so far…

* As usual, I reserve the right to make up my own words, as this is my blog.

SQL PASS Summit Logical Days 1 & 2

Logical Days? Well, the Conference doesn’t /technically/ start until Wednesday (tomorrow, as I’m writing this), but, 1) we’re here, and 2) I really do think of Pre-Cons and other organized functions as part of the conference itself, so these days counted for me.

Monday

Our conference trip started at 1:30 PM Central Daylight on Monday. With pushback scheduled for 4:45, this was wayyy out of whack for my usual scheduling. Because of how long it had been since we had flown, I didn’t know what security would look like at BNA or how long the process itself would take these days. Turns out, there have been little changes in the duration of things, so we wound up downstream of Checkpoint Charlie almost 2 hours before preboarding would start. Damn.

Anyway, ~5 hours later, we were in the back of a black Tahoe being driven by a Russian dude. I didn’t arrange the ground transportation; I was merely a pawn in a greater game passenger.

One of THE places to hang out & see people at, other than the Sheraton Lobby, of course, is the Tap House (it plays music, I’m sorry). We went there for supper, along with a couple of Tammy’s coworkers that are here. They have 160 beers on tap, and I had a few different Porters throughout the night. I was able to meet a good chunk of SQL Celebrities for the first time, and it’s always kind of fun to meet people like this. Twitter’s really good at making this happen—you feel like you’ve known these people for half your life, yet you’ve never actually met face to face. This happens a lot. In fact, because of my whole picture situation (I’ve got the Ray Bans on in all of the close-ups), Jorge Segarra (blog | @SQLChicken) was beginning to think that I was just a well-written bot. I thought that was pretty funny. For all you may know, he’s right.

Then there was the Mladen (blog | @MladenPrajdic) stuff, but I think that’s under NDA.

Long story short, we finally got back to the hotel at 0300 Tuesday morning. We’re off to a good start.

Tuesday

DowntownTransitTunnel
Seattle Transit Tunnel

Tuesday was mostly uneventful. We had an errand to run in the morning, which involved the usual public transportation crash course that happens in a new city. Turns out Seattle has this cool underground tunnel system for busses in the central downtown area. It’s just like the subway, except the bus routes run through there when they’re in the area. It’s a bit weird & pretty cool.

Tonight there were a few official events. The first was a First-Timers orientation & mixer session. We decided late to not go to that, instead going straight to the Welcome Reception/Quiz Bowl. The Quiz Bowl is where pairs (or three) SQL Server “Experts” compete in a Jeopardy!™-style competition where they basically are subject to the whims of Tim Ford (blog | @SQLAgentMan). Many LOLs ensue. After that was the SQL Server Central/Red Gate Exceptional DBA Presentation/Party. Got to meet Steve Jones (blog | @Way0utWest) finally, along with lots of other community members.

Of course, there is more SQL Karaoke going on tonight, but we decided that after the night we had last night, and the nights that we will have for the rest of the week, we should take it easy once.  Just about to pass out for the night, to be rested for tomorrow and all of the crazy learning (and just crazy) that will be going on for the next few days.

I’m here now, and I still can’t wait for whatever is going to happen next #sqlpass

Seattle in October

Next month, something awesome is going down.

PASS 2011

I haz a happy

For the first time since the Two Weeks in Junetrip in 2008, we’ll be going to conferences. For the first time in…well…ever, the conferences we’re going to are the same one at the same time.

Finally, FINALLY, we’re heading to Seattle for the Professional Association for SQL Server’sannual Summit. This conference was first put on my map when it basically replaced the MS BI conference in 2009 (which wound up getting scheduled for every two years). At the time, I was getting deep into my first “real” DBA job, taking the somewhat long and temporarily divergent road towards a career in BI. I came very close to footing the bill myself for the conference that year, and it would have been pretty interesting to see what would have happened since then had I made that move…

Anyway, we’re both going for real this year, and I’m looking forward to just about everything about it. I can’t wait to meet everyone from the SQL Server community that I haven’t yet (which is most everyone), to possibly sing badly (#SQLKaraoke), to try to split myself up into three pieces to go to all of the sessions that I want to go to (although I haven’t run through the schedule yet), and to try to find time to mumble onto the keyboard to get some posts up here about whatever is going on.

There are a couple things different about this one, though. I won’t be attending a precon session for the first time. That’s a little weird for me, as I think of it as part of the conference experience, and I always get a lot of good info out of them. When I’ve gone to conferences before, I haven’t had great reasons to go to BI-related sessions; I’d just check them out because I’d have the time and/or because I was interested in that sort of stuff. This time, pretty much the primary reason I’m attending is to go to every SSAS session I can. This is really awesome for me.

The other big thing that will be different is my attendance in after-hours events. For the TechEds & Connections conferences I went to, I went to very few after-hours events, either official or unofficial. We’re going to be hitting as much as we can this time, spending time with as many of our fellow Data Nerds™ as possible. Hopefully we won’t annoy too many people—we wouldn’t want to get blacklisted or anything 😉

So, in about a week and a half (!), we will get to spend some quality time in the back of a Southwest Boeing, KBNA—>KSEA. This trip will put me both the furthest West & North I’ve ever been (I don’t get out much), and that will be neat, too. We’ll be missing the photowalk on Monday, which is a bummer, but will be in town through the following Monday, so we’ll have plenty of time to spend with the Emerald City.

I know it’s getting close, but there’s technically still time! If you’re a SQL Server Pro, any of DBA, BI Monkey, or Dev, if at all possible, you should be here for this. I don’t explicitly know what we’re all getting into, but from what I’ve heard and read, there is no better place to be.

Did I mention that I’m excited about this? Yeah, I’m excited about this. The lack of sleep that’s going to happen that week, though? Yeah, I like my sleep. A lot. I’m not sure how that’s going to go.