PASS

SQL Server 2008 Launch Event

Bill Graziano — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:32:04 GMT

I attended the SQL Server 2008 launch in Los Angeles for PASS. It was VERY nice to leave sub-freezing Kansas and arrive in warm, sunny Los Angeles.

My pictures of the keynote didn't turn out all that well unfortunately. The ones I took before it started turned out the best. I also ran into Janette from Idera. Idera and Quest were the only two SQL Server tools vendors that I saw there. The keynote presentation was projected onto some type of clear screen. You could see the presentation and see through it. It gave it a neat 3D look.

The walk from the Nokia Theatre over to the convention center was short but unusual.

PASS was in the Microsoft Pavilion and shared a booth with Culminis and INETA. I always forget how hard it is to work in a booth all day. I saw quite a few people I knew including Dinakar who blogs here but didn't have time to talk much.

I managed an invite to Microsoft's party (or maybe AMD's) after the event where they had The Barenaked Ladies playing. That was pretty cool.

Are you attending the SQL Server 2008 Launch in LA?

Bill Graziano — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:27:04 GMT

I'll be in Los Angeles for the launch this week. I'll be the PASS representative at the Heroes Community Booth in the Microsoft Pavilion. When you enter the Microsoft Pavilion we'll be all the way back in the left corner. Come by and say Hi if you get a chance. I arrive Tuesday night and leave Thursday morning. Is anyone else reading going to be there?

Speaking in St. Louis on June 12th

Bill Graziano — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:00:32 GMT

I'll be speaking to the St. Louis SQL Server Users Group on the afternoon of June 12th at the Microsoft offices from 1PM until 4PM. I'll be doing two presentations back to back. The first is What I Wish Developers Knew about SQL Server. The second is Understanding the Procedure Cache: Writing Efficient Reusable Queries. The two presentations flow very well together. The second really builds on the concepts introduced in the first. The event was organized by Kathi Kellenberger through the PASS Star Program. Thanks Kathi!

SQL Gal at PASS

Bill Graziano — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:40:09 GMT

PASS is such an interesting event. At the start of the Welcome Reception last night SQL Gal made an appearance. She walked slowly down the hall with a group of people following her. No one would pass her.

PASS 2006: The Pre-Conference Seminars

Bill Graziano — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:53:50 GMT

One of my roles on the PASS Board of Directors is to develop the program for our annual Summit. Our next PASS Summit is in Seattle November 14th - 17th, 2006. The general sessions are broken into tracks for database administration, business intelligence, application development and professional development. These sessions run Wednesday through Friday. We run eight concurrent sessions on those days for a total of ninety-six educational sessions.

PASS also offers eight Pre-Conference sessions that take place on Monday and Tuesday with four occurring on each day. You can follow that link to read a detailed abstract on each session. I'm going to summarize the sessions and why we picked them.

Pre-conference sessions are full day sessions that focus on a single topic and are offered at an additional cost. Conference attendees can sign up for a pre-conference session for $395 while the cost for non-attendees is slightly higher. We have Pre-Conference sessions that focus on database administration, business intelligence and application development. We should have something interesting for everyone. Four of the sessions are presented by speakers from the SQL Server community and four are presented by Microsoft. The community speakers are Kalen Delaney, Andrew Kelly, Niels Berglund and Erik Veerman.

Andrew is going to present on Practical Performance Monitoring For SQL 2005 on Monday. Andrew is a SQL Server MVP and a regular speaker on SQL Server administration. Andrew's sessions at PASS have always been well attended and highly rated. At the time of our conference in November SQL Server 2005 will have been out for a year. We expect most companies will either be using or evaluating SQL Server 2005 so a performance monitoring topic should be of interest. Andrew is going to show how you can monitor performance of the various components of SQL Server 2005.

