Sunday, January 24, 2010
Happy to announce the arrival of Benjamin Micah Caldwell. Mother and baby are both doing well. Big sister thinks he’s just another baby doll for her to play with. Sleep is at a premium, but everyone is adapting well.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Andy Warren mentions in his Closing Out PASS 2009 post, that he “almost wish[es] for a closing session”. I agree that it would be nice to have some sort of wrap-up session, because it does feel a bit awkward to just fade back to normal life after such a fantastic event.
Oh sure, I take part in what appears to be turning into an annual tradition with a few folks where we are sure to get together for dinner on the last night of the main conference, and I want to keep doing that, but just walking out of the last breakout session at the convention center still feels like a bit of a let-down. Maybe a closing session could include some highlight video from the main conference, and perhaps this is where the new board members are introduced and there is some sort of passing of the baton from the outgoing board, or at least the executive committee to the incoming board or executive committee. Or maybe that’s too awkward since several people will be on both sides, it could be just the board members who are no longer serving handing over portfolios to those who are newly coming aboard. Or maybe just outgoing President to Incoming President. You get the idea. Do something that is symbolic of the changing of the guard. This would even be a great time for the incoming President to give a brief talk about what the Board hopes to accomplish the next year.
To add value and keep people from just disappearing early, maybe there could be an appearance by some special guest. In the past, I would have lobbied for Bill Gates. Maybe it should be Ballmer. Heck, this is the largest gathering of people around SQL Server, which is a major product for Microsoft, you’d think he might want to come by and say, “Thanks” to the community. Maybe this could also be the time when the winners of some of the vendor-sponsored drawings would occur rather than trying to squeeze them into a 15-minute coffee-break between sessions held two floors away.
The Summit starts off with a decent Welcome Reception to get people in the mood, and then Microsoft brings out a big name the next morning for the opening Keynote. It doesn’t need to be long; people are tired from a full week, and many want to get on with their dinner plans, so maybe it’s just a 30-minute deal. Don’t make it another full reception that competes with attendees’ own social plans, but make it more than a “That’s all folks…”. There has to be something that could be done to put a nice cap on things at the end.
And we might even find that with something like that to keep people around and interested to the very end, that attendance at the last breakout session on the last day may be stronger, too.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Had another great day of training on Thursday at the PASS Summit. After the fantastic keynote by David DeWitt, I went to a breakout session by Joe Webb on Data Driven Subscriptions in Reporting Services. We already use Data Driven Subscriptions in my company, but I figured I could always learn something new, and besides, Joe is a good presenter. Unfortunately I could not stay through the whole session because I had to leave early to get ready for the Meet the Chapters event at the lunch. I was hosting the table for the Professional Development Virtual Chapter that we just launched.
The Meet the Chapters lunch was fun and I had great conversations with several people who stopped by. I think that the virtual chapter format is really going to help fill a gap for people who would like to participate with PASS more, but due to scheduling conflicts or geographical barriers, just can’t make it to their local chapter. I am working out some of the kinks for our first virtual meeting. Keep an eye on our website for the details. And come back to the site to continue the conversation even after the meeting is long over.
After lunch, I went to the session entitled Achieving Work-Life Balance which was a panel discussion and Q&A with some members of the Women in Technology Virtual Chapter. Specifically, the panel consisted of Denise McInerney, Wendy Pastrick, and Meredith Ryan Smith. Since I know both Denise and Wendy from past PASS Summits, I thought it would be fun to sit in on their session. And don’t think that this topic, like the subject of Women in Technology overall, is just for women. This topic is of significant interest to me now that I have a family, and the demands for my time at work are increasing, too. Back when I was single, work-life balance was pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. But now that I’m married and have a 1 1/2 year old and a second on the way; if I decide to hang out at the office for a couple of extra hours because I’m “in the zone” and I want to keep on running, it has a lot greater impact than just having to pick up something to eat on the way home. It likely means that I won’t see my daughter before she goes to sleep, I may not see my wife before she goes to sleep, I don’t get to spend quality time with either of them that I really enjoy, and that’s just the surface stuff. There are a lot of other relationship effects that can come out of that, especially if it happens a lot. So, I went to the session and picked up some great tips. Most valuable, I think, was the reminder to manage expectations and communicate, communicate, communicate! Wendy had a great analogy about marriage being like an ongoing contract negotiation. Another good point was to break work tasks down to the simplest components that you can so that you are not necessarily the only one who can do it. Sometimes it is hard for us in technology to delegate, but if you never do find a way to spread the work, then balance will likely be very elusive. It makes me think of the verse, “For what does it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, yet lose his own soul (or family)?”
The next session I went to was put on by members of the SQL CAT team on the topic of SharePoint on SQL Server. There were several very practical bits of advice such as being sure to set the NTFS Allocation Unit size to 64K (the default is 4K); putting TempDB on the fastest drives and the content database Transaction Log files on the next fastest. They also recommend limiting (soft limit) the content databases to a size of 100GB, primarily for the purposes of backup and restore SLAs. And they gave a warning to not create any new database columns or indexes in the SharePoint databases, and to use the SharePoint tools to index columns if desired. There was one more thing that I made note of, and you’ll want to verify this for yourself because I may have misunderstood, but I believe they said that SharePoint 2010 will only run on 64-bit machines.
The last session that I went to has turned out to be the one that sparked the most work and the most benefit immediately upon my return to the office. The session was Denny Cherry’s Storage for the DBA. I almost didn’t go because it was the last session of the summit and frankly I was pretty drained. And I was concerned that this might get really technical and I’d be in over my head. But fortunately, it was just the right level for me. I learned some important jargon, a few key concepts, and most importantly, I learned some important questions to ask. As it turns out, we were right in the middle of re-provisioning our first SAN in the company, and there was some doubt that it had been configured properly for our needs; primarily because of the lack of involvement that my team had in any discussions about our needs. When I got back to the office, I was armed with the right questions to ask of our tech team and the consultant that helped them set it up, and I understood the jargon to use and the jargon they used in their responses, and I was able to determine that the disk arrays needed to be completely reconfigured. With a little more research based on my new knowledge, I was able to work with the team to understand what we really needed, and to back up my gut instinct with facts. After that, both my boss and I are far more confident that we will end up with equipment that is configured to meet our needs properly. I am by no means a SAN configuration specialist after just 75 minutes of training, but I learned just enough to get us back on track. How do you calculate the ROI on something like that? It’s HUGE! Again, another example of how just one session at PASS can justify the cost of the whole event.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday was the last day of the main conference this year, and it was kicked off in fine fashion by Bill Graziano who promised to have the fastest keynote at the conference. Part of Bill’s talk involved a moment of recognition for Kevin Kline, for the amazing amounts of work he did over 10 years of being on the PASS Board of Directors. Over the seven Summit conferences that I have attended, I have never seen the PASS crowd give a standing ovation to anybody, but they did this year, and it was well deserved. Thanks, Kevin, for all you have done to build PASS into the great organization it is today.
After Bill’s brief talk, a representative from Dell took the stage for a Keynote presentation. Unfortunately, I can’t remember a thing he covered. I’m sorry guys, I like your computers, but your keynote talks at PASS Summits are horrendous. I’m sure the guy who talked this year is a fine fellow, and probably very successful and important to Dell; however he and his presentation were utterly forgettable, and not just because he was upstaged by the next keynote speaker. The Dell guy sounded very nervous all of the way through, which was a huge distraction. Perhaps he was nervous, I’m sure all speakers that get up in front of a crowd of this size experience nervousness, but most of them still come across fine. So what was the issue? Was he not prepared? Did he not practice his talk, over and over, refining the message, like most of the other speakers at the conference? Was he just trying to wing it? I don’t know. But what I do know is that the vendor keynotes have never gone over very well. Maybe they just don’t understand who the audience is that they are talking to. That, and failing to practice would be like breaking cardinal rules #1 and #2 of public speaking.