On Tuesday Kalen Delaney is presenting Query Plans: Interpretation and Tuning in SQL Server 2005. This session will be a good complement to Andrew's session on monitoring performance. Kalen is also a SQL Server MVP and one of the best known SQL Server speakers. Her sessions are always among the most popular and highly rated at our conference. If you write or tune queries on SQL Server and care about performance this is a "must attend" session. Kalen has forgotten more about SQL Server query tuning than most of us will ever know. Her sessions are always informative and packed full of practical knowledge.

If you're interested monitoring and tuning SQL Server 2005 Andrew and Kalen will provide two great days of technical content. If your focus is on business intelligence we also have two full days of content for you. Microsoft's Francois Ajenstat is presenting Microsoft Business Intelligence: Tools and Applications – Building on the BI Platform on Monday and Erik Veerman is presenting Enterprise ETL with Integration Services on Tuesday. Francois will be presenting with Stacia Misner. Their presentation will focus on using tools such as Business Scorecard Manager 2005, ProClarity and Office 2007 to build a complete Business Intelligence Platform.

Erik's presentation will focus on using SQL Server Integration Services to populate a data warehouse. Erik is a consult, author and instructor and brings a tremendous depth of knowledge to the session. Those focused on business intelligence will find these sessions packed full of useful information.

Niels is presenting on Advanced SQLCLR for DBA and Developers on Monday. Like many of our presenters Niels is a consultant, instructor and author. As the title indicates this session should benefit application developers and DBA's that are supporting applications using the CLR in SQL Server 2005. The session will focus on advanced topics such as reliability and debugging. If you're architecting a new application for SQL Server 2005 this session is well worth your time.

SQL Server 2005 introduced major changes in the security model for the product. There are new components to be secured and new ways to secure exiting components. If you will be supporting production SQL Servers you should attend SQL Server Security – Technology, Guidance, and Best Practices on Tuesday. This session will be presented by program mangers, engineers and development leads from the security team. It will cover the security features in detail as well as best practices for configuring security on SQL Server 2005. This will be a great session on security presented by those who know it best.

Our last two sessions are presented by PSS. PSS is the group that provides product support for SQL Server. PSS really adds a different dimension from both the community presenters and the Microsoft presenters. They tend to see the really difficult support issues that arise when supporting production SQL Servers. Their sessions are always very informative and very technical. They are presenting their PSS Bootcamp for SQL Server 2005 over two days. Each day is an independent session so you can attend either or both sessions. Each PSS session is a group of inter-related presentations by different engineers within the support team. These are Microsoft's most senior support engineers and bring tremendous experience diagnosing problems with SQL Server.

On Monday they will be covering SQL Server Performance. These sessions will cover the tools and techniques that Microsoft's product support group uses to diagnose SQL Server performance problems. On Tuesday they will present on the Database Storage Engine. This session will cover topics such as backup and restore internals, Advanced I/O and database mirroring. Presenters for these two days include Bob Ward, Keith Elmore and Bart Duncan.

We have eight great sessions to choose from. You can get two full days of in-depth training on key SQL Server topics from some of the smartest people in the industry. We think the our pre-conference sessions are a great value and we hope you will too. I encourage you to sign up today at the PASS web site. And if you've already registered it's easy to add pre-conference sessions to your registration.

ClearTrace Video

Bill Graziano — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:03:00 GMT

I created a small video to demo ClearTrace. It's only about two minutes long. This is also the technology we're planning to use at the PASS Conference to capture presentations.

Writing Great Abstracts

Bill Graziano — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 04:23:00 GMT

The next PASS Conference is in Seattle in November 2006. The Call for Speakers for this conference closes on April 28th, 2006. If you have any interest in speaking you'll need to submit an abstract. As the Program Director for the conference this year I'd like to pass on some of my thoughts on what makes a great abstract. Our Program Committee is going to review close to 300 abstracts this year. Take some time and make yours stand out.