The third portion of the Thursday Keynote was a talk by David DeWitt which was really outstanding. DeWitt is a Technical Fellow in the Microsoft Data and Storage Platform Division, and he leads the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. Or in other words, he’s really, really smart. He talked about storage performance and stretched our brains with discussion of column-store vs. row-store methodologies, along with disk latency analysis and a whole bunch of other really technical stuff. Interestingly, although none of what he covered is directly applicable to anything I will be doing or needing in the next several years, it still kept my attention. WHY? Well, first of all, he was very comfortable presenting, knew his stuff, knew that he knew his stuff, and obviously enjoyed the subject he was discussing. And he did a fantastic job of taking some rather complex stuff that would normally fly right over my head, and conveyed it in a manner that I was able to understand and follow without having to work hard. I’m sure everyone there will remember his reference to the greens stuff on the stacked bar chart and that “the green stuff is bad”. This is the trait of a great communicator. Communicators take the complex and make it simple so that others can participate. All too often, it seems that really smart people do just the opposite, taking rather simple stuff and make it so complex that only a couple other people in the world can participate in the conversation. So, massive kudos to David DeWitt for doing it right.
And DeWitt understood his audience, and also understood the perception that many have of keynote presentations in general. This was made abundantly clear when he told a little of his background and talked about preparing for this talk, and poked fun at his own employer by saying that his boss had told him to make his talk more marketing-like and that he had refused. The loud cheer that went up when he said that should have sent the message loud and clear to all past and future speakers at PASS. Again, well done…very well done.
I should also give credit to the folks behind the scenes at PASS that arranged to have DeWitt present, because the truth is that he presented last year and was wildly popular then, too, and they made the effort to get him to come back again this year. Also, kudos to the Board or whoever made the decision to include DeWitt’s presentation on the Summit DVDs. Keynotes don’t usually end up on the DVDs, and this will be a great addition. And kudos specifically to PASS President Wayne Snyder, for coming out right at the end of DeWitt’s talk to announce that it would be on the DVDs. Well done!
The Summit on Wednesday kicked off with Rushabh Mehta, new PASS President, making some opening remarks and then handing-off to Ted Casey from Microsoft for the keynote. The things that stuck in my mind from Tom’s talk were some whiz-bang demos of PowerPivot with Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010. There was a demo where they were manipulating 100 million rows in Excel and made an off-hand remark about Excel 2010 including a mini OLAP engine in it to handle this. And there was something about Reporting Services Data Sources can be exported as a Data Feed which can be consumed by Excel. Didn’t quite get all the details of those, but that’s enough to spark your research if you’re interested. One other thing that really caught people’s attention was use of a moving bubble chart. I had seen this type of thing before from some posts that Garr Reynolds has on his Presentation Zen blog; specifically, check out the videos by Hans Rosling. (I’ve soap-boxed on this before, but presentation does matter. If you were in that room and heard the gasps and sounds of approval and being impressed, you would have no doubt on this.)
The first breakout session I went to on Wednesday was Brian Larson’s presentation on Creating Dashboards. This is something that we will be focusing on over the next couple of years in my company. We definitely need better visibility into (and presentation of) key business information throughout the company. I liked a definition that Brian gave…Business Intelligence is getting accurate and useful information to the appropriate people at the appropriate time. Simple, but powerful. Another good point that Brian made was that financials are usually a lagging indicator of organizational health, and so he advocated use of a Balanced Scorecard that includes measures from many different areas. A couple of cool tricks he shared were to build a nice calendar display built as a nested tablix on a Reporting Services report; and to insert a rectangle in a Reporting Services cell and then insert your image inside the rectangle in order to preserver a little white space around the image. He also mentioned an upcoming book named Reporting Services Recipes which sounds like it will contain several more tips and tricks. I’ll have to add that to my wish list.
Next I went to the Women in Technology luncheon which was great again this year. I blogged on the luncheon last year, and there are several bloggers continuing the conversation this year. I don’t know what more to say on this other than I again applaud all those involved in the goal of getting more women involved in technology and seeing it as the great and rewarding career path it can be; and tearing down barriers that interfere. As a father of a little girl, I know this will become even more important and meaningful for me over time.
After lunch I went to a panel discussion on SQL Injection. It turned out to be more simplistic than I expected. Perhaps I need to review the Level it was assigned, but it turned out to be much repeating of the mantra, “parameters, parameters, parameters”. This is good and important advice, and maybe I just was not the right target market for this breakout session since I have been using stored procedures with strongly typed parameters extensively for about a decade now and I put up quite a fight against use of dynamic SQL in our systems. I did make note of a few good references for testing tools that I’ll look into to see what vulnerabilities may have slipped in despite my best efforts.
I wrapped up the training day in a session on using Sparse Columns and Filtered Indexes, two new features in SQL 2008 that we will likely be implementing in the next couple of months, although I still need to do a little research. Dan Kiely did a good job explaining these topics and demonstrating them, along with some of the pitfalls to watch out for; especially the fact that if you issue an update against the Columnset column, it will cause any sparse column that is not included in your update statement to be set to null. That would be quite a shock if you accidentally triggered that feature. I like that he started off with a trivia question that will catch you if you’re not paying close attention. Here it is…”How much room does a NULL integer take?” Take a moment and think about it… WAITING… WAITING… OK, here’s the answer, “The same amount as a non-null Integer, 4 bytes”. If you said it takes up no space because it is NULL, you better go back and read it again.
The final event of the evening, was of course, the party at Gameworks. What can I say? Free food and drink…free games…good conversations…it was great! Thanks Microsoft for picking up the tab on that!
Another very valuable day at the PASS Community Summit!
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
There are 160 breakout sessions this year at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle, with 14 different sessions going on in any given time slot. This means that there is a really good chance that you will find something of interest to attend during every session time slot. This also means that there is a good chance that there will be more than one thing that you want to attend at a time. And since I still haven’t found that cloning lab that Graz was talking about, I’m glad that most of these sessions are being recorded and will be available on the conference DVD and on the PASS website for attendees to review after the Summit is over.
Sometimes it was hard to choose which particular session to attend. Currently I am playing quite the multi-faceted role of manager, app developer, database developer, and DBA, so I could probably pick up something valuable from every session this year. But, since I am in the early phase of developing an intense Reporting Services project which is closely related to our first significant use of a hierarchical model which will have some sparsely populated columns, tied to a security management system, all being rolled out on brand new 64-bit Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 boxes, I used that to guide me this week. So you might imagine that I was particularly interested in anything relating to the hierarchical model, including the new HierarchyID datatype, anything having to do with advanced Reporting Services configuration and security, and sessions on new features in SQL Server 2008 like SPARSE columns. Oh and did I mention a project slated for next year that looks (to my untrained eye) a lot like the Bill of Materials problem, which coincidentally, there was a session with that in its name.
I started Tuesday (day 1 of the main conference) with Wayne Snyder’s presentation on Reporting Services in the Enterprise and picked up a few critical tips, especially as it relates to Report Builder 2.0 and some potential pitfalls we would have run right into because we have already anticipated the need for ad-hoc reporting on top of the whiz-bang system we are building. For example, it is pretty easy for your users to accidentally produce a CROSS JOIN or Cartesian Product result set. Also some good tips about Subscriptions and security including the reminder that when the Subscription is executed, it runs under the security context of the Reporting Services service account which probably does not have the same permissions as the user who created the subscription or who is targeted to be receiving the subscription. This can lead to unexpected results if you use Windows Integrated Security for your data source connections and if the code is expecting to use the user’s identity to provide row-level security.
After lunch I went to a session entitled Solving the Bill of Materials Problem which is a problem I will be tackling next year, but which also promised some discussion of HierarchyID, and I’m currently debating whether to use HierarchyID in my current project as well as next year’s task. The speaker in this session (John Cook) is of the definite opinion that HierarchID may be well suited to simple tree hierarchies; it is not the best solution for the BOM problem. Good to know and also picked up references to some additional resources to research and decide what is best for our particular needs.
In the next time slot, I slipped on my DBA hat and went to listen to Grant Fritchey talk about how to use the Database Management Views that are new in SQL 2005 and 2008 as a shortcut to query tuning. I learned a lot from that session, not the least of which is that I have a lot more to learn. But I must say that it is pretty darn cool that you can issue a SELECT statement to find out about the other queries that are happening right now.
For the last session of the day, I goofed up my schedule and room assignments; and by the time I got it all straightened out, I decided I was better off taking a break and catching up on some work email and other stuff. Also had a chance to sit and chat with Joe Webb for a while, which was a treat.
Overall, it was a greatly rewarding and valuable day. All the things that I learned in this one day would make the whole event worthwhile.