Pick a topic you're passionate about. It will show in your abstract and your presentation. Pick something you work with every day and will still be working with in November. Real-world experience really shows through.
Pick something you know very, very well. There will be some extremely smart people attending your presentation. In my first PASS presentation I covered Profiler and trace. Right before I walked on stage the Microsoft Program Manager for Profiler and trace introduced herself to me.
No, I don't have any topic suggestions for you. I struggle with that too.
Choose a descriptive title. On our pocket schedules the attendees will only see your title, level and name. They should be able to decide if your presentation is right for them just by reading the title. Words like "introduction", "deep dive" or "overview" can tell attendees more about the level. Be careful with "cute" titles. Something like "Overcoming the Fear of Commitment" might be funny if you know the topic is transactions but if attendees only see the title they might not figure that out. When in doubt choose something simple, direct and descriptive.
Write a complete description. I've seen the paragraph describing the session be as simple as "This session will cover everything about backup." The person who wrote that didn't invest much time writing it. Will they invest much time creating a good presentation? You want to describe your session as completely as possible. What topics will you cover? What will the attendees learn?
Write well. Annoying little grammar errors really stand out when you review lots of abstracts. If someone couldn't take the time to proofread their own abstract will they deliver a good session? I'd especially encourage you to have someone else review your abstract. Find an English major and have them look for grammar errors. Stop by marketing and ask them to "punch up" the language for you (but not too much).
Invest time. We can usually tell who threw something together at the last minute or in a very short amount of time. Ask yourself what you know that you wish everyone else knew. Ask yourself what unique or interesting things you've done that you'd like to share.<.br>

Speaking at PASS is a great experience. The first step is submitting a great abstract. By my count you have ten days get your abstract in. Remember, the call for speakers closes on April 28th, 2006.

PASS in Barcelona

Bill Graziano — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:51:00 GMT

Our European Conference kicked off this morning in Barcelona. Ken Henderson, Bob Ward and Bart Duncan are all part of the PSS team. They are doing a day long pre-conference session on SQL Server internals. I think after being in Europe for five days now I'm finally over my jet lag.

The call for speakers for the Seattle Summit is up. You've got until April 28th to submit your abstracts.

PASS Session: Future Directions in Data and Language Integration

Bill Graziano — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 03:44:00 GMT

Of all the presentations that MS submitted for the PASS Conference, this was the one that intrigued me the most. It's on Wednesday at 1:30PM and is being delivered by Alan Griver. The original abstract was fairly vague. Lots of references to data manipulation on the client side but no real hint as to what it would actually cover. After the PDC it became clear that this was a presentation on LINQ.

Once the information was public Alan updated his abstract and the whole thing makes more sense. I'm really looking forward to this session. I've watched Ander's video on LINQ and was impressed. They've put quite a bit of thought into this. Hopefully they'll demo it more from a DBA perspective than from a pure developer perspective. I'm also curious how this will work when run from inside SQL Server. It should be interesting.

PASS Board of Directors Elections 2005

Bill Graziano — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 03:41:00 GMT

PASS sent out an email tonight with the slate of candidates for the Board of Directors so it's official. I'm running for the Board of Directors for PASS. There are six people running for three slots and it's a great group of candidates. No matter what the results PASS will be in great shape. I certainly would like to ask for your consideration when you cast your ballot. I've been a PASS volunteer for a couple of years and think I'd do a great job. (I've written a little longer bio that they'll hopefully get posted soon.) They are using an electronic ballot this year so watch your email for election information. And you don't need to attend the conference to vote. You just need to be a member of PASS.

My presentation is scheduled for the last slot on Friday. If you can stay that late I'll be presenting “What I Wish Developers Knew About SQL Server”. It's a broad summary of of common problems I see in SQL Server applications. It's more wide than deep but does cover a lot of ground. It's targeted at developers more than database administrators. I've delivered it five times now to various and I've recieved great feedback. Plus I'll give you candy for attending.

I'll also be spending some time in the Supplemental Question Lounge. Many of the MVP's will be there to answer questions and I think some Microsoft folks as well. They've scheduled a series of mini-presentations throughout the conference so be sure to check out the schedule.