Last night at the Exhibitor Reception at the Summit, Lance Harra said to me, “I thought you gave up on Twitter.” That was in response to seeing my Twitter ID on my name badge. Some of you may recall that last year, just before the PASS conference, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon to play with it during the event. Shortly thereafter, I jumped back off. Well, this year, again shortly before the Summit, I started getting interested again. So, here are a few things I thought I’d share to clear the air…
I learned a few tricks to make my use of Twitter a tiny bit more efficient, like using TweetDeck to follow not just a bunch of individuals, but a particular topic like the #sqlpass conversation. And it has been interesting to meet here at the conference some of the folks that I only knew as Twitter IDs. But I still believe that it is a huge distraction, and if I walked around my office and saw a twitter tool up on my developers screens more than a couple of times in the day, I would have serious concerns about whether they were getting anything productive done. I even had to stop myself yesterday in one of the breakout sessions. I had arrived early and popped open TweetDeck to see what was current, and then the session started and I thought I’d take some notes the old-fashioned way, plus make a few tweets about it. A few minutes into that little experiment, I found that I kept getting drawn into what other people were tweeting about the sessions they were sitting in, and not paying attention to the guy who I had, essentially, paid money to come hear. So I shut the notebook lid and stayed with pen and paper.
I talked with Joe Webb last night about this and about how he uses Twitter. Not to put words in his mouth, but he did make an analogy to email in that it is easy to get sucked-in to responding to an email just because it is there and it is “now” and not necessarily because it is important. But Joe is also doing an interesting experiment this year where he is using Twitter as a note-taking tool, and also consolidating some of those tweets into a blog post. I’ll be curious to hear what his opinion of that approach is at the end of the week.
On the other hand, Twitter turned into a great little tool during one of the sessions I attended yesterday. A question came up about metrics to decide which indexes to rebuild/reorganize, and the speaker stated an opinion that appeared to contradict a previous “Microsoft recommendation”. One of the members of the audience sent a quick tweet to Paul Randal who happened to be on at the time, and a clarifying answer came back immediately and was able to be shared with everyone in the room in just minutes. So that was a great use.
So where does that leave us? Well, as Paul Randal is fond of saying, “It depends.” There are certainly some ways to take advantage of this technology for good. And there is the dark side where it is really easy to blow off hours and hours of time. It’s up to you to decide how to use it for yourself, but as for me, don’t expect to see me much during normal business hours outside of special events like the Summit.
KUDOS to Wayne Snyder!
If you have read my reviews of past PASS Community Summit events, you probably know that it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when speakers run over their scheduled time. Taking a more positive approach this year, I’d like to commend PASS President Wayne Snyder for realizing he was running out of time during his opening remarks before the Microsoft Keynote, and cutting his talk short, skipping over a couple of his last slides. I’m sure that the valuable information he had on those slides will be presented to the membership at a later time; perhaps in Rushabh’s remarks tomorrow, and it allowed Microsoft to get started with their keynote on time.
Unfortunately, Microsoft did not follow Wayne’s example and ran long again. This has happened countless times in the past at the PASS Summit. I know, I know…they’re a founding partner, they give a LOT to the community and this organization in particular, I should cut them some slack, etc., etc. That’s true, and I do…hey, I stayed through the entire talk this morning instead of getting up and walking out with so many others. And sure, they have “the right” to do whatever they want and will be given a ton of leeway by the organization and the Board. On the other hand, it’s still rude. And I’m sure that both Bob Muglia and Ted Kummert have given enough talks to know how to manage their presentation time better.
“But wait!” I hear you say, “they also brought several people up on stage to do demos and talk, so it’s not all Muglia’s and Kummert’s fault.” I say, it is still their fault because they should have planned their overall keynote to have enough wiggle room for those extras to run long and still wrap up on time. That’s really how you manage your time as a presenter. It’s hard to guess exactly how long it’s going take you to get through your talk even when it’s just you doing the talking. So you organize your talk so that the key points fit well within the allotted time, even if you get sidetracked by a technical glitch or a long Q&A. And then you come prepared with bonus material that you can get into if there is extra time at the end. Not surprisingly, this is how Wayne was able to get through his session on SSRS that came right after, and was cut short by, the long-running keynote. It even stated directly in the abstract in the book, that he would cover topics X and Y, and “if there is time available” he would also cover topic Z.
Well done, Wayne.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
This year the schedule for the PASS Community Summit was shifted by one day to change from having two days of pre-conference seminars and then the main conference on Wednesday through Friday; to having one day of pre-conference seminars, one day of post-conference seminars, and the main conference on Tuesday through Thursday. It will be interesting to see what sort of feedback this new schedule generates. As for me, it works fine either way.
The pre- and post-conference seminars are typically all-day seminars that cover a topic in significant depth. These seminars cost extra beyond the money for the main conference registration. I have been interested in several of these, but have not personally spent the extra money to attend any of them before this year. However, this year there was a special, short (2-hour) seminar entitled Networking to Build Business Contacts by Don Gabor, and I decided to go for it. And it actually turned out that as a PASS volunteer this year, I was eligible to attend a shorter 1-hour version of Don’s presentation at no additional charge. So, I took advantage of both, and both of them were well worth the time and money. A perk of the paid 2-hour session was a free copy of Don’s book How To Start A Conversation And Make Friends
. I look forward to reading it. As a fan of the classic How to Win Friends & Influence People
by Dale Carnegie, I am curious to see what overlap in tips and techniques there are, as well as pick up any new pointers.
Of course, in the 2-hour session, Don was able to go into the topic in more depth and provide additional tips as well as more time to practice on each other than during the 1-hour volunteer session. I learned good tips and put them to practice from both sessions. Unfortunately, even in the 2-hour time slot, Don was pressed for time and did not get through everything he had in the handouts. I would recommend to the PASS Program Committee for next year that they consider inviting Don back again, and perhaps allot a half-day for this. And while I’m on the topic, I’ll also suggest that the Program Committee and whoever else makes this type of decision, consider doing some half-day pre- and post-conference seminars that may be more affordable or just more attractive based on the duration than a full day is to some people.
After the pre-conference seminars wrapped up, the real kickoff to the main event happened Monday night. I strongly recommend that anyone coming to a future Community Summit event be sure to arrive for the Welcome Reception. It is a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with friends and contacts from previous events, meet in person some of the folks that you only know from online conversations or blog posts, and of course meet entirely new contacts and friends. This fun and food event is a great way to relax from a long day or training or travel, and get into the community mood and relax before everything gets hectic. The Quiz Bowl is getting better each year, and for part of the evening, they were showing a live feed of the Twitter conversation, following the #sqlpass hash-tag. For those who were not able to come this year, you might enjoy reading the feed of the conversation on the Summit home page.
Overall, I would say a great start to another great Summit!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Next week at the PASS Community Summit, we will unveil the newest chapter of PASS, the Professional Development Virtual Chapter. Previously known as SIGs (Special Interest Groups) these have been renamed as Virtual Chapters, which I think is a better description. After all, they are organized and run like any other chapter of PASS, except that they are not constrained by geography or proximity of its membership. And the phrase “Special Interests” has taken on such a negative political connotation lately, that I am happy to be distancing ourselves from that.
Arnie Rowland, Jason Massie and I have been preparing for the launch of this new chapter for the last few months and we’re excited to roll it out at the Summit. Professional Development is a topic that is particularly dear to me. I spent four years on the Program Committee selecting speakers for the Professional Development track for past Summits, and I have a series of posts here about working as an independent contractor, and other thoughts on doing business right.
Although we are officially a PASS chapter, it is our intent to address the topic of Professional Development on a more broad scale than just SQL Server professionals. Much of what will be discussed is applicable to SQL Server DBAs and Developers, Oracle DBAs and Developers, ASP.NET Developers, and technical managers alike. In fact, Arnie and I had a lively debate early in the life of our group related to this topic, and we plan to open that up to the broader membership to join in the conversation. And that leads me to another of our goals with the chapter, which is to spur conversation. Jason has done a lot of work to turn our chapter web site into a medium for ongoing conversation, and not just a static page with a notice about the date and speaker for the next meeting. While we will have regular meetings with speakers presenting on relevant topics, it is our hope that those will merely act as starting points for new conversations.
To get more information about this new chapter, come find me at the Meet the Chapters lunch event on Thursday. I will be hosting a table for our new chapter, so please stop by and say “HI” and I’ll be happy to share some more details.
I will also be joining Arnie at the Birds of a Feather (BOF) lunch event on Tuesday where he is hosting a table on the subject of “What Is Professional Development for a SQL Professional?”. Jason will also be hosting a table on Tuesday under the heading of “Social Networking: Geek DBA to Butterfly”. Please stop by either of these and join in the conversation!